skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're leaving out the possibility that the charities, like most other marketers, didn't bother to get affirmative consent originally.

But equally, you're leaving out the possibility that charities really were clear and honest about what they would like to send and really did provide a genuine choice, yet would fall foul of one of the technical requirements under GDPR that wasn't in force at the time. This is probably the case for most if not all of the charities I support myself, so absent evidence to the contrary I have to assume it was widespread practice.

People keep talking about the "spirit of the law", but there's a danger that this becomes a euphemism for "what I wish the law had said, even though it didn't". Usually when people contrast the spirit of the law with the letter of the law, they are making a point about avoiding the obvious purpose of legislation by relying on legal technicalities or subtle implications that most people wouldn't pick up.

In this sort of case, I don't see how it's against even the spirit of previous data protection law if a charity clearly and honestly stated that it would like to send information to donors about how their money was being used, which probably many donors would indeed like to receive, but for example they checked the box by default. There was an explicit provision for businesses to send marketing mail to previous customers or prospects without requiring consent at all, as long as it related to products or services similar to what the recipient had been interested in before and as long as some reasonable requirements about opting out were met, so clearly this isn't some absurd idea just dreamed up by charity fundraisers.
"can't afford" is not equivilent to "won't pay"
Tales from the Ethereum Mines
Also a lot of it is essentially wrong, since they expect you to transliterate parts of the sentence that would probably not be included in context, e.g. saying "watashi wa" for any sentence starting "I".
A Dive into the World of the Hyperledger Blockchain
‘King of Kong’ Champion Billy Mitchell Stripped of ‘Donkey Kong’ World Record
You distribute the advertising cost & display across a very large number of users (varying on if we're talking about CPM or CPC), some of which can afford to buy things. Some users can afford to buy things at one point in time but not another, or vice versa. The users that do click and buy, subsidize the 3/4 of users that either could never afford to pay $5 or $10 per month for Facebook (a billion people or more), or would never want to (ie are perfectly fine with advertising). You advertise to a larger group than perfectly ideal (including guaranteed non-buyers) precisely because you don't know every person's exact financial condition and never will.

The minority of people on Facebook that click on ads and buy things, are making it possible for the other 2 billion people to use the service without paying a monthly fee.

This distribution is identical to advertising pretty much everywhere else throughout history.

Everyone that drives by a billboard can't afford to buy what the billboard is selling. That doesn't make it a con. The buyers you do derive, out of the very large number of people that have no interest or can't afford what you're selling, pay for your billboard (hopefully).

Everyone that watches an ad on TV - the past half century - can't afford to buy the thing being sold (a $1,000 workout machine), that doesn't mean the advertising is a con.

The sole difference is the heightened targeting based on information that Facebook or Google know about your habits or interests. In the past, it was far more difficult. A TV advertiser for example, might discover through research and trial & error that TV watchers are more likely to buy that $1,000 workout machine at 1am via an hour long infomercial. The experimentation loop was dramatically slower.
> Please refrain from putting Travis K. in the same category as Rosa Parks

Civil disobedience isn’t inherently good, momentous nor socially activistic. (See the story behind Homer Plessy [1], who was hired by railroad owners in a bid to cut costs related to a segregationist state law. It famously backfired when SCOTUS created “separate but equal”.)

It is simply “the active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws of the state, and/or demands, orders, and commands of a government” [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Plessy

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience
> Sure, in a pre-hotel era, but then someone thought "hey what about people coming to visit our city?" and hotels were born.

And someone thought what about even more of those people and airbnb was born...

> So? The long-term residents are the people that live in the city and actually make it what it is. They get the final say in what goes on in their own city that they pay taxes to. It's not about power--unless you mean the economic power to continue to afford to live in their city.

Thats your opinion. What would new york be without tourists? Or vancouver? Definitely a different city.

And they pay taxes for services they consume, not to get a privilege over stranges, that, by the way, also pay taxes. In fact, the visitors do more for the city than the actual tax paying residents. Because they bring money in, that increases the revenue of the city as well as of the individuals. If that were the bar to measure, then it would be the visitors that get to vote over the locals, since they do so much more to fill the coffers.

> I mean, your argument here is basically "wealthy travelers with the help of a large, wealthy corporation should be allowed to break local laws because it might be better for the economy."

If your main concern is companies breaking the law, then I have a proposition to satisfy you and me at the same time. Do away with the laws, and now there are no law-breakers.

