skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Searching for 'China internet percentage' shows several sites claiming ~50%, so double the ratio to ~0.5, or 10 times less than the USA.
I think this is a very distinct difference between the EU with the scaremongering removed, and e.g. the US: My experience of the EU has been that they've consistently looked out for my interests. Even in the face of the local government (I live in the UK) that have kept fighting for positions I find abhorrent (e.g. UK governments keep complaining about having to abide by EU human rights regulations for example).

Yes, we shouldn't aim to give governments power to push things to an extreme, but on the other hand we should also ensure that they have the ability to actually react to serious abuses.

In particularly in the area of data protection, I don't know of a single example where the rules have been pushed to the extreme. If anything, as a private citizen I'm disappointed there's not been stricter enforcement. As someone who has had to deal with it on the corporate side as well, it's not been hard to comply with.

Enforcement here is generally always strongly predicated on not jumping straight to the strictest possible outcome, but in carefully considering how serious a transgression is. It's not that EU systems are inherently good, but that history and practice have shown that when they give flexibility, it takes serious abuses and ill intent to end up with the strictest reactions allowed, and there'd also be little reason to assume that anyone rushing to the strictest interpretations possible wouldn't get shut down hard by the courts.
Generators require a mind switch to be used regularly. And the browser is not the place where the most obvious use cases are, so it's harder to make your first steps here.

The easiest things to start using generators is to write sysadmin scripts that parse big files. Once you've done that, you get the memory benefit. Then the more you use it, the more you get the lazy evaluation benefit and you start using it elsewhere.

It's clearer in Python because:

- generators have there for ever

- we have unified way of iterating on things, and generators just work transparently

- you can start learning generators by just changing [] to () in your comprehension lists

So in JS it's much less obvious.
We are repeatedly finding ways to hack general human perception the same way we can hack AI neural network perceptions. It's all very well pointing and laughing at the way we can construct pathological data: 'look, here's two pictures of a kitty, but the AI thinks the second one is an emu and can't be convinced otherwise!'

And then it turns out we're very much in the same boat.
I only hear needle and I'm a Laurel guy. It's mind boggling.
I don't know about them, but I agree with questioning your original comment, based on 17 years of dealing with data protection issues in the UK and other EU countries.
I've played a number or game that replaces your hand with the object you're using. Or hell, most of the time you see the vive controllers and not hands in place of your own.
FOI laws apply to governments, not corporations.

And yes, civil servants did use those arguments to try and stop FOI. They lost because ultimately they pay themselves out of tax revenues, and when you force people to buy something the bar for denying them information about how that money is used is a lot higher.

This doesn't apply in the case of companies and especially not job candidates.
The dirty secret of machine learning is it's 20% model building, 80% plumbing.
I wonder if Elon deliberately blew up Zuck's satellite.
If you don't have a talent pool, one should remove all candidate data after rejection. It's probably better to outsource talent pools.
Not an alternative - but the only obvious defence is to do the right thing, and delete data as soon as you have completed processing. e.g. delete those interview notes the second you have declined the candidate.
Law is by its nature open to interpretation and based on precedent. Otherwise there wouldn't be courts of appeal and supreme courts. What's so special about GDPR that makes you think it will be abused more than other laws?
Yes, and it is not that hard a read. The only problems people seem to be having are in trying to finesse the rules to avoid looking after data with due diligence. If you really want to look after data, then you just need to do that, and you will be compliant.
Exactly, I don't care. Not if if the trade-off is being tracked or advertised to.

If that happens with a service I'm already paying for, they get dropped entirely.

It's not my problem how the company chooses to go forward with its product and I honestly don't care. There are alternatives to most things out there.
>I am also slowly but surely deleting content from my account. Deleting old content, deleting likes and whatnot.

I would have likely stayed on the platform if there was an easy way to do this. One of my biggest concerns wasn't just Facebook analysing my data, but allowing others to access it indiscriminately and I wanted a way to delete it.

There's no API functionality to delete/untag/unlike anything. Timeline is a mess, there's no bulk delete option or option to even select multiple/all. No "delete after X days" feature. In the end I spent 3x12 hour shifts writing a python script using image processing to find delete buttons in timeline and go through the motions to delete everything. It took about 3 hours for me to write/debug/test 300 lines of spaghetti python and another 30 or so for it to go through everything and try to delete. All of which should have been doable in <30 lines, a single API call, or by just hitting ctrl+a and delete. I deleted my account afterwards mainly out of spite.

