skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In some sense I'm not worried too much about FR tech on its own. A few generations ago, most of us lived in small-enough contexts that human facial recognition served to identify us all the time anyhow. What I do worry about is the degree to which the video data and facial profile data is centralized.

Look at current surveillance cameras in the US as an example. There are a lot of them now, but data is held by a wide variety of people and institutions, and most of them just don't care about it unless something criminal happened.

If an individual school or workplace adds FR to their cameras such that they alerted to strangers in restricted areas, I wouldn't worry about that at all. If they own the data and have their own FR profiles, that's cool by me.

But that's very different than China's effort, where they're clearly working toward complete coverage of 1.4 billion people, with strongly centralized control. Now that they have president-for-life Xi, that's a lot of authoritarian potential.
10 Strategies for Building a Business with Influence
Anyone interested in the psychology of why nearly-but-not-quite humanoid machines are creepy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley is a good place to start reading.
It really depends on where you want to go, set yourself a clear goal what size and what kind of service you want to offer, in retrospect (5 years, 20 people and leading network with 40 people working for several global brands) that was my biggest mistake. We just happily tagged along and worked our way up... but an agency with 15 people works totally different than an agency with 4 or 40 people. The larger the agency gets the more defined are the roles, as a consultant you are selling yourself and doing everything yourself. In an agency of 40 clear roles have to be established for every process.

Agencies live by their brand and flair, you are selling not just a service but the idea of your service. So think hard about what differentiates you. Try to build dedicated sales funnel... Ok I could do this for hours...
> I'm not convinced that there are any fundamental differences between US and Australian usage here.

Technically that's right, but culturally there is a big difference in my experience (as an Australian who has spent a lot of time in SF Bay Area).

In the Bay Area, when people describe where they live they'll refer to their local city/town first - i.e., Palo Alto, San Jose, Oakland, San Mateo, or indeed San Francisco the distinct city. Sure they might refer to the "Bay Area", as a general descriptor of where they live to an outsider, but they wouldn't normally say "I live in San Francisco" if they live in Menlo Park.

In Australia, people will primarily describe themselves as living in "Melbourne" or "Sydney", and only if the conversation progresses to which part of that city they live in will they refer to the suburb. Even then they'll talk about the local suburb, which is normally distinct from the municipality, particularly now that the municipalities are quite large and encompass several suburbs.
Who actually watches these?
If executives aren't responsible for "strategy and innovation" how do they justify huge executive salaries?
While there may be some specific cases where it's done, I'm halfway through the course and watashi was shown on its own, (quite early) but I don't think it was used in even one sentence so far. (Most of them starting with I)
Service workers provide way more capabilities than just creating a shortcut. Google’s doc[1] provides a good introduction, but essentially you get things like push notifications and background sync in a cross-compatible way (chrome, Firefox, Edge, and now Safari). I’m particularly excited about the caches and sync APIs, which allows sites to be rendered and be interactive even when you’re offline or have a flaky connection.

1: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/primers/servi...
If you hire someone to do stufd you are bad at, you often end up in being unable to tell if they do it well
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) seems to be the most common term for that.
I haven't read the article yet, but this is why being "content" never seems that descriptive to me. It doesn't describe the situation in which one finds themselves, it's a statement on their reaction. Some people always fight, some people throw a fit like a child, etc. Some people are content.

It's essential to find a source of contentedness in life, but it can be easily manipulated to become complacency. Are these kids content about being content?
I meant Apple's developers.
It is also worth noting that the original speech called it the military industrial congressional complex. Indeed very relevant.
How good would you say the tech is? E.g., if Facebook put cameras outside a football stadium with 60k people, how many people would they correctly recognize? And how many false positives would be generated?

I ask because I'm wondering how much China's announcement here is a stunt that goes well beyond the state of the art.
> For one, the person requesting deletion doesn't even have to be your user.

If what you wrote is true, then organizations are liable for data that someone may, possibly even just theoretically, be able to use to identify someone else.

Given that the law is not 'technical', maybe it'll be interpreted much more leniently than a straightforward reading would lead one to expect.
The site is localized en-US so the way it's displayed is accurate to that localization (in showing other currencies, other than USD, to be in ISO).

The better option here would be defaulting the site to the locale of the users browser and/or just localizing the whole site translations and all.

I'd like to get more feedback on this before rolling anything out unnecessarily.
Some people were born in China, and haven't had a chance to opt in to the rules.

Sometimes the rules are not just. Perhaps you like Falun Gong. Perhaps you're a member of a disliked race/religion/hair color/etc.

In addition to making it much harder to avoid getting caught without going full Ann Frank, this makes it much harder for individuals who recognize that the law is unjust and are in a position to let it slide actually let it slide. After all, the cameras will get you eventually.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16828973
The corporation I work for is in business process automation (specialized in healthcare and insurance, but not exclusively that).

