skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found the US crackdown on online poker fascinating and disturbing in this regard. The poker sites were operating in offshore locations and abiding all local rules and regulations. The US then passed some laws stating that US players could not play online poker after extensive lobbying from local casino interests. These sites did not overtly stop US players from playing. And they were careful to keep all interactions with the US separated from themselves. For instance they did not handle financial interactions with US players or banks - instead it was all done through independent third parties.

Regardless the US decided to 'bring em democracy' which in this case translated to seizing their domains, freezing assets in banks worldwide, and staging arrests in all nations with extradition treaties. This cooperation by banks was quite surprising and disturbing, but I suppose the US is in a position to make them an offer they can't refuse. It's unclear if the EU would go the 'Team Merica' route, but we're increasingly deciding that laws are no longer constrained to borders.
The Great Amazon Reef six times larger than previously thought
This post will be illegal in a month and fault will be with hacker news: 91.253.39.120

Doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.
Yes, so much so that I would not call it a spin-off, rather one of the main tasks that people building quantum computing hardware are dealing with.

Entanglement is one of the main phenomena that permit quantum hardware to do things infeasible on classical hardware. In the context of communication it permits quantum key distribution, whose security depends only on quantum mechanics being a not-too-wrong description of nature (while classical schemes depend on less tested computational complexity conjectures). In the context of computing, it is an integral component of many of the "fault-tolerant error correcting" schemes, necessary in order to protect the extremely fragile qubits (similar to what ECC RAM does for classical computing).

In the context of sensing, it does permit some cool unbelievably sensitive detectors (the case discussed in the article), but it is only one of the avenues of intense research.
> Actually, if I could have Photoshop run in a browser, with its full feature set, and running at >90% of full native speed, that would be pretty awesome.

You won't get in the same universe as that until the web grows real threading support. Not this no-shared-data, ultra expensive, ultra heavy webworker nonsense.

Given SharedArrayBuffer seems to be un-shippable now due to Spectre, the planned future of WASM's threading seems uncertain. And without that WASM seems rather pointless to be honest. You just can't compete with native at anything compute when you can't use 80%+ of the CPU.
Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on Earth Before Ours?
I work at a small company that non the less deliver EDRMS system to a large part of the public sector. GDPR is intentionally vague, and most of it seems to be that you have to show reasonable effort. The backup problem require some additional logic and procedure, but that is the least of the problems.

One of my main issues with GDPR is the increased Red Tape. If I need customer data for whatever reason, extract data and deliver to Risarkivet (required by law every now and then), I must get a Data Processor Agreement. Fair enough, except if I need to do a different thing the customer asks me for, I need a new DPA. Only thing that'll happen is that we have a standard made by Datatilsynet, put in customer details and job detail, and that is it. A mail provides exactly the same, it could even reference the standard DPA. That just isn't accepted by the law. I guess middle managers need something to do as well.
It's not a shell script that you will write each time a user asks for a deletion though, would it? It will be a carefully tested and automated procedure.

It certainly sounds like the possibility of deleting all your users might actually make us all more careful, less gun-slinging, shoot-from-the-hip programmers.
Yep, this was billed as an experiment - results should have been produced, regardless of scientific merit.
Do you have any european contacts on your mobile phone? Hope you have consent for those. We’re at this level of inconvenience.
The BRAIN initiative started after the proposal of the Human Brain Project. The Human Brain Project also followed the Blue Brain Project, which was started in 2005. Leaving criticism of the HBP aside - it would be wrong to put it as if the HBP is the "European answer" to the BRAIN initiative.
While it is true that quantum is used a lot as a buzzword, here it is used in its literal scientific sense. And it is an exciting technology that has taken a lot of effort to be created that does not deserve such knee-jerk derisiveness.
Shameful veterans benefits doesn’t cover this. Clearly, if enough of these surgeries are done, the cost then will come down.
They don't use this data currently. It's a hedge against the day when firefox and safari start including something like uBlock by default.
Licensing is quite cheap compared to other commercial products in the same league.

I find it quite acceptable.

- Willing to give your work for free the same way as taking Qt's work? No problem, LGPL has you covered.

- No issues with dynamic linking, still wanting to use the work of others for free? No problem, LGPL has you covered.

- What to sell it for lots of cash? Then give the Qt guys a piece of the cake back and be happy they still exist.

I wonder what are the nice parts of JS web dev, collecting new frameworks and build tools every week, or functions as packages?

