skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> More concretely, what should we make of the software developers, designers, salespeople, and managers who collaborate in building these kinds of systems?

That's too simple. Good systems have potential (good and bad). For example, "It went from looking for bad guys to monitoring underground pipes." -https://www.npr.org/2018/05/08/609493403/these-smart-sewers-...

Were you going to suggest we surveil people who collaborate in building these kinds of systems?
Besides the obvious ethical problems, I don't why companies are worried about inducing stupid cognitive overhead with this. Employees will obviously change their behavior in response, and that will require nontrivial mental energy.
HN loves IP except when it doesn't.
Much of the mindset(s) of the 14th century make a LOT more sense when you realize two things.

1. 19 year olds were routinely making critical military decisions. Remember how friggin' twitchy you were at 19 about big capitalized ideas like Honor and Purity and Romance? Yeah, now be that guy but in charge of a thousand lances. A reasonable modern equivalent to 14th century france is 21st century afghanistan. A few old survivors trying to keep the peace, and teenagers flipping out on blood vendettas keeping everyone on their toes.

2. Basically everyone had PTSD and most of the warrior class had semi-permanent concussions. This explains most if not all of the weird contradictions between battlefield brutality and the extremes of social politesse off it. Froissart and other chroniclers of the age have plenty of examples of knights who would shit themselves in terror before making themselves fight, or have screaming nightmares for days, or any of a long list of things that are pretty obvious signals of severe psychological distress. They would also do things like bawl their eyes out at music or at the death of a pet or other seemingly small things -- and flip into murderous rage when social conventions were violated. This is entirely coherent with, for example, things we see retired NFL players do. I suspect it's for a lot of the same reasons.
Something like this was weaponized - back in World War II - with mixed results:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog
I've always thought the debate was in terms of energy required to manufacture the individual bags. In terms of recyclability and sustainability doesn't paper win out? The stuff literally grows on trees on farms
Powerpoint would have tipped the scale?
One of the things that attracts me so much to general computing are the moments where I find something that I didn't think was possible. Not that it's a new invention or a new idea, but something that contradicts something I thought was fundamentally true about the world.

Homomorphic encryption is one of those things where I would have told you before learning about it that you have to decrypt information to do anything with it. That obviously you have to decrypt something to work with it. Which... maybe I'm just really simplistic, and I make brash assumptions about what is and isn't possible, but it often feels like a paradigm shift to me.

Public/private key cryptography was one another one of those moments; "wait, you mean I can have someone encrypt information without knowing how to decrypt it?" Zero-knowledge proofs are another one. Also when people started using quantum entanglement to tell if a key had been intercepted. This stuff is stupid, it shouldn't work. It feels obvious to me that it shouldn't be possible.

I dunno, it feels like a cheat code or something. Or better analogy, being given a brand new mechanic in a video game level. It's like the first time that you rotate the world in Fez.
The number of people who think like you is pretty low, methinks.
because of a bad implementation of PoW

See yesterday's YC article from a cryptocoin ASIC designer.[1] It's possible to design an ASIC for any proof of work algorithm that will be more cost-effective than a general purpose CPU.

Monero was supposed to be resistant to special-purpose ASIC approaches. It isn't. Someone quietly built an ASIC for Monero about a year ago and made a ton of money.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17059858
Capgemini Green Futures Hackathon
Boy, the logic in this article is bad.

PoW is not the only solution to the BFT. PBFT PoS, DPoS, etc are all "solutions", in that they represent a series of tradeoffs to achieve consensus in the presence of faults, just as PoW does.

Further, PoW itself as implemented in large part today is vulnerable to attack via selfish mining.

Finally, purely empirically speaking, PoW in most systems like Bitcoin today is highly centralized and far from trustless. Consensus authority has accumulated in the hands of large mining operations. Many people foresaw this outcome. In the author's analogy, you are not provided any certainty of consensus on your bunker, rather, massively resourced authorities controlled by a handful of people are dictating state to you and you have nowhere near enough resources to change that.
This isn't happening in any respectable sector I'd hope.

When a bigger company bought the smaller software company where I worked, almost the first thing they tried to do was change all the contracts to include things like universal IP claims and getting more visibility and control over things people were doing away from the office.

This culture was becoming pervasive even a few years ago, and the arrogance and contempt exhibited by the senior executive who came to tell us about it was almost unbelievable. It felt like he watched Darth Vader's "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further" scene and thought it was an instruction manual.

