skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with this as I currently find myself in this very situation. I was a Unix admin for a decade and then found myself having to embrace Linux and then Windows Server to have a job. I've been a sysadmin for 20 years and one is who quite happy to work as a "coder" when needed.

I took a new job about a year ago, one that found me in a group of people who were struggling to do "simple" things, but doing them the "hard way". I came into this job, and because the core infrastructure is Windows Server, I learned PowerShell in about 6 months and started "solving" their problems by automating this and that. Things got easier, but the existing people thought me strange that I would resort to the "mere command line" for a solution rather than go about things using a GUI. My rule of thumb has always been "if I have to do it more than twice, script it."

These people have poo-pooed my every effort along the way and the boss has even called me out on it, despite me showing him that we are making strides where the team once did not. Sorry, I'm a command line guy at heart, and this will never change. I'm not a method man by any stretch. PowerShell is the orthodox way of handling Windows Server issues and that these people I work with don't want to embrace it is not going to slow me down.

We engage in useless meetings to have meetings. We talk about senseless things to jabber. I want to write scripts to automate certain tasks, but no. "What happens if you get hit by a bus, bro? No one knows how to code in PowerShell." My response to them was "I came here not knowing PowerShell, but I took the time to learn it and I'm productive in areas where you could be, too. I'll be happy to show you everything I've learned and coach you when you have time." They look at me like the proverbial deer in the headlights. I'm toying with leaving this year, as I want to work around like-minded, always-curious people, not people stuck in yesteryear.
Yeah, and to that I would add another nuance. Even if one does find spreadsheets that "ripe" for a more robust tool-- that still isn't enough.

One also has to consider the cost of engaging the IT department or others who can do and/or manage development within the organization. That's NOT cheap. Many businesses can barely manage to handle their own shit, let alone successfully do even a small unplanned project to port an excel app running in somebody's cube to something more robust.
https://sirv.com
How is it a strawman?
What do you see on the left?
Users forget passwords. Sometimes frequently. If data is lost every time a user forgets their password, that could cause them more immediate harm than good.

With that said, I'm in full agreement. End-to-end encryption of user data seems like it would solve plenty of problems on their end (with the exception of monetization).
Exactly as planned. The goal is creating chilling effects that create self-censorship to be reasonably sure you are safe. And this will begin a slippery slope of "questionable" court cases until they find where the line is.

They just had to wrap it up in a noble cause, much like false patriots wrap themselves up in flags.

Businesses selling any controlled good are now being censored "just to be safe" and try to avoid further legal pushes to add more things to the list.

Can we stop pretending this wasn't the goal now?
You're confusing different types of data. Data that belongs to the employer, and personal data about the employee which is protected as personal and private as a matter of course, even within the enterprise context.
And multiple previous times. This isn't the first time stuff like this has been amended to an unrelated bill.
They're higher in France but not meaningfully higher, hence my comment "not that different". In fact if you take into account the cost of typical private employer-paid healthcare, the cost might actually be higher in California.

And I maintain that taxes are just not high enough to be a major obstacle to entrepreneurship in France - and yes I am aware of the dreaded "charges sociales". The reason we hear so much about them is because complaining about high taxes is easy and not controversial. Unlike the topic of employee protection, which is deeply polarizing.
The energies required may not be cheap…
It's sad how little progress we've made in terms of freedom of speech and expression. In the 1800s the church was the censorship machine, with sex as the main vector. Today it's the government, still with sex as the main vector.
Maybe refresh your memory, watch the relevant southpark episode a few more times, go on, I'll wait... done? Good. There was never anything "relatively benign" about farmville. It's up there with the iTunes clickwrap TOS in pure evil, so don't you dare. (I could probably do worse than Southpark as a primary news source, but it does leave some gaps)
I was thinking requirements in the sense of «tell don’t ask». And I reslly believe that if we can define intent as implementation (on a high level of course) we have solved many problems. For example if you want to sort transactions by time in a accounting system you should only have to ask for a sorted collection ( sort(transactions)) and not worry about what way the data is sorted. Then the people developing the library for sorting will be able to optimize the implementation independently. This is something we do today, but I think this concept can be taken a lot further if we think of avstracting even higher. At the same time I think this requires rigor and extremely well defined boundaries between layers, so we dont end up with a mess like java null pointers.
Check out Fastmail perhaps, for email. I’m a happy customer.
Check out the Dolphin attack recently discussed RE Cuba.
The government does not have a right to stop someone shouting on a street corner. However, Youtube and reddit and other private sites are essentially the "street corner" these days. That's why people talk about freedom of speech concerns when talking about posting to privately owned forums because they are, for better or for worst, today's public spaces.