In fact I am pretty opinionated that some of the new UI goodies are only exposed via QML, which wouldn't be a problem if people stopped writing logic there.
I was extremely bored this evening, so I went looking for similar trips on European trains. I found a trip in May from Lisbon to Warsaw. Like the Chicago to Portland route on Amtrak, it's about 2000 miles and 42 hours. It has 6 transfers, including a 4 hour transfer from 10pm to 2am (ouch), and a few hours later a two hour transfer from 3am to 5am (very ouch). Only one of the trains has actual sleeping compartments. To match Amtrak I choose a private 2-bunk compartment on that train. I picked 1st class fully-refundable tickets on all 6 trains, again to match Amtrak. I've no idea if any of these trains have a dining car; I did see a photo of some vending machines. On the other hand, a ticket in a sleeper on Amtrak includes three meals a day.

The resulting price was $1067 for a one-way trip (the site couldn't find any return tickets). So even the high-priced $2000 ticket you saw doesn't seem that bad; that's the same cost as a trip of similar length in Europe.
* Take Backup 1 which contains users A,B and C.

* User A requests to be deleted and is from prod.

* Deploy bad code between backup 1 and 2 - oh noes prod is corrupted!

* Restore backup 1, which restores user A

So - how doesn't this work for GDPR?
I just have "NetworkError" for all of them.
I think the user mostly cares about his connection to anything outside his network (e.g. for public WiFis).
I can't help but think of the series Grey's Anatomy, where most surgeons would be more than happy to scrub in on a chance like this, maybe even pay for the privilege.
Part of the problem is that as the size of the database grows -- i.e., as every police encounter turns into a mandatory sample collection -- the false-positive rate will also go up.

Remember: DNA "matches" are probabilistic, and most of their utility has been based on the low probability of a sample taken from a crime scene "matching" a sample taken from a suspect. Prosecutors (committing the prosecutor's fallacy, of course) love to tout the "one in a billion" type statistics for a match being a false positive, but it doesn't take a very large database at all for "one in a billion" coincidences to start occurring.
Unfortunately I’m in the same boat. Love sonic as a company but they hiked the price of DSL up to the same as 60mbps Comcast. It’s getting harder to justify it. I’ll probably swallow my pride and switch to comcast soon.

I don’t think they’re doing this to push customers to fiber. I would gladly pay for fiber. It’s just not available. They’re doing it to fund the build out.

I just have no idea if it’s coming my way. I’d rather they raise investment capital to fund the buildout.
The nixie tube one is interesting because the guy was attempting to reboot commercial tube making. I wonder how he fared, is he still in business? Doesn't seem to have posted any new videos.
The Right To Be Forgotten is a reaction to how easy it is to search for information. If I happen to be in a newspaper 5 years ago, you'd had to spend a serious amount of time to find it. With the internet you can just search and get it in a few seconds.

> only the people who opted to be forgotten benefit

That is not true. One of the main points of GDPR is that you only store data as long as it is reasonable for your business. If I haven't been a customer at a store for 5 years, I can fully expect that my data has been deleted. How long reasonable is will be determined in the court, but I expect it is going to be in the customers favor.
I actually don't want to pay anyone monthly.

But I really like the Blendle model and would be happy to pay more through them if more relevant content (including blogs in my case) becomes available and easy to access:

It is pay-per-view but reasonably priced and with reasonable (last I checked) refunds if you happen to click on some clickbait.

I also like Spotify but I think Blendle has a better business model, at least for text.

What I like: Authors get paid for the stuff I read. The more I read the more I pay. It doesn't drain my account when I don't use it.
> While I'd love to say I sympathise, I do not. The end goal is not to make life easy for small businesses. The end goal is protecting the consumer.

I understand your sentiment, but I think dismissing the issue of barrier to entries for small businesses is very shortsighted. Remember that excessive consolidation in the Internet industry is what led to the wholesale violation of consumer's privacy in the first place. So enforcing stricter data handling rules and protecting small businesses's ability to compete are two sides of the same coin. To truly protect consumers in the long run, regulators need to address both issues in a comprehensive way.
This makes no sense. Why would understaffed EU prosecutors comb through hundreds of small companies instead of going for big headline grabbing companies they could levy giant sums of money from in the revenue-% based fines? This thinking is upside down.

There are also some relaxed rules in GDPR for SMEs also.
> the more fundamental question remains how can we achieve human welfare in a world where informed democracy is an illusion?

I think the way is to change the incentives. People in our society have various skills and abilities. Some of them are highly skilled at accumulating influence. They use that influence to get wealth. Then they leverage the wealth for more influence. Our society is structured to move those people into positions of greater and greater influence and wealth. And those without such skills are marginalized and suffer.

I think a democratic society with pure socialism would not suffer from this problem. It would contain people who are good at accumulating influence, but they could not use that influence to gain more money (to leverage for more influence). Without the power-multiplying effects of wealth accumulation, influencers would be limited in their reach. That society would be less likely to develop an upper class with disproportionate power, nor marginalized middle and lower classes.
Games devs have aversion to the FOSS culture.