All companies want business process automation, but none of them want to pay enough for it, or have their shit together enough to work with us, usually.

We still manage to get enough business to make money, but we've had lots of clients that absolutely needed something done by a certain date drag their feet about signing contracts to the point where we did free work expecting the contract to be signed, then they still don't sign the contracts or say they couldn't get their data ready to send to us so we could do what they wanted with it, or their IT department decides they can do what we do (and then ends up failing miserably because their culture is slow and awful), or all sorts of things.

It's quite a mess, but there is money to be made in it. Our corporation alone has billions of dollars in revenue from it every year, so the industry as a whole has to be pretty big.
Economic diversity, racial diversity, and religious diversity all spring to mind.

EDIT: Downvotes? For this?

I'm not claiming that lacking the diversity is a good thing, merely that having extra options decreases cohesion. The more diverse the economic situation is (say, due to vast wealth inequality) the less cohesion there is. The more diverse the religions are, the less common-ground people have based on religion--as in most of European history. The more racially diverse a place is, the more tensions due to race (LA versus Helsinki).

Is it worth the hit to cohesion to have better diversity? I'd argue that, in the absence of external threats, it absolutely is. But living in a fantasyland where diversity doesn't come at the expense of cohesion doesn't help.
Let's simplify the way we write Lisp …
> in the same way Apple was forced to adopt USB Type-C?

What in the what now?

Apple adopted the latest USB standard as a way to reduce the BOM on it's devices by consolidating ports. They did the same thing with the iMac almost 20 years ago. No one is twisting their arm on it, if anything people are asking them to not jump whole hog on USB Type-C but instead take a gradual approach to adopting it.
Offhand, I would guess that it's good for I/O-bound tasks, where you can have lots of threads waiting for input that don't need CPU time. A busy database maybe.
Yes, my bad on the GPS/GNSS.

Yet on the use cases for this, I don't think India would have ponied up the money for this if it wasn't for the military use. With GPS, Galileo, Beidou and Glonass, the civilian navigation problem is pretty much solved. Are you aware of a use case it is solving that the others aren't?
No large cities?
The problem with growing a consulting business is the only way to grow is to hire people. Consulting is often feast or famine. During the lean times if you have an employee you're going to need to keep paying them or they (rightfully so) will leave.

I have been a one-man-show consultant for about 12 years and just this year I have decided that I've had enough. Fat/thin times, clients who hate to pay even for good work, fighting the rest of the world in a race to the bottom, never working on one thing long enough to make it into something great, being the first to be let go when a client has tough times.

It's a bitch being a software consultant.

I'm going to build a product and wind down my business, I'm done.

Just yesterday I came across this video of Steve Jobs talking about consulting, it really hit home for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1F0DC66zwE

He's right, you never quite get deep enough. It's a shallow existence. I've worked for some of the worlds biggest brands and you know what? Nobody gives a shit. They just think you are expensive when they see all that. Seriously I've worked on 100 brands you'd recognize; nobody cares. Big clients squeeze you and small clients don't have the money.

The key was always having a few good clients to keep you going but then you are just basically working a job, right?

I make good money but I'm tired of the grind. I can't work in a reguar job, so, I'm going to grow a product.

Sorry about the rant. I hope you can learn something from the 12 years I just spent asking the questions you are asking.
Paul Halmos is known as one of the greatest and most enjoyable expositers of mathematics of the twentieth century. I've certainly learnt a lot about writing in general (not just mathematical) from reading his stuff, and his book "Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces" was an aid to me when I was learning Linear Algebra ten years ago.

If the linked text is too long, you might enjoy his shorter piece "Mathematics as Creative Art" [0].

[0] http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Creative_art....
> The surveillance AI knows nothing of the difference between malum in se (crime!) and malum prohibitum ("crime")

And for the humans in charge of the AI there is no such distinction so the AI is working as intended.
All these new features, but HTML5 audio is still utterly busted on iOS Safari[0]. So much so that my music player PWA is essentially unusable on iOS Safari.

Bug filed here[1], simple repro here[2].

I appreciate that service worker is here. I appreciate that they are making progress on PWA support. It's good to see. But there are some longstanding HTML5 issues in the browser that need to be fixed. Would really appreciate some Apple devs solving it; the fix is conceptually simple: fire HTML5 audio .ended event when audio finishes playing, even if the screen is off or app is in the background.

[0]: http://debuggerdotbreak.judahgabriel.com/2016/12/13/its-almo...

[1]: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=173332

[2]: https://bitshuvafiles01.com/iOSAudioBugRepro/audioError.html
>WebKit in Safari now supports loading H.264 encoded MP4 video with an HTML tag.