Also, it is worth noting that these actions are a result of a law enacted by the government, so even if the government isn't expressly curbing anyone's speech, it is having the chilling effect that opponents of sesta/fosta said it would.
One example is Christian Science, which has had issues with vaccinations which has varied throughout its history. Also, according to Wikipedia:

> "Forty-eight US states allowed religious exemptions for compulsory vaccination as of June 2015. In Australia the church was the only group with a religious exemption for vaccination as of April 2015; the government said that it planned to remove it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science#Religious_ex...
Nor was Farmville a political organization so perhaps read what I wrote more carefully.
It will go something like this:

> Why would we agree to this? The privacy of our citizens is at stake!

> You'll be able to spy on them too!

> Done!
You can say what you think plainly. You don't have to chide other people for not having the same ideas in their head that you have in yours.
I don't understand this notion that because it is physically possible to hold some opinion it must be as correct as any other opinion. Somehow the postmodern straw man of everything being subjective is now trotted out to defend the rights of men to insult and threaten other people, because they argue for the revocation of humanity from people out of conviction.

And anyway, who said there are a few people insisting that racial arguments are hate speech?
I'm making no claim as to how they are as people, but rather what they see as the philosophical center of their organizations. "Cheated on his wife" and "has a foundation" couldn't be less relevant. Bill Gates, as you mention, is practically the poster child for charity, and yet the idea that that implies much useful about the principles that animated Microsoft under his tenure is foolhardy.

My statement didn't say anythjng about who they are as fully-rounded human beings, and even further, spoke only about the _perception_ of what their company's philosophies (as embodied by their founders words) are. You're flattening the nuance of my statement into a simple-minded "Sergey good, Zuck bad" that I didn't come close to expressing.

The rest of your comment is pretty much a non sequitur and this is already a pretty long response, so forgive me for not addressing it (though I'm happy to if you think I'm being unfair to your point).
Ten Hard Problems
I can make the very same retort to you: In a separate post, I said that solving these sorts of "burden of compliance" problems has continually defined the successful players of the internet industry for the last quarter century. I don't argue they've solved them all, nor that they don't fall prey to regulation themselves. The extent to which companies start wilting under this burden will also be the extent other companies will address those pain points like they always have, with machines that don't get stressed out because their data and requirements grew faster than they could.

I don't see the immovable object here.
Wrote an article on deploying a ERC-20 token to Ropsten Network
> Teaching everyone with high expectations is a great idea. In practice, though, it means that some people flunk.

No, it doesn't, any more than any other expectations do. (The expectations that are being discussed are the assumptions of ability that set content and instructional approaches. How you respond to differing acheivement is a nearly orthogonal question, and that's the domain that flunking is in.)

> Many school systems find that flunking folks requires a disproportionate amount of effort.

Which is why they don't flunk students, even when they fail to succeed with the low expectations that underlie their instructional approach.
You had me until pedestrian-killing frat boys... Is this a California thing?
Matrix AI Network Analysis Report
> OFA’s ratio was in the 200:1 neighborhood ratio.

Great, what's your source for that data ?

> So these apps with much larger install bases than Obama could have ever dreamed of had access to less data than OFA did because their ratio was allowed to be so ridiculously asymmetric. They still had access to large amounts of data because of their massive authorized install bases. But none had the entire US social graph.

Nevertheless, they didn't seek to hoist a fascist leader apparently controlled by a foreign enemy on the US. It is perfectly fine that OFA and other organizations should not have this kind of access either. But this is whataboutism. Its truth or not does not mean the CA situation is not revealing of an enormous problem.
I was curious and visited your site, thanks :)

I noticed that Facebook is listed as the first option with a graphic button, whereas e-mail is listed last with a text-only link. Despite this, e-mail has attracted more users than Facebook. It’s broadly a similar story for other posts here with stats listed.

In my view, this mostly negates the claims above that people who prefer to login with e-mail can be reasonably ignored.
> Scandal or not - Facebook is still where "everyone is".
What about Elgg? https://elgg.org/
Good point for starting your own 'Facebook'
Honestly curious what you have against DuckDuckGo or Protonmail, same with MapQuest.
Ironically, we have Open Hardware/Source 3D printers but not 2D ones. Some development in that field too would send a message.
I'd say its that the intervening years have shed the bloom from the rose that was Facebook, and a lot more people have become a lot more savvy to the topic since then. That makes CA the tipping point for public sentiment in the US, but Europe has been ahead of us for these types of concerns. Worth noting that i haven't seen many people placing blame on the Trump campaign either, it seems to be going swuarely where it belongs: CA and Facebook. It would be nice if more splashed on to other big players for this type of data too, like google. Google hasn't yet betrayed their trust to as great an extent though.
I recently tried slacemacs, and based in my experience is use plain emacs.