It doesn't play ball with IP business and NDA rules that are common place in the industry.
While sane, it has the drawbacks of similar experimental designs : wouldn't UBI distributed to everyone have other effects on the unemployed than UBI to 2k unemployed?
id Software used finger heavily during the 90s with regular .plan updates.

There's an archive of John Carmack's .plan files here:

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive
most people use podcasts through an app, not by adding the RSS feed to their RSS reader.

When people talk about RSS being dead, they mean the consumer usage, and not about how it powers other things behind the scenes.
If backups are now live data you need to backup the backups. What happens if the procedure bugs out? It’s backups and scripts all the way down.
KIA and Hyundai win at the International level in racing and or rallying. That is still the key to selling cars. Ask Mercedes, ask Ferrari, or even Ford. As the saying goes; Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday .

I know I'm Old school, and some day in the Future self-driving cars MAY dominate the highways... but (thankfully) that day is not today.
Would you be willing to release the code for this? I'd like to run one myself.
I'd argue that the industry tends to swing between larger venture startups to constellations of smaller 'lifestyle'/bootstrapped businesses as technology shifts, in cycles.

The VC capital flows in when there are hard and expensive problems to solve in emerging tech spaces that need a lot of innovation or heavy lifting and, hence, financial runway to survive.

When the tech in the space gets cheaper, the cow paths have been paved and the tech becomes more accessible, it becomes more viable to bootstrap your way into the market. The get rich quick gold rush starts and then everyone floods in to find niches in the market they can fill on their own.

Eventually the bootstrapped businesses fill all the niches they can, the market becomes saturated and it's no longer lucrative or easy to bootstrap in that space. And the cycle begins again
Yeah, right.

"I don't want to pay for software, so here take a bloated browser as fake native app".
Cyber Attack on Careem: Data of 14M Customers Were Stolen TechyTalk
That is what i was thinking pretty much. Maybe that is what needs to happen.
"The agile methodology" doesn't really make claims about what a specific group of people need to do.

It's a tool/methodology that can help you increase quality.

If quality isn't a priority, a methodology that helps to better align your work with your priorities isn't going to improve quality.
For a public company, sure. How would you find company officers of private offshore companies located in Cayman/Seychelles/BVI?
When you own a $1m home, you cease to be “regular.”
Actually European cities have really shitty air becausr of all the diesels. Thay can't be outlawed soon enough.
If US companies take that route, that would give fledgling EU startups that have no choice but to comply with GDPR from day one a nice little moat around a market of half a billion people. (And cause the survivors to come stronger out of it, unlike most protectionist-type measures.)

Now let's try to figure out that tricky backup problem!
This argument is of the "we can't solve the problem completely, so let's do nothing about it" kind. The abuse is happening from both camps and we all know it, especially here on HN where some of us are actively developing user-tracking schemes and ad-targeting platforms for a living.
GDPR allows you to ask reasonably. Repeated attempts to overwhelm the target are not allowed.
No, it is actually quite cheap.

Usually software licenses for commercial development tools have a few more zeros, or not even that, forcing one to schedule a meeting with their sales people.

Before the FOSS movement, startups somehow managed to pay for their software.
Off the top of my head, my recollection is that lung transplants cost a cool half million on average in the year they occur, plus add ongoing expenses to care for the rest of your life.

An article I googled earlier suggests similar costs for other transplant surgeries: http://www.nationalkidneycenter.org/treatment-options/transp...

The figures given in this article don't appear particularly more than or out of line with other, more established transplant surgeries.
Feel free to come make some friends in #perl6 on Freenode!
Your procedure should include what to do with the deleted users when you backup. You'd have to keep logs of it anyway. Trivial problem to solve.
It would be good to mention operational transformation for managing changes between collaborators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

Quill editor has a pretty good implementation of this called “Delta” that I’ve used to build something similar before.

https://quilljs.com

Not to mention Quill is a great library overall!
Whilst not an open blog platform, CmdrTaco of Slashdot claims his Slashdot prototype 'Chips and Dips' which he created in 1997, was one of the first 'blogs'.
Used PHP in a Hackathon was made fun of and it made me feel really shitty
Laws about abortions, bathrooms, access to the social net, etc.
I joined a startup directly from college and only worked at small (3-4 people) companies for the first 3 years of my career. Going from that to a ~250 people organization, when I joined, I figured "Software Engineer" was a good role, but it turned out everyone was surprised that I wasn't a "Senior Software Engineer".

Even though I basically designed and coded the entire data layer of the platform, maintain and administer the entire pipeline (including the production databases), am on call any time anything goes wrong, my title was only very recently changed to "Senior Software Engineer" - and it was independent from any increase in salary, which didn't happen. The title change was also "promised" to me for a few months after appraisal - presumably to retain me.

