skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In theory, perhaps. In practice, it provides a universally inconvenient currency. If somebody wants to send me money to read an email, then I want to be able to spend that money. If they send me bitcoin, I can't spend it directly: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l...

Ergo, I am right back in need some way to convert it into my local currency. Except far less conveniently than just letting my bank take care of the exchange, as they would with an international wire transfer.

Also, as I explain elsewhere, the forex thing is a solution looking for a problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16854526

The reason I'd pay somebody to read an email is so that I can do business with them, and for a fair bit more money than I pay for the email. That involves one of us paying the other. Which in practice will mean a real currency, not cryptotulips.
Microsoft's Service Fabric is an open source distributed system build on the same principles. Check it out - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/service-fabric/
There really are lots of strong correlations between race and measurable qualities. That alone means it's a real concept - it has predictive power. Simple examples are hair color and eye coolor.
Sort of, the issue is companies typically bootstrap in their domestic market. If laws are restrictive it will kill companies before they even get to the point of international expansion.
Posting an analysis most definitely does not make you a bad actor. He works at an AV company and analyzes malware for a living. Malware uses the same techniques as this kind of spyware, and it’s pretty natural for a curious person who works with these tools to see what it was doing, especially after a ban. The GDPR won’t make that any less difficult.
Also I don't think most people would be willing to pay for Facebook which would be the alternative to surveillance and advertising.
This operation is still going - https://unlockd.com/products/unlockd-loyalty/
What does the boring company make? I saw bits of it as a bit of a joke... ?

Is it Musk's approach of making a traditional company and flipping it on its head?
>I posit that a reasonable person (not an HN reader) would infer from a document being only accessible by editing a URL that it was not intended to be publicly accessible.

Do you view 'a HN reader' as a reasonable representation of someone skilled in the art [of creating and serving websites]?

Unless I'm missing something, the only conclusion that I can see following this line of reasoning is that skill in the art is inversely proportional to a person's 'reasonableness' in this matter.

If a quorum of experts are coherently proposing that certain actions are reasonable, even if you find them distasteful, at what point is 'reasonable' no longer reasonable?

For what it's worth, despite sounding like a rhetorical question, I am truly interested to know your thoughts on that last matter.
That's interesting! I had a hell of a time turning off all the nasty intrusive bits for my friends and parents. I should take a look at this version.
Facebook must face class action over facial recognition: U.S. judge
I've been using my bitpay card for over a year to handle every type of payment that you would want to make using fiat money. I know this isn't viable as a total replacement for dollars yet, due to the sometimes wild fluctuations in the price, but that is stabilizing over time. It is reasonable to think that the price of btc will eventually reach a more stable base, as more money (including institutional money) enters the space and options for shorting become more accessible. The NY times writer just didn't do enough research to figure out how to spend bitcoin. It's not that hard. These are early days, and this is still experimental technology, but is becoming more practical by the minute.
Except this teenager was explicitly authorized to access all those files.

He literally asked the web server "can I have these files" and it responded with "yes, you are authorized, here you go".

If he wasn't authorized, the server should have responded with a 403 Forbidden!

Web servers are built around authentication and access rights! It is not the teen's fault that the government doesn't know how to configure them properly.
Busting Two Myths About Paid Prioritization
Google is awful. But so is Facebook. Shifting blame to Google in a discussion about Facebook is a distraction from the problem.
Sure, systems like this have been used at least 15 years by online poker bots. Poker software has some of the strongest anti-cheat systems in the world. The arms race didn't stop there, I know PokerStars moved on to behavior modeling about a decade ago. Now with machine learning being mainstream, mainstream games are starting to do behavior modeling as well. [1][2]

However most games either don't have any anticheats at all, or have very limited ones. Specifically you can run most games under a normal user and run the cheat under an administrator user. Let Windows help hide it.

--

[1] Valve has used deep learning for CSGO https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/

[2] Third parties have done work for Dota 2, with hints of official Valve variants coming as well https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/8816oh/12_of_all_mat...
Yeah, for some reason I'm ambivalent about Gates and always have been. Microsoft hasn't been run by him in a long long time though.
I haven't - thanks.

Writing test harnesses specific to the different tools (so far, just AFL and KLEE) has not been particularly difficult - all of them fit easily on one screen. So I'm not sure that deepstate really brings much to the table for what I'm doing.
SF issues cease and desist order to scooter companies
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger.

I only add the latter because it's separate enough already, and you can now sign up "without" a pre-existing fb account.
Is it similar in function to WhatsApp? Yep, but if we split the company along product lines Messenger should be considered a suitable product.
Sending a packet in response to some other packet is something "a computer does". Back when "ordinary people" thought that witch-dunking was an "ordinary" security measure, "ordinary people" were wrong. Improvements came not when the courts surrendered to ignorance, but when they corrected it.