I was confused by this sentence, but it actually says "HTML <IMG> tag" (the "<IMG>" part of the text is unescaped, and does not render). Meaning you can use <img src="video.mp4">

"But we already have <video> and animated webP and..." is addresed in depth in the linked article: https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2017/animated-gif-without-th...
I scaled from myself to a team of 20 (all remote). Just be aware that your skill set needs to change from hands on to management and operations. I had formal training in both, so it felt comfortable, but that's where many people stumble thinking that they have more work than they can handle so they start hiring, even though their gift is just on the execution side and not the management side.

The transition is fantastic and very financially rewarding if you have the desire and skillset to hire, manage (and fire!) others. The biggest change for me was the added stress on sales of having to "provide" for not just myself and my family but the individuals I hired and thinking about their families as well.

Also, my days became much more about things going wrong. Not because they were at a high rate, but because at the top people bring to you problems they couldn't solve themselves. So, it's a lot of problem solving, client repair work and coaching.

But after 5 years, I made more money than I thought I'd ever make, so to the victor go the spoils.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention..., I suspect it has more to do with average wealth / standard of living combined with wealth inequality. "Social cohesion", whatever that means, is probably correlated, but I wouldn't be sure it's the underlying cause.
> Two child seats basically means no one can fit in the middle unless you have an extra wide car

The middle I never even worried about, the problem I find is that they take so much space in the front/back direction of the car. I.e. if you put a rear facing seat in the front passenger seat, no adult can sit behind it, and if you put a rear facing seat behind the front passenger seat, then no adult can sit in the front passenger seat.

So for the first child, a compact was no problem. The read-facing seat takes the non-driver side of the car - front or back doesn't matter). One parent drives and the other sits behind the driver.

With TWO rear facing seats however, we found that not even a medium size car (A4, 9-3, C-class, 3-series...) would fit them in a way that also fits two adults - at least not in a way that works for long trips.
Do you get flu vaccine every year?
Defined benefit can work as long as people aren’t being shady. It costs more up front. Pensions are in trouble because they have not made the contributions over the life of the employment. Also, and independent third party management with proper controls.

What I read about whenever these stories hit the news is they assume they can take from the pool either directly or by under contributing thinking they can just pay it later
Ask HN: How do you deal with burnout as a programmer?
> Every terrorist attack where Telegram is used will paint a bigger and bigger bullseye on their backs. The media will get in on it. The public will get in on it. Lawmakers will get in on it. Hacker News will get in on it.

Here I was, thinking that we here at HN aimed higher.

> The witch hunt against Facebook shows how this will look though the particulars will be different.

Witch hunt usually implies baseless, made up accusations.

When it comes to Facebook I'd phrase it differently; maybe something about consequences or justice?
Are you at ISC West?
You‘re misinformed.

Yes, the German language has had several big changes, but until the reform we‘re talking about it was linguistically „proper“ in that the existing language was described and codified. It was bottom up.

In this reform some non-elected people (who just a few years earlier had said themselves that there job wasn‘t to invent German, but to describe existing use and trends) invented a whole new orthography from scratch. The new rules have never been in use anywhere throughout the German-speaking lands.

They were and are pure fiction.

In linguistics that‘s how you tell a layperson: they think linguistics is proscriptive. Now it seems to be... :-(

And of course people under 22 don‘t care. They have never learned proper German.
Google Awarded Patent: Audio Syncing Between Devices
Iceland only has about 300,000 inhabitants (the same as the city of Santa Ana, ca), and a lot of people are somehow related to each other. In fact, there's an Icelandic dating app that checks if the person you're interested in isn't related to you.
Funny story, i have never seen any ad anywhere in the internet or never clicked on any one for sure. i wonder why product makers pay so much for advertisement to google n fb.

i have seen advertisement in tv when i used to watch tv a lot and am sure i have never bought those stuff jus because they advertised them, most of time we will just swap channels for few mins and advertisement wud b gone away.

And in internet it is very effortless to jus scroll past stuff that we are not paying attention to, i guess i most of the time ended up scrolling thru ads, thats y i dont remember buying anything because i saw some ad.
The main things that cause loss of GPS 'lock' are the satellite signals being blocked (buildings, terrain, people, etc in the way), and multipath (signals being reflected off buildings, terrain, etc). A munition a few thousand feet above the ground has none of those things.

(There's also 'GPS jamming', which is totally a thing in war, but that's not really 'like our phones', generally.)

As other posts have mentioned, though, GPS is simply one input into weapons systems, not the input into weapons systems.
The difference is in "knowing" vs "guessing".

If I am shown an ad in front of a YouTube video about how awesome guns are, it can be guessed that I like guns, and so would make sense for YouTube to show an NRA advertisement in front of that video. The "targeting" is based on assumptions about the audience, not specific knowledge. The only specific knowledge is based around the content, not the audience, and the content creator (whomever that may be) has opted in to ads.