> This is a far cry from your original statement of "Short term rentals do not diminish housing stock"

You are switching the definition of housing stock: they dont diminish it, they increase it. More people fit in the same space thanks to airbnb, because it extends utilization rates and adds density: it just does so at a cost to the long term resident over short term residents.
Location: India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes, for the right job, after some months

Technologies: Python, SQL and many databases, C, Unix/Linux commands and shell scripting, back-end web dev with Python and Flask, REST, MongoDB, command-line utility development in C, Python and DLang, many open source libraries, PDF generation and PDF text extraction. Some Ruby and Rails and Java earlier. Generally, strong Python, C-and-Unix-related-tech and DB skills.

Résumé/CV: http://www.codementor.io/vasudevram

Email: http://vasudevram.github.io/contact.html

Notes: Creator of xtopdf, a Python toolkit for PDF generation from other data formats. Team leader for a successful database middleware product developed in C on Windows. Published author of some technical articles on sites or magazines like IBM developerWorks, Packt Publishing and Linux For You (now Open Source For You). Blog at jugad2.blogspot.com has many Python posts with code (see label python).
Introduction to D-Apps. Part #1
Pure CGI
Yep, there seems to be a great deal of magical thinking revolving around the idea of if you pay companies they wont keep on exploiting your data.

You still get ads on very expensive cable TV packages.

Your bank still data mines and sells off your purchase history, dispite a large monthly fee.
How to Create a Private or Custom Ethereum Blockchain Quickly
A lot of people could appeal the ruling, including the Wikimedia foundation if they were being forced to remove those links. I’m not sure, but my impression of this ruling is that it would probably be overturned on appeal.
That's fair, thanks for the explanation. I legit didn't know the specifics of the Korean technology, just that I had heard the bus can get charge from the road while driving on it.
I'd say it's desperation. The traditional business model of newspapers has been upended, and the ad driven model isn't really working out that well either. So instead of doubling down and riding it to the ground, some outlets are actually innovating and making cool stuff and throwing it against the wall to see what happens.
>Can you elaborate on why that isn't a good thing?

It's not a bad thing per se, but it's added complexity without any obvious benefit if that code is still doing what javascript already does, just as a binary blob, especially for simple uses like glue code around jQuery or the sort of JS running on Hacker News.
Blockchain 101: Beginners Guide to Understanding the Technolog
> You don't have much choice but to agree.

Yes. Following the law is not optional.
Setting Business KPI's for Pre-Revenue and Early Revenue Startups
> Yeah, right, now you lost me completely by trying to cast moderate alcohol use as something that will _make_ me hit my wife

That's not what he says, though. He says alcohol could have that effect. Given that alcohol has notable connections to that effect, it's a reasonable statement. One could argue it's only connected to alcohol abuse, and that's also a reasonable argument, but (a) it's not the only risk related to alcohol consumption (the article notable focuses on cancer) and (b) there's the fact that some portion of the population is at risk for alcohol abuse in a way they are probably not at risk for, say, statin abuse.

> and talking of it as a bad medication.

If we're going to speak of health benefits of alcohol and talk about whether professionals should recommend it, then it's reasonable to compare it to a form of medication.

> You can't walk and have a glass of wine at the weekend?

The question here isn't whether you can do both. Obviously, anyone can. The question is what recommendations are likely to improve outcomes.

The evidence for benefits of alcohol consumption doesn't seem clear. The evidence for some risks does (even if many people who drink never experience them).

So the only people you should tell to take a walk and have a glass of wine are the people who are already having the glass of wine or really really want to for non-health related reasons.

(Or the people who can be confident something else will kill them first and don't need to be unintoxicated in the meanwhile, I suppose.)

> this piece just went of the deep end in lacking perspective and I can no longer trust that it will give me useful advice on keeping alcohol as part of my lifestyle.

The perspective seems pretty straight on to me (and, fwiw, entirely consistent with the advice I've gotten from a handful of doctors including two fancy cardiologists).

Alcohol has risks. The article discusses some and reasons why they may not be adequately appreciated. If that isn't useful as advice while forming an opinion about alcohol as part of your lifestyle, maybe the problem is less the article and more that you're not interested in making that decision based off an understanding of the risks.

And yes, we all accept activities we know have risks, so if drinking is something you enjoy enough you want to accept the measure of risk, fair enough! I do the same with some my own choices. I don't tell myself I'm doing it as part of a health regimen, though, when there are options that seem to have clearer benefits and better risks profiles.
Not encouraging anyone to do an ICO or sell unlicensed securities, but as with anything, it's a situation of risk vs. reward. And the odds are in your favour (especially if you're not US based).

Any high risk investment is a gamble. Most cryptocurrencies are garbage, useless and will eventually disappear. But several of them (in my view) are interesting and will be around. Investing in cryptocurrencies isn't riskier than angel investing in a startup. if you love losing money, invest in 10 startups. You'll most likely lose money on all 10 deals. Your chances of making a massive return by investing in crypto are probably significantly higher.

