skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure whether your reasoning about Japan is a good way to evaluate things. That's because Japan could be different because of a particular thing out of all the possible factors. The reason I say that is because I am thinking of the effect of lead exposure on crime rates as an analogy. There are a million things that could and probably do affect crime, but lead in the environment seems to dominate. If the Japanese are particularly healthy, it could be to one particular factor, say fish oil consumption (just to be arbitrary) and everything else might conceivably be irrelevant or harmful. Assuming the "goodness" is distributed equally among the various characteristics of the typical diet could lead you astray when you focus on something that doesn't matter or is harmful. It's the same issue as if you observe some people living a very long time while smoking - is smoking contributing to their lifespan or working against it?
Hi! I built this to have an easier way to convert ebooks to audiobooks! The backend is powered by AWS Polly. If you have any feedback or feature requests, please feel free to drop me an email at <last 3 characters of username> @ <myusername>.com
I'd assume it's for the same reason that that Oracle used a poem in one of their protocols[1]-- to make distributing the key copyright infringement.

[1] https://dacut.blogspot.com/2008/03/oracle-poetry.html
Hi, thanks for the kind words and especially for translating from the Dutch! I did anticipate that I was perhaps looking into it a little to much, so it's always nice to clear up some speculation with a bit of evidence.

Of course, 12 years is a long time, perhaps his outlook on science has changed somewhat, I was almost tempted to email him and ask about it but I thought "A man too busy to update his professional website is certainly too bust to respond to an insignificant inquiry regarding the /state/ of his website".
... which is why you provision servers and design your software and network architecture to take the demand (latency, bandwidth, etc.) into account. Data rates for online games are pretty predictable. A 10 Gbit fiber connection to a racked server doesn't cost that much.

At the datacenter level you're making sure that the bandwidth you bought from providers is sufficient (and ideally, redundant), and that you can shift load from one area to another if necessary. You can buy this capability from AWS or Azure, or build it yourself in many different ways.
It's no bet. The investigation results in a ticket for another intern to add "WHERE deleted = 0" to the download tool.
> Better.

Thanks. Anything concrete or specific to add to the discussion?
Pretty certain that videos and photos count as personally identifiable information that have to be deleted.
One fascinating outcome of all this fallout is that there's now a readymade excuse to stop using Facebook.

My personal observations are that a good number of people have felt 'fatigued' by Facebook for a very long time, but were also unsure of how best to extricate themselves without incurring a social penalty.

But now there's an impetus that most people can understand. I'm not sure about how many people will move away or how quickly it'll happen, but the network effects Facebook capitalized on can also work in reverse: if you have just one or two very vocal privacy proponents in a friend circle pushing to get off the platform. One group I'm in recently migrated to Telegram for this very reason.
Obviously I'm not privy to the details of this particular requirement, but I'm fairly certain that very few, if any, of our videos actually go away when we delete accounts. (Or even when we delete the videos themselves.) I think this because I've seen images from SMS texts, instagrams, snapchats and things of that nature used in court cases. So law enforcement must have access to that stuff somehow? But, again, I'm not privy to the technical or legal mechanisms they use to make that happen. All that said, I have seen images from services like these in court cases. And defendants have CLAIMED that they had deleted them. (For whatever value of "deleted" exists on the given service.)

So I'm wondering if the services actually have some sort of archiving requirement for law enforcement purposes? Maybe for a certain number of years, they have to save your data or something like that?

If there's anyone who would be familiar with the legal obligations of these services vis-a-vis data archiving I'd be really interested in hearing more about what we should reasonably expect from these services in terms of deletion etc?
Emmanuel Macron on France's AI Strategy
> expecting a non-tech-savvy person to understand how data moves around the Internet

Then we - the people that do have the necessary technical knowledge - have a duty to teach them what they need to know. This isn't necessarily "how data moves on the internet". Yes, this can be difficult and tedious, but understanding the risk profile for data/networks is increasingly important as networks become involved in everything.

> they ultimately don't care

Again, it's our duty to teach them why they need to care. This probably shouldn't involve a lecture on networking or data analysis, but instead tailoring an explanation to their personal situation and knowledge.
I don't think facebook really deletes any data.
You deleting a comment or a picture pretty much means: isvisible=false;
You described similar symptoms to 'arc flash' (brief exposure to welding arcs). While its obviously best to avoid this, a decent first-aid measure is to set a 15-30 min timer and keep your eyes closed. That can help, and while it isn't always an option (driving/etc) it can help.
One thing I've been finding increasingly while using Flow in javascript is, null-pointer exceptions aren't really much of a problem any more.

Where they might have caused a bug, 90% of the time Flow will catch them, and insist that I do a null check and handle that case.