Very few "ordinary people" would describe websites as "places", anyway. They don't say they're "at" Facebook, they say they're "on" it, much like they could be "on the phone" or "on TV". Maybe this hasn't always been the case, but the courts aren't tied to 1990s-era metaphors. No one on a jury remembers those silly "Welcome to the BatCave, Come on in if you Dare" geocities pages.

Incidentally, Facebook and its ilk hold ordinary people to much more complicated standards of behavior than those to which you and they would hold sites, all the time. Oh, you didn't read all 50 pages of TOS and then update the (hidden) configuration, every week? Silly user, that's why we gave all your data to the English!

Meanwhile, you don't think Facebook should have to understand how HTTP works, just because one person working at the company might not. Interesting, that the benefits go one direction and the duties go the other.
Pixel isn't the only way to embed Facebook on the page mate. Facebook plugins and facebook auth also.
That makes sense to me? Buses are environmentally equivalent to trolleys, cheaper, both have to deal with traffic, etc. In most cases the fact that buses are more flexible is good but inflexibility can sometimes be useful in terms for getting people to believe you're really going to stick with a new route and therefore it makes sense to start a business on it.

Now if they were replacing subways or light rail with buses that would be horrible.
Another huge reason is to prove concept and make sure you're not fooling yourself. If you can get others to put in large amounts, it's an (imperfect) indicator of a kind of traction.

Musk probably doesn't feel like he needs that validation, so the main reasons to take outside money would be leverage and diversification. The downside is some loss of control.
Infinite Sudoku and the Sudoku game
Extra glass of wine a day 'will shorten your life by 30 minutes'
I hope that this would be a boon for transit costs in America which are ridiculous compared to Europe [0].

But part of the problem lies with transit advocates in the US, who think tech and Elon Musk are a threat to transit. [1]

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

1: https://twitter.com/humantransit/status/941386665519595521
Where are you thinking of? Many skytrain stations are either built away from businesses or now have businesses depending on them.
Google’s Facebook Copycat Moves Leave It More Exposed to Privacy Backlash
Unicorns Are Flush with Cash They Didn't Even Ask For
The web server sends a response code with each response.

The best, and most accurate, way of determining if the resource you requested is meant to be accessible, is to check to see if you got a 200 OK response or a 403 Forbidden response.
Company histories asside, someone had to develop a hardened kernel--and they had to be big enough that the client could sue in the event of a problem. Redhat comes to mind, but I honestly can't think of a better company than MSFT to own this (and the associated libility).

It makes terrific financial sense for them to take ownership, liability (and revenues) for a product class their native technology can't compete in.
A capitalist and a laborer who both contribute nothing should expect nothing as a return.

A capitalist who contributes capital should expect investment returns, and a laborer who contributes labor should expect the agreed-upon compensation. Beyond that, the details of who should expect how much come down to supply and demand, of both labor and capital.
Why not just set up two wifi routers? This is surely also the best solution for ensuring data compartmentalization.
A link is not someone giving you permission, it's merely telling you where something else is. I can't think of how you even came to this conclusion. It's like you have this incredibly restricted view of the internet, limited to people clicking on a browser, and think that's enough for protecting files. It's not.

You don't seem to realize how bad of an idea this is. You're talking about making criminals of people. You know, I think I remember once reading about how chrome would try the address you type while you typed it (i.e. before pressing enter, it'd make a request for every character you typed). Users of chrome could become criminals because their software would do this.
If you're frustrated by this story and live in Georgia, USA, you should immediately contact the Governor's office and express your concern and share that he veto a similar bill sitting on his desk, SB 315.

https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action4/common/public/?a...
Is gentrification killing the gay bars in america?
> It's long but the language is far easier than American legalese. The implications depend on your site/service behaviors. An RSS reader is pretty trivial, interactive social media... less so.

Except the GDPR is full of hand-wavy stuff. Who needs a DPO? What is "large scale" in that context? How exactly do you conduct a legitimate interest balancing test? Who is your lead regulator and under what criteria as an American company can you decide?

Also, people have a lot more 3rd party systems than most think. Think transactional mailers, marketing mailers, billing systems, payroll, zendesk, etc.

And even an RSS reader is scary. What if someone follows a series of blogs about HIV treatments, or internal trade union politics? If that means you could infer the person is poz or is a member of that trade union, you now have heightened scrutiny data in your possession.
Yeah, personally, I think Windows for home users is a dying market. My wife and kids use either ChromeOS or OSX. Everything has moved to the web for younger people. Fat client apps are increasingly the exception. Very niche...like "I need Adobe tools, Photoshop, etc".