Considering how politicians are already getting stung by things they posted to FB/Twitter in their teens here in the UK it is absolutely incomprehensible to me how Facebook doesn't have half decent delete functionality.
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And if you are a small/medium business, don't comply and somehow are reported, you will receive an email from the regalutory instance of the country the person who reported you come from. They will tell you what is wrong and point you to some articles who can give you advices on how to comply. If you have difficulty to do so, you can contact them and ask specific advices, they will respond (probably a bit late) and as long as you comply with the RGPD within a month after that, you're good.

Audit can take some time and have a real impact on your business though, so i'm not saying everything is perfect. But to me, audit is the only thing you have to be really afraid of, not fines.
The important point to be made is that the "simpler" tasks will be automated early, pushing human required labour to generally be smarter and better educated.

There are only so many people for any required value of "smart".
The historical human computers in the article required less education and base intelligence than the mathematicians that are employed today.*

Sooner or later a significant segment of the population will simply not be able to train to most tasks that still require human labour. And slowly (or quickly) that bar will rise.
When I hire and train people I simply need a certain baseline mental capacity, otherwise they will never get good enough to keep, no matter how long they train.

*) Note though that this does not mean they necessarily were less intelligent than the modern work force.
I'm not certain about the other memberstates but to my knowledge the privacy law hasn't changed that much. There is a good increase in the amount of generating an audit log of any privacy sensitive stuff you do and of course the various "Right to be *" variants but those are largely non-issues.

German courts already considered a EULA or "check box to consent and get thing" a non-binding consent (to some extend).

Largely, if you are running afoul the GDPR in germany there is basically two options A) you rely on adsense a lot and B) you ran afoul the previous laws already.

So, overall, I would say that yeah, most of the stuff forbidden by the GDPR was already forbidden. The GDPR grants you new rights and requires corporations to ensure compliance however, that's new.

Plus the teeth in form of pretty hefty fine limits. Which is good IMO.
When I was playing around with that about ten years ago you could triangulate the position using multiple towers to narrow it down to a radius of a few dozen meters. It depends of course on the density of towers around the phone.
Geolocation, IP Lookup etc. You generally shouldn't care whether they're a resident in the EU, but just whether they are in EU or not. Remember GDPR doesn't cover any citizens from EU who aren't in EU.
I would love to see some pictures of this, any chance he would share some?
And the author of this article, who was also very active in the same thread hasn't made up his mind?
A few years from now I predict people will deny that the EU had anything to do with instigating this, the way people often insist the manufacturers just suddenly decided USB charging was the way to go and ignore that it first happened after the EU threatened them.
There is an exemption for vexacious or disproportionately costly requests, so once everything has settled down and it is clear how the regulators deal with complaints, then it should work out ok.
Fair point about it being public bodies. But my point stands in terms of abuse of the system - the deluge didn't happen.
> The FBI was granted a search warrant by a judge based on evidence they presented. At the very least this is a process that involves multiple branches of the government.

I'm not sure why that is a justification. The Chinese security services clearly got the authority to act as they did to. It doesn't make it right.
I still believe it’s possible and even likely that there are aspects of our universe that are totally undiscovered, much like radio was a thing no one knew about until it was discovered. It seems reasonable to me that we might discover ways to create gravity on demand, or to contort spacetime in other ways using electrical devices. Any of this would upend our understanding of physics to a large degree. But nothing will falsify existing observations - apples will always fall from apple trees. That doesn’t mean there can’t be more out there.
Have you been running a socially controversial business? That's where the specifics of the law start to really matter. The butcher, baker and candlestick maker have little to fear from the most badly drafted of laws; it's the person running a skate park or gay bar in a small town who tends to be on the sharp end.
Towards built-in sharding for PostgreSQL
> The regulators have been running for two decades,

Exactly 4 decades in France (it started in 1978).
Yeah, I don't understand why so many people keep trying to write control-flow to FPGA compilers. The only way these things are going to be practical is if you understand how both FPGAs and the compiler work really well, and then write control-flow code in a really specific way that the compiler can handle. At which point you'd be better off using a tool that can model what you want directly.

The more useful way to write hardware using programming languages is to create a model of hardware and then use the language features to manipulate that model, and use it to create abstractions for actual hardware patterns.
EU residents in the EU, EU citizens worldwide.
Outsourcing your talent pools - literally the future of your company - would be an extreme step just to ensure GDPR compliance.
That Varonis link gets posted quite a bit, but it drastically over simplifies things and even tries to poke fun at some aspects of the legislation. The ICO site is a much better read for this.
But that's purely your own opinion.

