skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You don't trust "anti-gun people" so you therefore don't want to enact policies that you think will reduce gun violence?

You have it all wrong. I don't believe they will reduce gun violence.

I'm saying if anti-gun people were trustworthy I'd be willing to try some of these policies - then if they didn't work we could just stop them - no harm done.

> but I don't see how they hurt either.

And that's the problem: You are happy to infringe upon a fundamental right without clear evidence that it's a big win for society.

That mentality needs to be opposed at every step.

> To me, it seems like more guns, easier and cheaper availability of guns, more destructive guns, less strict and less comprehensive / universal background checks are all things that lead pretty clearly to more gun violence.

But the actual evidence for these is not at all conclusive.

What is conclusive is firearms are used for self defence all the time: https://fee.org/articles/defensive-gun-use-is-more-than-shoo...

Your anti-gun policies can just as easily ensure more women are raped and sexually assaulted.
I got this objection once for a mere 100k. The most enterprisey client stalled negotiations for quite some time because we didn’t have long enough TOS. There was no issue with the content just length.
Financial stress is not exactly the condition correlating with the creation of new taxes.

A tax does not relieve financial stress in any general way. If it did, we would constantly raise taxes.

What a tax does is enforce a collective use of financial resources. The demand for such enforced collectivism increases when a threat emerges that can only be adequately dealt with using such collective action.

A foreign nation, engaged in organized violence, aka war, against a nation, is the most extreme example of a situation where enforcing collective action provides a benefit to the majority, and thus that's when people are most likely to sacrifice their liberty and accept a new tax.
In my experience it's more of a pushback or contrarian dynamic. The first wave of comments tends to be negative as people object to the article (unless it's particularly interesting, which is the case we hope for), and the second wave tends to be positive as people object to the objections.

You're right about the upvoting though. Bad upvotes are a bigger problem than bad comments. ('Bad' here means 'not helping with intellectual curiosity and civility'). If you put that together with the pushback thing, it explains a curious phenomenon: why at the top of so many active threads sits a comment saying "I can't believe how negative the comments are here". It sounds self-contradictory but it's not, because there are multiple generations of comments. That's a pushback comment attracting a lot of pushback upvotes.
That’s to switch off all GPS. To disable the logging/upload to mothership, the settings is buried in Settings/Privacy/Location Services/System Services.
Can't speak for the parent, but Apple USB keyboards have F13-F19.
I am a customer of two SaaS companies that use Intercom, and with them it is nice to use and un-obtrusive. This is the first time I've noticed the pop-up, so it's really on this company for configuring it to pop-up.
Errrr.. yeah.... if that's how you think ... maybe you should be thinking of another career
> It seems like it should be an obvious given that just installing an FB app on your phone shouldn't hand FB a record of all your phone calls and text messages.

Has it been established anywhere that this was not the case (i.e. that just installing the app uploaded all calls and text messages)?
Testing [Nodejs] Lambda functions
What amazed me the most from the first Snowden leak was that the NSA was vastly more effective and competent in their efforts than I had expected.
I got my contacts uploaded at some point despite always making sure to reject their prompt. I'm sure people will claim it was just a "bug" or I must have just mistapped (which I have no reason to believe was the case, but how would I prove this), but either way, it's oddly convenient how it works out for them.
Nvidia being dicks to gamers because of Gameworks is like saying Apple are dicks to business people because of iOS. Both Nvidia and Apple create software products and only want their products to be run on their walled garden. The fallout of Gameworks wasn't even that bad as Nvidia released the source code under a restricted license and allowed AMD to optimize their drivers for the API. So like... what...?
FixIt: moving your issue tracker and review comments to code
Since when is "overton window" exclusively a right-wing concept? It's been commonly discussed for a very long time. It seems like a bad idea to shut out any conversation that mentions that.
I guess they want you to run your analyses on AWS directly.
> It might not be strictly true in a legal sense, but it hits close to the mark in the case of facebook et al

There's a difference between "we did it because we were legally obligated" and "we did it because Zuckerberg wanted to". The myth of profit maximisation being an absolute legal duty is much too kind to Facebook here; they're not just a victim of our late capitalist system.

> It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise.

Right. Which is why their largest shareholder and CEO is going to ensure they do it, not because he's being forced by the spectre of shareholder lawsuits.

> Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to.

Certainly not if we continue to give them a pass when they fail to do so.
Mostly via amplification.

The issue is that Russia is taking natural tension and then using AI, bot farms, propaganda and shills to wind the volume up to 11.

Most people are not even aware that they are under attack let alone have the tools to resist this level of hostile action.

I strongly suspect that a LOT of the Bernie/Hilary discord was mostly Russian in origin. When I actually queried people as to why they disliked a candidate vs why they liked a candidate you got VERY discordant viewpoints--totally off-scale divergence.