An actual "targeted ad" counter example to this example would be if I made a post on Facebook saying "Damn, I really love guns!", and Facebook then showed me an NRA ad.

One is based on actual data about me, the other is on the content/environment and assumptions. I think that is a fairly clear difference.
Two good books on the subject...

First read "The E-myth".

Then read "Built to Sell".
The whole point of a pension is to accept lower pay today to not have to worry about tomorrow. It's a structural way of dealing with the fact that most people don't know how to plan for the future and, before, just ended up dying in the streets in their 60s.
Where did he mention tax avoidance? My interpretation of the parent is he’s saying many violations of securities laws are otherwise harmless. Nobody needs to be defrauded for a violation to occur. All parties on both sides of an investment could willingly consent to take part, and everyone involved could be happy, yet the SEC or CFTC could still punish everyone.

I’m not arguing in favor of either side with this comment, just looking to clear up some apparent confusion on what the parent comment stated.
That's basically one of the approaches they discuss:

> The legal status for a robot can’t derive from the Legal Entity model, since it implies the existence of human persons behind the legal person to represent and direct it. And this is not the case for a robot.

They also cover treating the robot as a trust fund:

> c. The legal status for a robot can’t derive from the Anglo-Saxon Trust model also called Fiducie or Treuhand in Germany. Indeed, this regime is extremely complex, requires very specialized competences and would not solve the liability issue. More importantly , it would still imply the existence of a human being as a last resort – the trustee or fiduciary – responsible for managing the robot granted with a Trust or a Fiducie.

Edit: The silly thing is that they want to ensure that robots have "the status of electronic persons responsible for making good any damage they may cause" while simultaneously holding that a robot can't be a Natural Person "since the robot would then hold human rights, such as [...] the right to remuneration".

So in their book a robot can't earn money but is personally financially liable for any damage it causes.
That's ridiculous. People hire accountants, lawyers, and doctors all the time.
This would be a more compelling counterfactual if the approach that won wasn't in many senses the most successful technology in the history of the computer industry.
I'd imagine that this isn't generally true. Surely it's better, for at least some data, that it be preserved even if it's leaked to the public.
Prof. Dr. Style (2010)
This is a great point. A common complaint about adtech is that since it prints money, the opportunity cost of the brain power being poured into it is other more important problems, like cancer research, for one. Where it gets tricky is when the adtech behemoths start funding cancer research. I don't have an answer to this one.
Your toothbrush needs replacing every 3 weeks?
> Actually I'd feel rude phoning someone without arranging it first. Not terribly rude, but a little uncomfortable. What if they are driving or in an important meeting?

Then they don't answer it. It's called self control!
I'm inclined to agree with you. I don't think IKEA sells shovels. At least, not in the way Apple does. BMW is more of a middle ground between the two.

I think what we're looking at is selling experiences?

You can sell shovels and bundle experience with them - I think it's pretty straightforward to view Apple from that perspective.

But home furnishings are just purely experiences. Clothing seems to fall into the same experience category.

So maybe it's a sort of trifecta. Middlemen, Shovels, and experience.

When I buy a television there's going to be a middleman - a retailer - who probably can provide some pro/con to the experience category. But what's driving me is the experience that the TV will afford. Same with IKEA.

When I buy a Macbook Pro I'm looking for a device that can help me edit code and video in ways that I enjoy, so the shovel factor is important to me.

If I'm going to buy a luxury car like a BMW then there's the shovel-factor of having reliable transportation, but the premium price comes from experience.

Utility, middle-men, and experience. The extra category of experience seems to fill in the gaps.
Can you really not imagine even a single case where this isn't true?
Not trying to compete with your concerns because I don't like advertisers having any of my info either since I don't want spam, telemarketing or junk mail sent to my house...but the biggest fears that I have about companies like Google and Facebook is that I'm convinced that either they're fronts for intelligence agencies or at the very least, the agencies have deep access to their systems for use in black ops such as domestic propaganda.

Having read about things like Operation Mockingbird [1], I can't imagine that these agencies have stopped behaving as such. Google and FB alone have got to be a treasure trove for them.

It seems like there's not much I can do about either one of these concerns, so on most days I just try not to let them suck my time up by worrying about them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
I helped do this, and am working on doing it again now (1.5 years in, 6 people, soon to be 7). 6 years ago, I wrote a guide on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615

My #1 answer to "how to do this" has the virtue of simplicity: stop billing hourly.

What would be interesting to see on a thread like this is which people offering advice have actually scaled a consultancy.

Happy to answer specific questions, for what it's worth.
Size of country and high, equitable standards of living.