I do have some direct experience of working with EU data protection regulators. My experience has been that they vary wildly in "reasonableness". UK ICO is pretty OK, they want companies to succeed. France's CNIL is a joke. Petty, spiteful and utterly inconsistent. I watched as a company worked closely with them to get their sign-off on a change to their terms of service and privacy policy. CNIL were happy to be involved and taken so seriously, they were satisfied with the changes and even praised them in private. After the company announced the change, some journalists saw an opportunity to make some noise and did so. CNIL then immediately changed their mind and dished out a fine, despite having previously agreed to it. What a farce.

That's at the national level. I can give many examples of cases where the EU has been anything but reasonable.

The entire argument Jaques presents here boils down to his belief that everyone working in GDPR enforcement in the EU will not only be totally predictable and reasonable today but also going forward into the indefinite future.

As pointed out in the other thread, this belief is itself unreasonable, because the nature of the GDPR means that even in the unlikely even it's true today, if in 10 years a new Commission arrives and changes their mind they can retroactively decide that things previously allowed were actually illegal. The GDPR says virtually nothing about anything so they'd certainly argue such a thing was merely a "clarification" and not a retroactive change to the law.

There are plenty of examples of governments doing this sort of thing over time, including the EU, like with Apple's tax situation. Mr Mattheij appears to just write this possibility off entirely.
It's especially hard for a small sized business where all your clients are either departments of the government or leasing companies.
> you also need a privacy policy if you are receiving phone calls. did you know that?

You mean your website needs to have a note next to your phone number saying something like "we will not record your phone calls", and if there isn't, you're liable to be fined?
You seem to have misunderstood my comment. I was saying that from a legal complience perspective, the notion that the regulatary body is "good-natured" is meaningless. You have to comply with ever letter of the GDPR, you can't just do most of it, or interpret it loosely, and say "oh but they are good-natured people they will understand.". Legal complience doesn't work like that AT ALL!
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We (in the US) live in a culture of white supremacy, where the state has a "monopoly on violence". So it makes sense that any non-white-male would have some kind of history, whether individually or as a member of a group, of violent oppression by a member, or members, of the dominant group.

It is unfortunate that the authors seem to be tip-toeing around white supremacy, and instead choose to invent a new term like "victimhood culture" to neatly label what is actually a wide-ranging and diverse counter-cultural movement.

Their stance could almost come across as sympathetic to this movement. Instead, they end with "And finally, it’s important to combat victimhood culture and to deal with the problems it creates ...".

To me this reeks of the same old white privilege and condescension that have led our society to this point. We desperately need to address the dominant culture and the problems it has created and continues to create, the latest of which appears to be this book.

Labeling the dominant culture a "dignity culture" is, at this moment in history, beyond the pale.
That's the UK's straight-forward unequivocal explanation of the rules. Where there is room for interpretation or uncertainty, the ICO is very good at pointing this out. It doesn't here.

As poisan42 points out - it echoes the words in the actual article, directly.

Bottom line, he doesn't need a DPO.
The GDPR hysteria demonstrates that:

1. Many people (even "rational hacker-types" ha-ha!) do not take the time to research, analyze or understand the regulations and laws that affect them.

2. Many people, even though they don't understand said regulations, will have an extreme negative reaction to the new regulation especially when they see big scary numbers like numbers like "$20M Euro". This is true even of regulations like the GDPR which most anybody should be able to read and understand in a couple of hours.

3. Many people don't understand where regulations come from or how they work. They have no understanding of scope, process, judegement criteria or enforcement vectors. This leads to terrifying visions of "EU cops" waiting at airports to arrest people the moment they get off the plane.

Frankly, the whole situation speaks to the profound ignorance and fear that lies at the heart of the modern nation state. Citizens do not understand the government, they have no understanding of how or why it does what it does, all they really understand is that the government can and will completely ruin them should they violate one the tens of thousands of laws and rules and regulations and decrees that modern governments impose on their domains.

This ignorance has real consequences and costs. You can see this now particularly in Britain where many people are now learning how their country actually works after voting to tear down their current regulatory and economic framework. But you can also see it in all the fear and the moaning and the teeth gnashing every time some new regulation is proposed. (The funny thing here is that even the most hardcore libertarian economists are coming to understand that regulation does not impede economic growth [1]. Indeed there's ample evidence that regulation, by imposing best practices on firms and increasing trust within the market, is a significant driver of economic growth.)