This is new in politics--at least to me--and I had to be careful not to fall into the trap myself.
What are these 'lot' of SEA markets?
I was lucky to have started in 8 bit machines, and having used Basic and Pascal compilers before ever touching C.

There wasn't a single new concept regarding low level hardware programming that C teached me, on the contrary, I got to learn how not to do it.

And I wasn't infected by the "micro-optimize each line of code as it gets written" culture, rather I was shipping software that was fast enough to keep its users happy.
Scopes in JavaScript. Different types of variable declarations
Because those movies already have distributors...

Netflix is a distributor.

Netflix submitting films is cheating because they are using the festival not only as free advertising for their platform but it also goes against the spirit of the festival where film makers can showcase their work and easily have distributors buy their work.

No one is stopping Netflix from buying films showcased at Cannes, in fact that is highly encouraged (for anyone buying, at that) but for them to act like they are being mistreated is border line stupid. Especially coming from one of the largest tech and media companies in the world.

Major multinational corporations that act like the world is against them really rubs me the wrong way and for multinational corporations to take advantage of an extremely empowering art festival is even more sleazy.
Seriously, this is ridiculous.
HOW DRUG RELATED DEATHS ARE DEPOPULATING AMERICA
We should be thankful that they haven't cross shared the WhatsApp contact info - they probably have a similar stream of information on that side.
Dzzoffice – Open source alternative to G Suite
Wow! This takes me back! HyperTalk was probably my second language after Applesoft BASIC and boy did it seem powerful at the time.

Hypercard overall was just great at getting out of the way and letting you get things done. Looking back, if Apple had realised how powerful networking was back then, Hypercard may have morphed into the browser one day, but they missed that boat.

I remember reading somewhere a while back that Hypercard plus some XCMDs were used to control the lighting system in Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpar... actually here we go: https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-forgotten-but-not-go...
We do know that Facebook gave the data away for free to all apps, just like Google's Android. So that "they don't sell your data" is a deluded statement.

Maybe they also sell it (processed into aggregated reports, not raw), I wouldn't be surprised.
Hm, isn't it illegal to offer this option in Germany then?
Grab drivers make more money than Uber. Or so they do in Singapore.
The trackpad has moments where it just doesn't seem to want to work correctly for certain complex movements like drag and drop. I'm months in with this stupid thing and I still can't get it to reliable draw a box around a bunch of icons and drag and drop.

Glad this isn't just me! It seems next to impossible now to drag and drop one handed. I'm sure there is a knack to it, but I can't figure it out.
I thought Project Zero tries to find vulnerabilities in Google stuff too?
> The fact that it was an interpreter meant you could read all the code for any program you found.

This wasn't a granted thing back then.

GW-BASIC source needed to be explicitly saved in ASCII mode.
Their competitive edge is quite dull then, because all FB apps had access to the user data. FB PR needs to work on another excuse now... "don't sell your data" is a joke after the CA scandal.
I think this should be amended to "don't do creepy stuff" in the cloud.

This is why encryption on our phones is so important. I want my phone knowing all sorts of "creepy" things about me (medical records, etc) so that it can be more useful. What I don't want is that information anywhere except under my immediate control.

Storing encrypted in the cloud is OK as well, I suppose, as long as the encryption key is only available to me.
Can’t really see the benefit here? For me, the point of a URL shortener is to reduce friction, adding an extra step just adds extra friction.
> Again, moving the goalposts.

I'm only moving the goalposts in that I will not necessarily dismiss you and your comment at the first offense. But when your comment has multiple red flags and little substance, the scales don't tip in your favor. There is absolutely no goalpost-moving involved in expecting your comment to have sufficient substance to balance out the rhetoric.

In a discussion about details of tax policy, I consider it a red flag when someone starts ranting about "natural rights"; they're clearly trying to drag things off-topic, and probably not in a particularly enlightening direction. When the comment goes downhill from there, I'm quite justified in rendering a judgement. There's nothing anti-intellectual about this. It's just a logical reaction to your inability to stay on-topic and level-headed for two whole sentences.

It would be anti-intellectual or at least inadvisably closed-minded to filter out your comments with a blind grep-like process for merely mentioning certain words. But the Bayesian process of reading until I understand what you're trying to say is the only sane way to interact with an Internet that contains an effectively limitless supply of crackpot ideas.
Hawking’s “Final Theory” is not groundbreaking
Privacy is like eating your vegetables. Or doing those push ups eery morning. Given any excuse people will ignore common sense and the lizard brain takes over. Facebook knows this like no other. The outrage too comes from the lizard brain once it realizes the dangers of the situation it is now in.
Could/should one use this to build a touch screen user interface for an RPi as part of a kiosk based application?