Office 365 is accelerating that. No need for local Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.
Tesla Temporarily Pauses Production of the Model 3 Sedan Again
The only way to make reasonable business decisions is to think about costs in any company.
I could hear the elevated Bart line at Daly City station two miles away in Colma, where all the graveyards are.
What's your solution then? Are you implying that manual laborers had a better time at any point in history before Amazon existed?
Love this site. Helped me often in my first career as a sysadmin and made me want to write freeware.
Sequential numbers are not obscure. They're commonly used for pagination and collections, to the point where popular browsers have extensions to simplify navigating them.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nextprev-page...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/urlnext/emepkgfiam...
As a maintainer, part of my task is to interface between developers and the code. That generally means responding to submissions somewhat in proportion to the effort the submitter put in.

More importantly, I have benefitted so much from senior devs "wasting time" on me, I am obliged to help others now I'm senior.
This is a great tool. Wish it could work with build workflow tools like Habitus (http://www.habitus.io)
I remember a discussion on HN about Orchid Protocol, where proponents argued that if you route traffic through GCP/AWS China wouldn't dare ban the big american clouds because that would, in effect, ban most of legitimate internet for its citizens, and that would have a net negative effect on its economy and its citizens' well-being.

Russia shows that political will and/or technical incompetence can easily overlook these things.
Why would you?

If they want that permission before loading the page/app, they should ask. If they don't want to annoy their customers, they should wait until they need each permission.
Rather than their Linux distro I think they will do what Google did with Android, that is, making their ecosystem run under the Linux kernel (plus MS services) so that they will save a huge load of money by not having to maintain their own kernel. Think about not having to write drivers for every piece of hardware that gets produced; they would probably just audit and test the code to certify the driver as fully compatible.

This may seem good, but my paranoid half (make it 9/10) thinks they could "hijack" the Linux user base by releasing software certified as Linux compatible that runs only under their Linux, and by being platinum members of the Linux Foundation they could be entitled to say that their Linux is the only true one.
Have you tried shopping around?

https://www.healthcarebluebook.com and a bunch of others are trying to provide price transparency. Sometimes 30 min drive means thousands in savings.
Yeah, Heathrow Express makes sense if you're ending up near Paddington but otherwise I don't really understand it. If there are a couple of you with luggage, get a car and it's door-to-door. Otherwise take the tube and save a bunch of money. I go to London a lot and mostly take the Piccadilly Line or sometimes a cab at off-hours or from inconvenient locations. But I honestly don't understand why the Heathrow Express would be interesting outside of a narrow range of circumstances.
> The onus for keeping computerized material private is on the owner

I don’t think that’s a sensible rule and at the end of the day, it’s not the one that’s going to prevail. The Internet will be sanitized and made safe for all the people who forget their passwords and write them in their monitors. The Internet is for ordinary people now, not curious teenager hackers. And ordinary people will make the rules to suit themselves.
Netflix programming binge pays off with subscriber surge
Kyle Kingsbury/Aphyr's Jepsen distributed DB testing writeups are also a really, really wonderful base for comprehending some of the failings of distributed systems.

https://aphyr.com/tags/Jepsen
https://jepsen.io/analyses
I find Optimage has better lossless compression. I never regretted paying for the full version. https://getoptimage.com
A capitalist who invests indiscriminately (e.g. broadly) today, has a positive expected outcome of this, and that's not a given out of the fundamental theory.

The work a capitalist does, their contribution, isn't just writing checks, it's writing the right checks.
> obviously not intended to be publicly accessible, or else it would have been reachable from some public-facing portion of the site.

Doesn't seem obvious to me. So now I have to check for a specific anchor to a URL to see if a URL is considered publicly accessible?
Your comment reminds me both of a Chomsky opinion piece [1] and a Swift essay [2]. I couldn't agree with you more. The same can be said about 'food shortages' but in that case it's the other way around.

[1] Recognizing the “Unpeople” - https://chomsky.info/20120107-2/

[2] A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
When someone pipes up saying how terrible it is that one company is tracking people on 12% of the top websites in the world, I think it's directly relevant to point out that another one is tracking people on 75% of that same group of sites. The tracking is either an issue or it isn't, regardless of who is doing it. If it isn't, then this is a pointless discussion, and if it is, then clearly this particular discussion should primarily be about Google.

Regardless, it is a moot point because third party tracking is here to stay, even under GDPR - you'll just have another message box to dismiss when browsing. My favorite so far is this one - http://prntscr.com/j67usw . I offered a few ways to slow down that tracking above, but the only true way to not be tracked is to not use the Internet, because none of this even broaches the subject of what data ISPs collect about your behavior.
...or maybe HN was wrong?
blasphemy!
Have you used Windows 10 Server Core, or Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB? There's no data collection in either of those, because they're for serious people.