At the end of the day, if you can risk $1 to potentially make $10 or 20, with an 80% chance of you doubling your money, a 50% chance that you 10x and a 25% chance you 20x your money -- honestly, why wouldn't you do that? Not with your entire net worth, but those odds are just too good not to put some money in.

In fact, I'd say more, anyone who hasn't at least invested some money in cryptocurrencies.. just doesn't like making money. What if Bitcoin actually ends up becoming digital gold? You'll have lost out on the best possible investment in our lifetime. What if Ethereum ends up powering most dApps? etc
You would need to be pretty close to the server/storage/etc to get a clean enough signal to be useful though. So physical security might be enough to protect against this type of attack. You probably can't just dig up the powerline outside and start tapping it thankfully.
I agree with this though opening up to external scrutiny (up to a reasonable extent similar to - say - CERN) would help dispel a feeling of “yet another faster-than-light type experiment”. I also don’t think that the “combativeness” with which criticisms of the experiment are addressed (cf article) is in any way useful to the scientific endeavour.
Best is the new default on the old UI too.
The forget the encryption key approach is clever.
Sure, that's true if you are raising from a few, relatively speaking, large investors, and also only if you care about fundraising as a one time event, instead of funds management as an ongoing process. The entire point of ICOs seems to be to raise from many small investors at once, perhaps skirting, among other things, accredited investor laws.

Even for large companies: say we want to do my crazy invest at the team level idea: I don't really agree it would be simple to operationalize all of that money flow, and I do actually think having a blockchain could help if that is your goal, which is a big if.

I'm not here to hard sell anyone on crypto, but I also am not comfortable with the wholesale dismissal of it either, so I'm definitely hoping a lot of people disagree with me and we can tease some of this stuff out.
Reddit on web is unfortunately unusable, at least on mobile, due to how badly it was implemented
The article mentions that that onion address is in the list of domains that are "included but not limited to" in the injunction.

Good luck to ACS getting a .onion address seized... WHatever their legal injunction says.
Distributed detached root DNS anyone? A twitter bot that returns IP addresses to #icanhazscience ? I don't think they can prevent this.
Having left school 3 years ago, I can confirm there is still no grammar taught in english lessons. It was all taught to the AQA exam we did. I studied french and german too, and all my grammar knowledge comes from there and from languages at uni. There's obviously basic things in primary school but that's like where to put commas, that's it.
Hmm.. Contracts are between two parties. If it’s not the government providing recourse in the case of a contract breach, then who? I don’t see a realistic alternative.
> Are there any consumer-centric arguments against this being the default

You can use the same arguments that support the census. Corporations need good data to know where to invest.

> might being a default spurn the development of countermeasures to circumvent it?

Certainly. This is an endless arms race.
I built a canned food rack. It hangs on the wall and acts as a fifo. When canned good I like are on sale, I buy a ton and never worry that there is an old can at the back of the self.
exactly, however this fully decentralized/untrusted model is only applicable to a few types of businesses, in the digital realm. in this case just stamping shares with a blockchain is not a particularly inspiring application. and "legally binding cryptocurrency" is a quite the oxymoron, like the venezuelan petro.
A couple of things:

1. Having Tesla keep their mouths shut results in more unbiased people. Kicking Tesla off the investigation is in large part a deterrent, not a corrective action.

2. This change also involves giving Tesla less access to data that they might leak. Information collected from the car's logs is under NTSB control (in past cases, for example, American Airlines was punished for making its own copy of the black box before handing it over). You can reduce these issues by not sharing information with an unreliable party.
I understand the discomfort, I feel it myself. However, I believe that friction, and adding delays, makes it more likely that people engage system 2 thinking (slow).

When communication is frictionless, we engage more of our type i system. See: drunk arguments.
Last time this happened, sci-hub posted DNS servers that you can use.

80.82.77.83 and 80.82.77.84
i want to burn up on re-entry. Elon, you hear me?! I want a space burial.
I think there are some services which people will pay for. People have been paying to be entertained for decades with pay TV models.
Sounds like their sales org is getting a little more savvy.

My last experience showed they had no idea how to sell to a stodgy F500 company. The pitch was "were smart, you aren't"...followed up with technical drivel that few in the room would understand. And, they gave up after a few weeks. Azure and AWS knew better.
"Nobody is entitled to have millions and millions spent on keeping them alive..."