I really like Go, and suspect a Go app would beat the pants off anything powered by Electron (performance wise).
One man's creep is another man's crop.
From memory, they did swap out Mach from the version 2.5 used in NS/OS for version 3 from MkLinux (which was from OSF). This was at the time of the Rhapsody to OS X transition. My memory is hazy on the BSD kernel mode component history.
"Before its acquisition he had been the cofounder and technical director of a small company called Dumpmines, which was in the business of digging up and processing old landfills, recovering the valuable materials that had been thrown away in a more wasteful age. It had been a surprise when Praxis had acquired them, a very pleasant surprise, as everyone in Dumpmines went from employment in a small firm to apprentice membership in one of the richest organizations in the world - paid in its shares, voting on its policy, free to use all its resources. It was like being knighted." - Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, 1993.
I think that’s a good way to create an incentive to write short TOSs. They shouldn’t be legally enforceable unless people are actually reading them. Nothing good can come out of that.
YouTube was also burning money for bandwidth like nobody's business. I suspect that Google Video tracked and limited bandwidth.

If Google hadn't bought them, YouTube were headed straight for bankruptcy. People forget that the YouTube deal was a big time boardroom back scratch between Google and the VC's.

The worst part is that Google subsidizing YouTube has set back a real monetization of video on the web.
I wanted to include this in the original post as well. My cynical/ironic phrasing of this phenomenon is “not wealthy enough to have principles”.

Which I totally get. I’ve been a victim myself. And the truth is it’s hard to find successful companies that aren’t profiting off of some kind of exploitation (e.g. pollution, natural resources stolen from a developing nation, behavioral manipulation of users, injecting animals with antibiotics, high fructose corn syrup, lobbying (institutionalized corruption, preying on people’s fears (media), child labor (lots of clothing supply chains), predatory lending, extreme leverage ratios in a too big to fail context, etc).

It’s weird to me that people often don’t understand the root problem here is unrestrained/underregulated capitalism. In any naturally competitive system without adequate rules, the winners will be cheaters/exploiters. In reverse: you often cannot win unless you cheat.

Hence: most people dont have the luxury of working exclusively for socially responsible companies.
Another alternative is Talkyard (I'm developing it):

https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments — there's serverless hosting (with privacy. No ads, no tracking), + it's open source like Isso.
No, that’s your back alley corner behind a dumpster in some backwater settlement in the middle of nowhere.

TV never was how people talk to each other. Internet - and particularly the monopoly platforms like FB or YT - are the modern day street.
The problem, as I’m sure you’re aware, is that the reading level and attention span in this case are minimal. People click through ToSes just as they click through installers. Even if the ToS was 5 words on the screen in 36pt bold font saying “WE COLLECT: Text, call, and contact data”, people would still not take the time to read or understand or care about what that actually means. They want to see cat / friend / baby photos, and will mash buttons until that happens, onboarding processes and tutorials be damned.
Which spouse you’d choose MongoDB OR MySQL?
We would never have newspapers in that case. Very few have ever been able to support themselves on the price the user pays.
Think about this:

Everyone on a boat has twenty dollars and absolutely needs an EpiPen to live. You have a supply of EpiPens and want to get as much of their money as possible. There's zero elasticity between 0 and 20 dollars, but you better not charge $21!

Now, imagine that there was only one person who needed an EpiPen, but everyone else was willing to pitch in as much as it took to help them out. If the supplier of the medicine was perfectly evil, the price would be $20 times the number of people.

Perfect self-interest is a pretty good model of any industry, including pharma, so I think this is a good picture of the situation. The ACA was careful to keep something like a market system in place, which is why we're faced with a problem that can be understood with microeconomics.
How can activity games benefit your kids?
That's okay. The USA is used to Brits trying to take away our guns. It was kinda the pivotal event that sparked the revolution and caused our ancestors to throw your ancestors out of the country. Not surprising that you still don't understand the big deal.
No problem outside Europe? Asia is outside of Europe. Now the plague caused the decline of the Mongol empire - the first trans continental, almost global trading network, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica
Errr, no. That's leader election, and is not a consensus algorithm by itself. It's part of the algorithm, which is nothing like PoS at all. That's like saying UDP and TCP are the same because they send packets.
What do you think about https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments? I'm developing it and if you or the ancestors have any thoughts or feedback that'd be interesting to hear
The Civilization designers say it’s a win even if you’re not the one who sent the ship.

The text you quoted is from the original game’s manual.
That is worrying. The iOS security model would have served you better; Facebook could never accidentally forget you’d said no.
To some part I think the GDPR is intended to make it easier for startups in Europe to compete with US services on the EU market.