The only meaningful difference seems to be that since it was a software business, a significant proportion of the developers essentially telling them to shove their deal or we'd walk was powerful enough to put a stop to it. Obviously people working in unskilled jobs where staff are fungible aren't so lucky. We're supposed to have employment laws to protect people in vulnerable positions like that from exploitation, but welcome to 2018 I guess.
Facebook’s New Patent Will Enable It to See into Your Fridge, Suggest a Recipe
It woulds still be great to get some sort of protocol that will work over email. This is still the de-facto way of communication. If we can secure it, it would be a massive win. Much like the wide-spread use of HTTPS over HTTP was a massive win.
With a layer 2 protocol like lightning network, we can have individual transactions be fast and cheap, and only the net settlement of a payment channel on the blockchain slow and expensive. Which is okay because it would happen infrequently.
Introduction to using user-space tracepoints with BPF
I don't think Tolkein was a Marxist.
> I feel we are in the final stages of what amounts to a global elite deviant takeover.

You realize you sound a lot like this QAnon guy yourself now, right?
Because....everything I write on Facebook belongs to Facebook?
Possibly ironically, one of the reasons BD is looking for consumer-sale alternatives is that it specifically didn't meet the bar for military tech. The Big Dog project started as an idea for a field heavy-pack machine to offload some of the weight marines deep-inserted into a theater need to carry. It failed to meet either the noise limitation or power demand needs for that use-case.

Turns out for military applications, "Just send some trained dudes with guns" is a lot easier, still, than ground-based drones. Air drones are, of course, a whole different kettle of missiles<delete>fish.
Scurvy was a thing on sailing ships. If it had been universal for everybody everywhere, wouldn't we have retained the ability to produce vitamin C like other creatures do - and not lost it through evolution?

I am amazed if you truly cannot imagine a root cellar, just a generation or two ago.
My car displays something on the screen, but I don't recall it making a noise.

I've left the car running while stepping into a store because someone was in the passenger seat. If I get too far, my bluetooth music stops, but the air-conditioning keeps going without the key.
I think the current course, which is making decent web APIs that open the "potential of the device" to web apps, is going to get us the advantages of both.
It's a shame the charge is only for 90 minutes. I could see this being somewhat of a novel packhorse for going camping or something. Throw some saddlebags on it and you're set. Not sure how to get it to follow you automatically though. Probably would have to write custom software and make it follow a Bluetooth signal on the person to follow.
The issue there is that if you call something PGP, people expect backwards compatibility, but if you switch to a different mode of encryption that becomes a massive pain.
Whats next? A plastic bag beats humans to Mars?
cat keylog_data_of_200k_employees > /dev/null

Seriously any company doing this is not competent enough to do any kind of meaningful analysis on data of that scale.
Scientists find new deep sea species in seas off Java
Yes, I'm aware and you're preaching to the choir. I'm literally the lead on $employer's k8s deployment. I was just pointing out that things like k8s can absolutely be done reliably with old school bare metal and config management + some orchestration glue. Only it isn't as simple for most and generally is done poorly. I'm a huge fan of k8s.
That isn't requirement for most people. Furthermore, ordinary people consider "government influence" a good thing, because they trust their government more than some random piece of technology such as Bitcoin.
A slightly larger version of Sand Flea seems like a better fit. Disposable, can be deployed relatively cheaply in large quantities, with good camo nearly invisible on the ground, can scale obstacles by jumping. Could be made to carry a fragmentation payload and/or spy gear.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6b4ZZQkcNEo
Aren't we just sending it back? If it was important, perhaps rather than not accepting the garbage, China could use their resources to guide the progression of the problem. I am aware that the Chinese didn't create this problem, but they are definitely in a position to do something about it and arguably have the most to lose given the size of the population.
It does exist, but has approximately zero users

https://saltpack.org/

No PFS, though
Forbidden how?

I'm not sure why remote-start exists if it's forbidden to use it.
There are a lot of people right now who want to stifle free speech. "Have a different opinion, that's abuse - or a beating".
While not restricted to antifa, there seems lately a surge of "little Stalinists", who seem intent to crush or silence any dissenting opinion.

In short, history repeats itself, and "experience is recognising a mistake the second time you've made it."
The author's answer would be to reduce your database dependencies to one. Good luck with that!
Big Dog was floated for that purpose and failed to meet the requirements.