It's all weird but strangely, it had started to grate on me the last year that despite all the critical work I did, the salary and position did not reflect it at all. Still doesn't.
"The vast majority of internet services" I haven't seen a single service preparing to explicitly tell EU users to go somewhere else, except random comments on HN claiming so. Also the EU economy is about the size of the US so can't easily be ignored fortunately.

Also, why does a company or anyone else "own" personally identifiable information in the first place? The logic is completely inverted and we seem to have all been OK with it in the first place. Why does a company like Facebook "own" what is mine from the beginning — is it just because it is in a row in their database? Is it because I once clicked OK on a TOS? Now I can revoke this consent and Facebook and others have to comply. Previously they could just tell me to FO. Sounds like a great win for users!
It will probably be an SQL query and if software development has thought us anything is that testing is not enough. Proper testing can be very helpful and prevent many errors but it can never prevent all because you just cannot test for all circumstances. This is why backups are helpful and why backups should not be changeable. It is a reason why backups were made on magnetic tab back in the day so it wouldn’t be overridden by mistake. Backups were just as important back when programming wasn’t all about that fast iterating and push updates and fix later – or gun-slinging programming as you call it – as they are now.
I believe GDPR is like a pre-annoucement of GFoC but for Europeans.
So your proposal is a return to the status quo ante and unlimited exploitation of users? Not good enough. I will take the imperfect good of the GDPR as an incremental improvement over the option of abject surrender.
Follow up question if anyone feels like speculating, can GDPR compliance be used as a stick when intelligence agencies and law enforcement are looking to collect information on individuals? "Now that all your user information is definitely queryable give us everything you have"?

I generally feel positive about the law but I'm curious how this feels from a position of paranoia. (Very tangential followup this is just the first time I've seen intelligence agencies and GDPR mentioned at the same time).
You can't look only at track record. Afaik they have an unreasonable amount of infantry for purely defensive purposes. They're #3 globally in terms of firepower, of course they won't create trouble until they're reasonably sure they'll come out ahead. Once they're more powerful economically and militarily you'll have a an unscrupulous nation, with a dictator for life, capable of very long-term planning, leading a pretty explicitly racist people in need of massive amounts of natural resources.

So yeah, even though they're not currently adventurous militarily, I wouldn't count on that being the case forever.
I'd recommend checking out the article and other reading on PRISM. PRISM is operated by the NSA and involves egregious breaches of personal privacy including bulk collection of loosely targeted data, warrantless data retrieval in some instances, the collection and use of "inadvertently collected data" and more. This entire period of extreme surveillance and secret courts, which are in effect kangaroo courts, will likely be looked at in the history books similar to how you look at things like the Stasi. Keep in mind that the Stasi was founded in 1950 and prosecutions only began once East Germany fell, some 40 years later.
Is it me or is BBC's feed outdated or broken?
I would say that's not RSS winning, but more like Ars Technica adding many "premium features" as a bundle to justify the subscription fee.

It's like NYTimes providing crossword puzzle for free to subscribed users. You wouldn't call that "It's the perfect time for a crossword puzzle renaissance", would you?
It's more like having an interface to the voice controls of your phone without your phone being nearby and unlocked. We use it to control lights and media, and we ask it the weather. Nothing works reliably. The Uber integration is clunky and now gives us a generic error.
How would you propose we do both simultaneously, though? All else being equal, I'd very much want to have both. I try to avoid big companies in all kinds of walks of life. But if I have to choose between the two options, I'd very much choose the GDPR way.
ITER started as an equal partnership between EU, US, USSR (yep, not Russia) and Japan.
It is insanely expensive, but I wouldn't consider it a Europe-specific madness.
They often have quality content.
I'm familiar with the European Molecular Biology Lab [1] (worked there), which is one of the best research centres in cell and molecular biology as well as bioinformatics in the world. The only real prerequisite for working there is excellence. It seems like this new AI proposal is modeled after the EMBL model, with one headquarter and several other locations around Europe. At least in the case of the EMBL, it worked incredibly well and created a great joint European atmosphere which really motivated everyone to do their best.

Obviously, there is currently much more money in AI in the industry, so I guess it will be hard for such a research centre to compete with industry. The wage differential between biotech industry and EMBL is much less than that of a hypothetical EAIL and the software industry.

[1] https://www.embl.org/
> Well what about backups? Do you retroactively go through your backups and remove R2BF users?

Good one, hadn't even though of this. I planned on my VPN provider handling off-site backups for me, but this would mean I'm unable to delete a use from backups.

Does anybody have a solid solution for this?
I think that any startup that allows EU traffic to access its services is going to be a tough sell to investors in a GDPR world. Who wants to put, say $1 million, into a startup that could easily be fined that amount or more for inadvertent violations? There's a whole other world of markets out there and only one that imposes this risk on companies. GDPR just introduces too much risk, even for those companies with the best of intentions.
Kaspersky's analysis of servers compromised by #EnergeticBear