The problem with spacemacs as a beginner is it isn't quite emacs, and it isn't quite vim, and as a beginner you don't know how to translate vim and Emacs guides to spacemacs.
Your reply is amusing. Do you call presenting examples cherry-picking whenever they don’t suit you?

Facebook, too, provides many useful features to many people. But your puerile comment insists we see things as black and white, and that we can only say “Facebook bad, Google good.”

Facebook allowing people to communicate is good; leaking their data, not so much. Google allowing people to find what they’re looking for is good; uploading their locations without meaningful consent, not so much.

Nice try with the logical fallacy spiel, but you should really be back in class.
For me, the cache was missing this screenshot of the message sent to mods of /r/SexWorkers: https://imgur.com/a/dxn04
> Because they're slow as shit,

Tor isn't that bad actually for browsing, while i2p needs more love regarding speed.

> difficult to configure correctly,

For Tor: You just download the Tor Browser. Already pre-configured.

> and make you more conspicuous to most three-letter agencies.

Good argument for actually using them.
Disclaimer: I have not tested these add-ons myself.

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-1/

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...
Ads yes, but tracking?
Libertarians usually say that everyone should be free to form contracts without government restriction. Why shouldn't unions get the same freedom to form binding contracts that everyone else gets?
If the TOS states clearly that such content is not allowed (which it seems it does) then what’s the story?
Quite right. For about a year now, I have been toying with the idea of building my own personal heavily-encrypted infrastructure (email, storage, etc.) using someone like Digital Ocean. E2E encryption, encryption at rest, getting a domain and giving my friends email accounts that are encryted by default. None of my friends trust or use Facebook, Google, and some others because of not just recent happenings, but also because we see the writing on the wall.

Another thing I want to do on the server(s) is create a proxy "pass-through" that we can point all of our devices to that acts like a Pi-hole, stripping out ads, beacons, trackers, etc. I also want to create a remote desktop from which I can work that is heavily encrypted and all files are backed up not only locally, but remotely in a similar fully encrypted setup.
>You can say what you think plainly

Clearly this isn't the case, since we're already seeing the chilling effects on platforms. The legislation is so intentionally vague for the benefit of prosecutors, and the very fact that it's ex-post facto (unconstitutional), you could certainly be forgiven for thinking that the sole intention was to produce a chilling effect, and those pushing it were intentionally dishonest.
Not political? It's only the biggest pro-Farma lobbying effort ever. ConAgra and Monsanto's fingerprints were all over that "game" /s
Like I said, “I think it would be a fallacy to think learning cannot be fun.“
I am also childless these days and doing research. Research is like skin. You never get away from it. But, then, who would want to?
What are you talking about, black people can vote, gay people can marry, but there has hardly been any freedom of speech progress since 1800?
Yep, it definitely enforces a lot of streamlining
It’s definitely not. This guy’s comments are all him mis-applying logical fallacies and then saying peoples’ posts should be ignored. Ironic.
Oh, so there are already unreasonable applications of this law in court? Or are you merely guessing how things will progress?
You can easily block Facebook and Google via host loopback or blocking their scripts.

I have never seen so many pro ISP tracking/privacy people on HN.
Food safety standards are a concrete set of rules that are trivially captured in training for low-wage, low-literacy, high-turnover workers. Restaurants do not need to hire specialist lawyers to guess at how the courts might interpret them. This analogy is completely inappropriate.
There's still SNI in TLS. Hopefully that changes in 1.3, but I don't know how prevalent that is yet.
yeah, that's how the argument will go.

it's just a trade-off. do you value freedom or security?

a side-effect of security is you're also creating the conditions for tyranny. choose wisely!
That's not what I'm talking about. I just didn't like AFnobody acting like everyone should have the same ideas they do.
Ad networks are tracking by design including ISP injected ones.
If they are perceived to break American copyright law
> Looking for a SaaS idea? Ask random people in a target industry what kinds of things they do with Excel.

True, but you also have to make sure that you can improve on the spreadsheet way enough to be worth potential customers' switching cost and money.