In recent times, being a privacy-aware service is a selling point and the EU services can easily advertise as being privacy-first to US citizens while US companies will have trouble doing so (considering SESTA/FOSTA and CLOUD act)
Don't you find it a bit odd that you keep making claims that you can not or will not support? Is a (non) reference to something that has not happened all you are willing to provide? To extradite someone from the US, you must:

1. Have probable cause to arrest them.

2. Arrest them.

3. Convict them.

4. Extradite them.

Why don't you just say "how extradition actually works"?
I dunno. I don't live in KL. Uber is fine where I live. Grab is also fine.
It is not over, Intel appealed so it dragged things along for years, I hope they get what they deserve.

The main problem was not the gifts or discounts for selling Intel CPU, there was conditions like do not sell any AMD or less then 5% AMD.
Do we want startups to have a "data-backed business model"?
Everything is possible. Part of last weeks action was cummulative plunge in the stock market, trump's trade wars, rising rates, and so on.
GPGPU started the day shaders were possible.

There are SIGRAPH papers from 2003 about how to use GPU Assembly with texture data for doing non graphics related computations.
Related reading: "Ephemeralization", by Adam Wiggins (Heroku co-founder) https://adam.herokuapp.com/past/2011/4/7/ephemeralization/
The word "pernicious" is very rare outside of a medical context, but the top Google result for "pernicious to liberty" is an anti-income tax screed.
Allright, I forgot that ones.

However they are quite pricey. Maybe some solution that one can host himself is a nicer alternative.
One feature on 1Password I _love_ is its diceword generator. These are so much easier type when I do need to type them and I even remember a few.
As someone who was creating a reasonably popular 'video podcast' back then, I have a different perspective...

Uploading to Google video was incredibly slow relative to Youtube. During the period of the 'battle' between the two services, Youtube allowed only very short videos - excluding most useful content, but discouraging piracy (except for very laborious multi part uploads). G'Video on the other hand allowed uploading of essentially any length, although at much lower resolution

But it was incredibly laborious, as uploads took hours - and were liable to fail without warning (at least uploading from Europe). I recall there was also an emphasis on adding lots of metadata etc, another barrier to uploading.

The social elements of youtube - perhaps in hindsight addicting rather than useful, are rightfully acknowledged. Whats less well remembered is the sheer clunkiness of using Google Video. The service looked and responded much more like a corporate intranet than a website. Still, I - and lots of other 'vidcasters' at the time were sad to see it go.

Here's a perspective from the time - from a blogpost I wrote about different video services in 2006 (https://garethstack.com/2006/07/24/the-unavoidable-future-of...)...

"While sites like Youtube and Guba, may or may not have a future primarily as redistributors of broadcast content, they’ve done little to foster the creation of original work. In fact, by restricting the length and size of files which can be uploaded (ostensibly to reduce copyright infringement), YouTube have diminished their chances of becoming a hotbed of original content. Google video, although bravely eschewing any restrictions on the length of uploaded content (whilst foolishly restricting video quality to an extremely low bit rate), does little to foster the community creation or pooling of talent needed to inspire the development of original shows and films. Note, it’s far from clear that it was ever Google’s intention to become a generator of new IP, so Google Video shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a failure"
Data Science Bootcamps: 9 Fellowships every data scientist should know
So I downloaded my facebook data a few days ago and there were no phone nrs in there, no call history, actually much less of everything than I thought they'd have. Are they lying to me or does this depend on other factors?
Truly Kryptic – Unique free online puzzle game
I donno about Cannes Film Festival, but Cannes Lions it mostly a circle jerk award full of fake adverts. Do the 2 have any relation or only in name?
There is also a view that he'll run for presidency some day.
Ok, well this is just great. So Facebook has all my contacts from their aquisition of WhatsApp and even though I've never used any of their Apps or had an account with them, I'm pretty sure everyone I typically communicate with has the App and did not opt-out of this collection. So they get data on me for free that the police would need a court order to get. This kind of data retention has been highly controversial in Europe and is currently illegal for carriers to do in some countries, even though the security services obviously love it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention), it is one of the few things I've actively politically fought against.

I really hope they will eventually crater like all the other social networks before them and I should have a way of asking them to delete all data they have on me including meta data from sms/phone calls they might have collected.
How do we know they haven’t shared WhatsApp contact data with their main FB database? I was operating under the assumption based on some news articles that they long broke whatever promises they made.
Natively Implemented Functions in Erlang
I laughed way too hard at this.
I feel like if you should quote a very inflammatory and controversial "quip" you should at least provide a source. Maybe I'm the only one on HN that hasn't heard about it, but even so, sources shouldn't be omitted.
> That is worrying.

Indeed. :\

> The iOS security model would have served you better; Facebook could never accidentally forget you’d said no.

Interesting, so you mean this is the case even if I uninstall and reinstall the app? What if I wipe the OS and reinstall (as "cleanly" as is possible)?