The reason I point this out on HN is because I think, at the end of the day, being an entrepreneur or an investor is all about learning how the world really works and then changing the world to work for you. And while most people can perhaps afford to plod along with all sorts of misguided notions about how the world works because their jobs do not require them to have any real understanding of the big picture, entrepeneurs and investors absolutely cannot. Buffet says it best: "Risk is not knowing what you're doing." The sites shutting down in the face of the GDPR out of fear and ignorance are making the most basic mistake, they literally do not know what they're doing.

[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/fe...
Good work! Have a cookie.
> • The GDPR will enable anybody to be able to sue me, even from abroad

> The GDPR does not have this effect, but you may be interested to know that anybody can sue you or your business for whatever reason strikes their fancy. This is a direct consequence of doing business and has nothing to do with a particular law. What the GDPR allows private individuals to do is to contact their regulators and to complain if you decide to ignore their requests.

That's not exactly correct. Art. 79 of the GDPR allows people to sue directly for violations of GDPR although it's very non-specific.
The DPA (Datatilsynet) in Denmark operates in the exact way stated in the article. I've fairly sure it's the same in Sweden, Germany, UK, and most of the EU. It is in stark contrast to the US.

I'm not going to link cases, because they're in Danish. They are available from their webpage, and the most resent ones are linked on the frontpage. The last few cases large companies was not in compliance and the didn't get a fine, but they are expected to address the issues, and if they don't then they will get a fine.
There are certainly allot large organisations that need a DPO, all these companies will compete on a small number of DPO candidates.

How are they suppose to fill the positions by 25th of May?
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Right, I was on desktop, but I missed that the link above was to the mobile version (m.facebook), which did not had the login popover, which is very annoying on the desktop version.
Your argument is that there is no case law so you get to claim whatever imaginary consequence you want. That’s fine but then other people may debate your conclusions.

You’re also claiming people are rightfully concerned. Where is that right coming from? From past experience? Or is they just baseless concerns?
Great article! Thanks for posting.
It is, but in a vague way, see article 83[0], where to choose what fine to apply you must consider, amongst other things:

(f) the degree of cooperation with the supervisory authority, in order to remedy the infringement and mitigate the possible adverse effects of the infringement

If an authority did not go this way any fine could be voided by an appeal.

[0] http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-5419-2016-IN...
I also don't understand this reaction, because the guy is the developer of a chat program. It seems that if you encrypt communications and user data and do not sell personal data to third parties, then you comply with the GDPR. I don't see where those bureaucratic hoops come into play this developer is bemoaning.
Full out socialism is and has always been based on earning wages by working. The UBI is very much the opposite of socialism in this regard.
Sure, it wasn't consistent, but the argument about lack of enforcement really comes down to the national regulators not taking their jobs seriously enough or being given sufficient resources. The ICO in the UK has only ever issued pretty small beer fines.

The problem with self-regulation in this area is that there is significant competitive advantage to be gained by not being particularly careful. In that sense, I think GDPR evens the playing field.
Some do and create value can be enough for a startup.
You are transposing your like of certain EU institutions (human rights regulations) and grafting them onto this legislation. This isn't how it works, not least because there has been no case-law yet, so we have no idea how it will be interpreted. Therefore a legal compliance unit has no choice but to follow GDPR the letter, which is hugely difficult and bureaucratic. The notion that they are "good-natured" is meaningless in a legal sense.

It seems many commentators here are confusing criticism of the GDPR with criticism of the EU itself. Surely people are sophisticated enough to understand that they are 2 hugely different things, and that a robust criticism of regulations and laws are part of a healthy democratic society.
> The key question is what happens if you break those laws. In most cases you will be given a fine, and if you don't pay then you will no longer be allowed to sell goods to consumers in that country. If you continue to break the law then you are probably breaking an international treaty on border control or customs, which means that you could be extradited or tried in your own country. Some of the laws I mentioned above are mediated through international agreements, but the fundamental point is that if you break their laws they can place sanctions against you to stop you from doing business with them.

A foreign country could arbitrarily decide I owed them a certain fine, or was no longer allowed into their country, or that they didn't want to allow my products into their country, at any time, whether or not I followed their laws.

In my daily life I've done, and continue to do, things that are illegal under e.g. Iranian law. That's fine and normal - I have no obligation to comply with Iranian law. Iran can make its own decisions about whether e.g. I'm allowed to enter their country, but that would always be the case.
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My DPO didn’t allow me to store that kind of personal information /s
The "special" part is that it prescribes very specific things in very ambiguous terms.

You have to change what you're doing to be compliant, but you don't know how. And for some aspects, no one knows how.

And GDPR actually has teeth. It's ripe for selective enforcement and other bureaucracy failures.
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