I actually wrote a post about exactly this only a couple of weeks back: "Your biggest competitor is a spreadsheet" - https://medium.com/@hjalli/your-biggest-competitor-is-a-spre...
Tim Berners-Lee: Cool URIs don't change (1998)
The article does not mention the issue FTC took with "Verified Apps" in 2011.1 This was before FBs IPO.

WSJ had reported several times about apps leaking FB IDs and about companies such as RapLeaf linking them to users.2 They were apparently combining Facebook data with some data from public sources to identify Facebook users, in 2011.

Zuckerberg in his statements so far has used the term "derivative" data a couple of times, as if the word derivative is significant. Does Facebook believe this somehow takes it outside the scope of what they are responsible for?

1. https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/SB1000142405270230477280457...

2. https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/SB1000142405270230441050457...
No apologies necessary: creating the archive in the first place was awesome! Like I said, this just shows how massive and complex Usenet is (or maybe, was), and how it's not easy at all to create a comprehensive archive. It's far better to have some of it than none of it!
OFA’s ratio was in the 200:1 neighborhood ratio

Great, what's your source for that data ?

My source is that I can do math. The campaign admits it had “the entire US social graph”. With ~200 million US Facebook profiles, and less than 1 million people that actually authorized Obama’s app, we come out with a ratio of roughly 200:1.

Its truth or not does not mean the CA situation is not revealing of an enormous problem.

It revealed an enormous problem when Obama did it (and worse, with Facebook’s approval). It only became an issue for the press, though, when they failed to manipulate the election in the way they wanted. I’m actually not an advocate of Trump - I’m just saying that this was either wrong or it wasn’t, regardless of who did it. In truth, they both did it. Obama just did it on a vastly larger scale.
A motto for the coming decades:

“Move fast and fix things”
There's been evidence, admittedly anecdotal AFAIK, that YouTube recommendation algorithms can tend towards increasingly extremist content from quite innocuous starting points. For example:

* https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/973716995521748992

* https://twitter.com/Limerick1914/status/972837152940855296

This doesn't mean YouTube staff are purposefully designing the algorithm to specifically trend towards extremism: this can fall out naturally from human psychology and ML algorithms that note which videos increase engagement and recommend videos based on user interest and recommending videos that will increase the user's time on site.

I think this is worth looking into in a more methodical manner. You can dismiss it as cherry-picking, but I think it's something reasonable people can be concerned about. And these services and products should be looked at separately, determining which parts are good and which parts are bad.
"Ensuring 99.99% of all life forms reach full self-measured potential" LOL the earth would be a circus....
First thing first, this is a shining example why we should be trying to decentralize and why we should be trying to build diversity in how many providers we use to distribute content. This said, I dont think any of us have some inherent right to an audience which someone else built. And I’m not sure where this mistaken belief started. We have the right -in the US- to stand on a street corner and say stuff, but not the right that someone else has to go and round up 30,000 people and force them to listen to us.

I think the right to utility services usually comes from contractual agreements between companies and the localities they serve in exchange for those companies usually exclusive roles in servicing those areas and they usually agree to being heavily regulated.

If we’re going to be a country which is heavily invested in private property rights, the companies will _almost_ always have a choice in what products they decide to distribute and which products they choose to not distribute.

I find it strange to imply google has a monopoly on serving videos, they may have a large and readily available audience, but they’ve spent a rather large amount of time and energy building this audience and the infrastructure needed to accommodate.

It’s not like it’s difficult to go set up a website and serve videos, it’s trivial in labor and trivial in cost.

People seem to be implying they feel like they’re entitled to an audience that someone else built and I think that’s a strange thing to believe.

Again, let’s make other video services more popular rather than pretend YouTube is somehow the only way on the entire internet to serve videos.
i'm sorry?
One nuance is whether you offer one or multiple channels. I prefer email registration, but will consider Google or Microsoft logins. I will not under any circumstances use Facebook or Twitter login.
Voting is not speech. Also it's what you aren't allowed to say that changed.
Jay Freeman (saurik) gave a talk that takes these isolated incidents ("this doesn't seem too bad") and puts them all together to paint a really disturbing picture:

https://air.mozilla.org/privacy-lab-orchid/

It's one of my favorite talks, and I love the format: each slide is a news article.
Right: As I said earlier, the list in this archive includes rec.humor.funny but not rec.arts.books.tolkien. (And I seem to recall that the alt.* hierarchy was a little less broadly propagated, which might possibly be related to why it wasn't included here.)
Google DoubleClick Mozilla essay second draft