And when they do crop up, it's usually more of a serious failure that I'm happy to trigger an exception early, rather than having it propagate further down the stack by using something like nothing.js. Especially given the list of gotchas. The fact that `Nothing` is not falsy is really problematic.

I'm pretty convinced at this point that `a && a.b && a.b.c && a.b.c.d` is an anti-pattern in javascript anyway; if I'm that unsure about the structure of my data, I have more serious problems than just trying to avoid null pointers.
Ehh, wearing earplugs is luxurious. It’s damn peaceful going about life with the volume turned down a bit, even if it poses no direct threat to one’s hearing.
I’m not a GDPR lawyer, but I do live with one.

My understanding is that an image is by itself PII, regardless of whether or not it has any additional information associated with it. I don’t think there’s a way to retain images without contravening GDPR.
Objective-C also allows nil to receive messages which then just returns nil also. I’ve always found this really natural in that you can assume something is either valid or null and avoid a whole lot of null checks this way. That said, I’ve never been terribly frustrated by other languages either which throw when calling methods on null. Maybe it’s because of heavy use of certain design patterns that make it so it’s never really a surprise?
What are the ethical concerns with Cloudflare?
First lesson in DB class: do NOT delete. Just flag.

I can give you plenty of statements about how I'm Santa Claus though.
I don't generally hold my phone near my head or heart.
You should upload random-pixel uncompressible videos and delete them over and over again. It not only increases storage cost but makes the profile SNR very low.

There are general-strike level attack surfaces on these networks, but people don't really care that much.
Try living in Eastern Europe. Digital Ocean did that to me when I opened the account more than 5 years ago.
Exactly this.

Who even supports FB?

The media? No, they hate them because they took all their ad revenue.

Republicans? No, they hate them for the censorship controversy that happened a year or so ago, and because it is full of ultra left wing silicon Valley types.

Democrats? No, they hate them for the whole Cambridge analytica, Russian data thing.

Facebook has made a lot of enemies, and there really isn't any sort of constituency that SUPPORTS them.
The brick wall happens with full-time employment.

- You can still do consulting/contracting or act on behalf of your own company.

- Build website for "your company" and describe services you offering that are matching your skillset.

- You can still look for job at upwork.com (or whatever sites there are). Granted - you'll be competing with bottomfishers from developing countries - but the point is to make your expertise known. This may evolve into good business relationships down the road.

- You can still participate in contests (as a company) and build your hackerrank or whatnot. If asked to work for someone - tell them you only do consulting/projects on behalf of your own company, not as individual.

- You can still hire others as consultants to do work for you or for customers you find need your skills. Again - acting as a business, not as individual.
Btw why do we think that the downloadable archive contains everything they have? Because they said so?

Just add a bool field to the table "canExport".
Only about 10% of HN users are in Silicon Valley, and many of those are critical of it.
Cloudflare. Cheap, fast and powerful. They seem to be doing everything right, as evidenced by all the growth and great features in a single package. It's rather surprising the other vendors aren't doing anything to even catch up.

If you need more control, than Fastly is very technical, although the recently launched Cloudflare workers give you much more programmability by running javascript.

For more traditional options, look at the quiet upstart Stackpath which is built upon the old MaxCDN network, and also CDN77 which is great value.
Or use DNS Override app: https://www.iphonedns.com
And they've just listed 1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1, 2606:4700:4700::1111, 2606:4700:4700::1001 officially as Cloudflare DNS. Looks like everything is here: https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/
> ...but I grew up to be a productive & well rounded member of society. More or less

It's almost as though play, of the sort which could end your life, is a natural part of growing up (perhaps especially for boys). Then again, I don't really remember doing any very stupid things as an adolescent, probably due to spending more time in nature, trying not to die by falling, drowning, hypothermia, or impalement.
This (and the GDPR - even though my company is in the US) are why I now tell the developers on my team to not collect info unless they have a definitive use case as to why to store it.
And make sure to delete delete data as soon as it is no longer needed.

It helps that my business doesn't monetize via advertising.

My guess is what actually happened here is that they had a use case to store it for a few hours or so (incase, say the user changed their mind about posting it) and no one ever bothered to write a cleanup script because "storage is cheap" and possibly "maybe we might have a use case for it someday"

I can't imagine this being intentionally. Even if I try to consider malicious use cases I can't think of any where it would be beneficial for Facebook to actually store this data besides being too lazy to clean it up.