I agree. The F35 cost has gotten way out of hand.
What is interesting about a bot-on-bot negotiation? if the AI had any performance against a human it might be worth caring about.
It’s unlikely that vendors will ever support multiple JIT engines, so wasm is likely to be AOT only for the foreseeable future: you likely won’t see other languages inside script tags.

And secondly, it’s going to be a long time before the entirety of the Web API (which is much bigger than just the DOM) is supported in wasm, if ever.
> Cars are not software.

Software is also not software (in this framing). I think the Facebook elections fiasco has shown that even something as innocuous as social media has consequences beyond the strictly user<->company relationship.
There are 7 billion people and a lot of them die every day. We choose as a society about the trade offs between safety, liberty and convenience. When people tell you the raw numbers it sounds bad. When they tell you the probability you’ll die in a car accident in your lifetime they may think of it differently
I'm not an expert in this domain, but my guess is that a flip of the eaths magnetic field is not instantaneous, but it takes over a few bird generations.
50% of government affairs will be completed by blockchain by 2021
powerbleed?
It probably is, but it is also at least an order of magnitude more beneficial to the field than some of the computational work. There are some groups working on non-invasive optogenetics methods, which are still early stage but really cool
I think part of it is that people often buy pizza out of their neighborhood, so they want a name they know with menu items they can just recite... hence not only national chains but regional chains (e.g. Round Table in CA).

I would never have a chain food app on my phone just from a privacy-suck standpoint. For example, here are the permissions the Dominos app wants on Android:

This app has access to:

Location

- precise location (GPS and network-based)

Phone

- directly call phone numbers

- read phone status and identity

Photos/Media/Files

- read the contents of your USB storage

- modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

Storage

- read the contents of your USB storage

- modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

Camera

- take pictures and videos

Microphone

- record audio

Device ID & call information

- phone status and identity

Other

- receive data from Internet

- view network connections

- pair with Bluetooth devices

- access Bluetooth settings

- full network access

- control vibration

- prevent device from sleeping
That is not correct. GDP enforcement doesn't start until late May, but the law is already in effect.
> I think the problem is the "bad" things I may or may not have done in the past is none of the potential employers business.

Baloney - if I'm going to trust you with my customers, my business data, and my reputation, I darned well do deserve to know if you've done things that might make you undeserving of that trust. Lying on a job application would be a very good example of that.
Visualizing How Vulnerable Is Each US State to a Trade War
AI Learns a New Trick: Measuring Brain Cells
If the images in the article are accurate, the birds don't really see the polarity of the field, merely the alignment, so they don't really see "north", "east", "south" and "west", merely "latitudinal" or "longitudinal".

They would probably combine with sunlight to get the real orientation – an approach which would continue to work with a flipped magnetic field.
Surprise Congress failed to address Facebook’s fundamental flaw
Crypto currency mining!

/joke
You’re correct, an airline autopilot can do all that under _continual pilot supervision_. The autopilot also cannot communicate with ATC so pilots will adjust the flight path in flight to account for ATC instructions and changing weather. It’s not hands-off.
You should try Firefox's tracking protection. This was actually one page I didn't use reader view for!
That wasn’t my intention.
A while ago they made subs that a large number of people had blocked show up on the front page less. The change came about because certain small vocal communities would boost content to the front page that the rest of reddit hated.
...is it possible for a pun to distill the zeitgeist more perfectly than that?
Why? Verifying the veracity of information on a job application with public records seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and nowhere in the realm of 'civil rights abuse'.
Is it time to start creating shadows for Facebook to track of people that don't exist and don't have facebook accounts?
Operation Parliament uses Windows malware in targeted information theft
I’d love to have a way to sync my google play music files with apples app. The reason I’m interested in apples app is so that I can fully control it with Seri. This way in the car I can just tell seri what song, artist, album, genre to play.
Hey, thanks! That's what I was looking for! Their procedure is far less bloody than my proposal... that's probably why I'm not a biologist. I guess the "Let's just chop it off and see what happens" ploy isn't all that sophisticated.
FYI, here are the permissions the Slice app requires on Android:

"This app has access to:

Identity: find accounts on the device, add or remove accounts

Contacts: (are you kidding me?!?!)

Location: precise location (GPS and network-based)

Photos/Media/Files: read the contents of your USB storage,
modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

Storage: read the contents of your USB storage, modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

Camera: take pictures and videos

Wi-Fi connection information: view Wi-Fi connections

Other:

- receive data from Internet

- view network connections

- create accounts and set passwords

- full network access

- use accounts on the device

- control vibration

- prevent device from sleeping"

So, what they don't make on taking a slice of providers, they can make on selling marketing/demographic data.
Ex-Googler's E-Commerce Site Valued at About $15B