The Home and Pro editions, meanwhile, are effectively "Xbox OS for PCs." They turn your computer into an entertainment appliance run and maintained by Microsoft itself. Of course they collect data, just like there are data-collection agents on all the nodes of your average production system cluster. When Microsoft is the sysadmin, Microsoft needs to collect ops data.

And, personally, I don't think that's a bad thing, per se. It's a choice you make. You can take control of your PC while still running Windows, if you like. (It's just a big hassle, because truly administering a modern Windows system is a big hassle.)
Are regular mail-order catalogues expected to start doing the same?
> It was always going to be difficult to top the first three books, how many book series are consistently great?

In a similar vein, my anticipation of The Doors of Stone has gone from fervent to uneasy as the years have dragged on...
It's a Bezos thing. The idea is that every day is "Day 1". Just because you or your company has been around for years and years or that you've hit a major milestone, you can't rest on your laurels. You need to approach every day as "Day 1" with regard to your attitude toward innovation and moving quickly.
Should be interesting to see if Fuschia gains some mindshare. Linux is "bloated" by LOC standards, but once you target a specific architecture, the LOC drops dramatically.

The whole LOC drama train is tied to code that doesn't get compiled when you specify the architecture.
This is really funny to see people comparing downloading a file to breaking into an unlocked window.

You guys don't really have a clue on what Internet is.
For those who haven't read it, The Hacker Crackdown was released by Sterling as freeware:

http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html

there are also PDF and epub versions if you google for it.
I understand that viewpoint,and even agree with it mostly on a person to person level, but if the government didn't have these laws why would it be any better. When people tried to negotiate with companies without the states involvement, the companies used violence to try and get their way.

Corporations aren't moral agents and can't be treated as such
Yes, this news is exciting. But right now we're a very long way from curing cancer.

In 50% of the full range of cancer types treated so far by the drug in question, immunotherapy does absolutely nothing. And for another 25% it helps only a little. Only about 25% see a game-changing response. Even then, among high responders, most are not cured. They do live longer than if treated only with chemo. (In this study announcement, there's a 51% better survival rate after one year. That's great for those who are near death. But it offers them additional months of life, not decades.)

As of today, the fraction of patients who are fully cured of cancer by immunotherapy is unhappily small. It's also important to remember that these therapies are too new for us to know how long the positive effects will last. Will the lucky ones add months or years to their lives? We don't know. As of today it's just too soon to tell.

I do agree that the potential of treating cancer using the immune system is exciting. Certainly. But right now we're nowhere near able to declare victory or start worrying about the implications of ending cancer. That's not fair to the unlucky majority of cancer patients.
In virtue of the fact that a system of law has established and enforces property rights, even at the expense of others labor.
Check out the cancer.gov page[1], which does a decent job of giving an overview. The drug in question, pembrolizumab, is a monoclonal antibody (you can tell because the name ends with '-mab'), and you can read more about how those work on this page[2].

[1] https://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatments-and-side-effects...

[2] https://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatments-and-side-effects...
The levels of security:

1) Formal methods and cryptography

2) Obfuscation

3) Litigation

Looks like they chose the latter.
I can see where you're coming from but you're also describing the purpose of an API, documented or not. Ultimately, if you want to secure the boundaries of your property (whether that's your app or your domain or your honest to god physical land) it's up to you. If you find yourself in the position where other people are revealing information you or your company should have protected then you are accountable. You have to be accountable. The guy who found the problem or abused it is not accountable.
He's CTO of Azure and therefore a VIP at Microsoft...

In his spare time he's also managed to write three novels.
Mostly goofing with you. But it is kind of crazy to think 20 years ago, nobody knew about a thing called "Google".
Given the numerous articles about documents inadvertently being exposed through URL ID incrementing, clearly response codes do not accurately convey what people meant.
I can appreciate that argument, and I agree with you, but I don't think that's the argument you made in your original comment. It's a good one, though.
Amazon already asked Zello, another banned communication app, to stop using their servers to circumvent the Russian ban.

Can't see why they wouldn't shy away here as well.
IANAL, but I think it depends on what data they collect.

Part of running any advertising business is accurately billing the advertisers. To do that, they need to measure enough information to track viewed impressions, click-through rate, etc.

If they collect only enough information to perform business functions like these, I believe that would constitute a legal basis for processing under the GDPR.

They may have a harder time using that justification for information that is only needed for ad targeting. In that case, consent may be an easier legal basis for them to establish, for which an account would be useful.