Edit: Wow. Who new applying Hanlon's razor to this would get me downvoted so badly? I'm going to leave this here unedited and eat the downvotes of the people on an anti-facebook warpath because I think it is important to state that we as people who make tech products often take short cuts (like avoiding dev work because it is cheaper to just keep data in storage) and we need to stop doing that. There is plenty of stuff Facebook does that is beyond the pale but this one is more likely contributed to lazyness, and if you are going to downvote me without explaining why you are not contributing to the conversation.
How to Clone Netflix's “Because You Watched X”
It was unsubstantive by the standard we moderate HN for–shallow and repetitive, made worse by snark and tropiness. Please don't post like that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is there not a way to delete all posts and comments at once?
Stitcher, Audible, Spotify, etc. are all trying, by creating walled gardens in the form of subscriptions. The end goal would be to create a youtube-like monolith for Audio media
And inside of California there are no vehicle inspections except for a smog check every two years.

Cops will pull you over if your brake/head lights are out.
Yes, Rust move semantics are designed to make passing things like strings and collections cheap. Only the stack-allocated part must be copied. But passing stack-heavy objects (think std::array) can still be expensive without elision guarantees, so some elision rules could be useful even though they don’t affect semantics and would be allowed anyway by the as-if rule. People shouldn’t feel the need to pass by reference just for performance reasons, especially given that it introduces syntactic noise at call site unlike in C++. OTOH I guess inlining makes the point moot in many cases.
It seems painfully obvious that licensing should be reserved for professions where there are major consequences to violating standards (i.e. medicine and law). Professions that bend more towards the arts may benefit from the "protection racket" aspect of licensing, while costing the rest of society.
Hey, I hit flag on this. Mobile mistake. Plz ignore, or fix.

Thanks :(

I see unflag option on refresh. Used it, but still.
Definitely worth noting as another example of how data can be harvested — but also important to point out it was a third-party created archive made from 2007 and 2010. People will still be (justifiably, IMO) unhappy. Just as they were when YourOpenBook made the risk so blatantly obvious.
> I am sure that the deletion of media files in services like Facebook has never meant to be absolute. Many of my colleagues believe the same thing that I believe: Facebook and other services do not actually delete data, they just mark it as "deleted" and purge it only if they need the space.

No reason to believe. You can read about the storage architecture used to store photos from a post in 2009 here: https://code.facebook.com/posts/685565858139515/needle-in-a-.... Obviously that might and probably has changed since, but at least at some point that was exactly true.

Quote:

"The delete operation is simple – it marks the needle in the haystack store as deleted by setting a “deleted” bit in the flags field of the needle. However, the associated index record is not modified in any way so an application could end up referencing a deleted needle. A read operation for such a needle will see the “deleted” flag and fail the operation with an appropriate error. The space of a deleted needle is not reclaimed in any way. The only way to reclaim space from deleted needles is to compact the haystack (see below)."
If you somehow manage to develop silicosis from fiberglass whilst trying to fix a toilet, then you are definitely someone who shouldn't be attempting any sort of hands-on repair.
Maybe, but that’s not the case in this article, which describes an obsoleted video feature.
I'm comparing relative to UK MOT or Germany's TÜV when I say "cakewalk".
> if a big one wants to spawn children

Should this be considered poor behavior or design?

It's been quite a while since I wrote explicit fork/ exec code, but wouldn't a better approach be to have a small master process that spawns off the necessary children and then either links them up or mediates communication?

I mean, on a unix-like system, init is ultimately the spawner of everything else and it's not a particularly large process.
from their FAQ: Wasabi’s hot cloud storage service is not designed to be used to serve up (for example) web pages at a rate where the downloaded data far exceeds the stored data or any other use case where a small amount of data is served up a large amount of times.

Wasabi it appears is not suitable when content is downloaded is many times, which is the use case for websites.
The records produced by Ozma are standard LP records and contain only the audio elements. The actual voyager records used a non-standard encoding and rotation speed, and as far as I know only NASA has a copy from the original pressing.
Storage being cheap is irrelevant..when a user requests the data to be deleted. You delete it. Outside of government compliance there is no reason to not comply with that request
Yes let Web 2.0s dream of open standards win over this world walled web we have today
What about before such things were available? Did everyone get damaged hearing the first day?
After reading the Three Body Problem It feels like encoding our exact location might not have been the smartest move :)
I think this kind of access pattern is typically a code smell. Instead of carrying around arbitrarily nested values you should try to normalize it into a known and consistent shape when crossing serialization boundaries.

Proxy pays a big performance penalty, and I doubt it'll be improving any time soon. In addition, I believe it's not possible to polyfill Proxy. An alternative could be to just wrap the deep property access in a try/catch:

function getQux (input) {
try {
return input.foo.bar.baz.qux()
} catch (e) {
return null
}
}
One of the challenges in first aid treatment for stroke is “is it ischemic or hemorrhagic?”. The symptoms are similar, but the treatments almost the reverse of each other. Do you want to increase clotting to stop the bleeding, or decrease clotting to keep an existing brain clot small?

Sometimes (for example if it would take hours to bring the patient to a MRI/CT machine) an educated guess as to the answer is the optimal strategy.
Still, absent an adequate replacement people will continue to stay there.
But are they really being deleted?
I wish I did. Rust has a very interesting learning curve to say the least. It is a long fight with the borrow checker and it beats you until it teaches you its ways. Then you realize they were good practices all along.

And then comes a point where you realize that you need to write _some_ low level code that is unsafe. You read a lot about unsafe Rust and it almost allows you to almost work as if you are working with C. You can transmute a reference to native pointer type and then transmute it back as a mutable reference with a static lifetime if you want. But at that point you have lost the safeties and now you have to know exactly how to craft your transmute trickery such that you know there will be little to no overhead.

Perhaps it all comes down to the borrow checker being less strict about things. I can't tell exactly in which ways, perhaps about the lifetimes of references. Something doesn't feel as natural to reason about working in Rust as it does in C but I can't put my finger on it.

One thing I can say though is I wish I didn't need to use lazy static for non-primitive static globals.

But overall I really like the general direction that the language is heading. Love the way dependencies are managed although TOML wasn't the best format choice in my mind. crates.io, docs.rs and the entire community and the ecosystem are great and unique too.
What I mean is that it is often used as a transport format for when some component or app will need dynamic and styled text content that update over time. Often in web applications, but not always.
> I can't imagine this being intentionally. Even if I try to consider malicious use cases I can't think of any where it would be beneficial for Facebook to actually store this data besides being too lazy to clean it up.

Nope. They wrote a routine that makes the video invisible to the actual user but refrained from deleting it right away. That is intentional.
Python reimplementation of cryptonights hash function
What's the cost of non compliance for not putting up a $0.20 sign
> developers who cannot restrain themselves

That’s pretty much all of us IMO. We need to get stuff done, and if there’s a feature available that lets us do it quicklier, we use it. We take the path of least resistance—a warning saying “don’t” provides no actual resistance.

That’s why I like languages like Haskell that by default prevent me from doing anything I’m probably going to regret later; if I want to break referential transparency, type safety, memory safety, &c. then I can always opt in explicitly and grep for it later when it hits the fan.

That said, I do prefer C over C++—really, the only things I miss are destructors (local automatic memory management is nice) and templates (generic/type-level programming is nice), but they’re not critical for the kinds of stuff I use C for anyway.
Your non-tech friends (or at least 'quite a few' of them) are clearly more tech savvy than mine ;)

I've been using 1Password since nearly the beginning, and am really quite dependent on it now (so much so that I had a hard time coming to terms with an inevitable eventual move to Linux, until the release of 1PasswordX). So I'm an advocate.

But I think the whole computer industry outside of a very few (notably Facebook and Amazon) has a grossly inadequate picture of just how little most people (including most of the so-called 'digital native' generations) know about the many computers in their lives. They don't use computers --
they are trained by a small number of commercial interfaces. It's extremely basic rat-in-maze stuff.

The companies rightly lauded for their design skills targeted at us (this includes Apple and AgileBits) aren't even in this ballpark, and from everything I see and hear from them, they haven't a clue that they're not there.
> Twitter is more anonymous.

How did you arrive at that conclusion? I assume Twitter retains everything as well (even "deleted" tweets) and it's all associated with an email address. Or did you mean it in the sense that far fewer people have a Twitter account?
Your second question is the key: the USPS exists to encourage business. It loses money on most, if not all, package plans it has with businesses. It does not seek to gain profit.
We've banned this account for crossing repeatedly into personal attack and ignoring our requests to stop breaking the site guidelines.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We just revamped linuxserver.io
Magic Modules: Automagically Generate Google Cloud Platform Support for OSS
Last time I bought some 10Gbit fiber (some AOC, the stuff with SFPs on both ends) it was about $70 for a 3 meter cable. Amortized cost of switch ports are maybe another $200. You paid $700 for a 10Gbit networking card with (say) four ports ... but a LOT more for the server to run all of this.

Back-of-envelope calculation: You can get about 50,000 client connections at 50 updates/sec of 500 bytes each on a 10Gbit link. Four ports, double redundancy gets you 100K clients on a server. Yike -- that's wayyy more clients than you want on a single server (you almost certainly run out of server-side CPU for game simulation and so forth before you run into bandwidth issues). A dual 40Gbit networking card is pretty cheap, but you'll run into CPU load issues trying to feed that card enough traffic -- it's frankly plenty hard to do that even when you're not doing game computation.

You can probably run all of your servers on 1Gbit copper for under $100 / port. There are better ways to wire things up, but I've done this in the past and it's worked fine.

Capital outlay for sufficient server bandwidth just isn't a big deal.

[edit: back-of-envelope calculation low by a factor of 10 :-) ]