(Specifically, it was intended to be a marines platform---I guess the main infantry doesn't need it because they already have trucks?---but it didn't meet the goals for power constraint or noise constraint).
The simpler answer to this is to use portability layers that work around common problems. This is partly why it is suggested you use libraries rather than rolling your own code.
It takes about 1 Mega Joule of energy to bring 2500kg car to a stop from 60 mph. The model s with a 100kwh battery can store 360MJ and weights about 2500kg with passengers.

Is it wrong that I get uncomfortable with the idea of a spinning mass able to charge a model s that fits within the artists rendering of the charging station?
Why would that be a good thing? You'd still be left with a system that leaks immense amounts of metadata, which is often all government adversaries really care about, where the majority of the installed base isn't encrypted and you have to interoperate, and the vast majority of users gets access to messages through a web browser and so is hamstrung on secure delivery of encryption in the first place.

Just stop using email to deliver secrets.
Looking at you continent of Africa...
Maybe so, but I just call it like I see it. That's part of what makes his narrative compelling. A good con lies strategically but also peppers the story with truth.

The thing I find alarming is that nobody looks good. The whole thing looks like crooks vs crooks, and I don't just mean in the USA.
PWA with ionFullApp4Pro ionic starter
For those that haven’t heard of go-colly before, it’s a scraping platform written in, yup you guessed it, go. See: http://go-colly.org/

Here’s an example we can all relate to: http://go-colly.org/docs/examples/hackernews_comments/
Python 3's F-Strings: An Improved String Formatting Syntax (Guide)
I don't live on forever to witness my immortal impact, either.

Once I'm dead, literally nothing matters to me.
Is there a standard for this? It seems like if you tried to do it by hand, the receiver's UI would present this in a scary/confusing way. I'm imagining instead some sort of "Alan Smithee" User ID which the UI interprets as "deliberately anonymous/disavowable".
Their sacrifice is opportunity cost. Which is what TFA describes as the necessary ingredient for a consensus protocol.

> Practical impossibility can be reframed in terms of "opportunity cost": there are limited physical resources and those should have been largely allocated to X than to Y so we can see that X sucked in all resources from any alternatives.

There are a limited number of coins that can be staked at any time.
To be fair, a very large part of this attack is not about PGP at all. That part is about abusing email-client rendering of partly encrypted messages, and abusing S/MIME to get message malleability again exploited via HTML.
What's with the U.S.'s obsession with efficiency? Life is much more than that. So what if your employees are not working at full efficiency? I doubt a lot of these execs work without taking breaks.
>Can you imagine any other app store denying service to 200 teams or individuals and then investigate any possible wrongdoings?

The government does stuff like that all the time although usually it's ~200 people over the course of a year or two, not all at once. It's something along the lines of "Whoops, looks like CPS wasn't actually doing their jobs right and we took 200 kids from otherwise not too terrible parents, well here's an official apology and a pledge to investigate this internally, don't worry we'll conclude we did nothing wrong. Maybe if we feel really guilty we'll force someone to retire a year early or something."

You can replace the above with other examples of systemic mistreatment if you want.

Sleazy utility providers and businesses with local monopoly do similar but not quite so bad things and nobody gets any recourse unless they get a check from a class action.

These kind of things typically makes the state or regional news for a day with maybe a 10sec follow up when the apology is actually issued or they find themselves innocent of wrongdoing.

When you have monopoly or near monopoly position there's less accountability and more wiggle room to behave like a jerk.
"Hard science" would seem to be what orchestration frameworks are for, and why they're so integral to value creation. Frankly the parallel holds: you can do a lot more with shipping containers, but the standardised box is mostly a thing that lets you get started on the 'real work' :)

Re: VMs vs Containers -- the implicit assumption in what you're describing, and in the article, is that you're building in AWS/GCP/Azure with engineers who are competent in that specific suppliers ecosystem and relevant server techs.
Working with hybrid cloud installations and "air-gapped" systems with international partners invalidates a lot of those assumptions... Having a stable cross-section for deployment and scaling across clouds, backed with holistic answers to configuration-heavy parts of the application stack, is a total game changer. Containers don't let you ignore VMs any more then VMs let you ignore hardware, but trying to recreate Kubernetes ad-hoc in-situ is a crap-fest.

As a software engineer I gotta disagree about abstractions creating cruft. That's what poor abstractions do. Good abstractions moves complexity to it's most reasonable point of management and the lowest point of pain. "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection" ;)
no, that would not be the term. Here are some candidates

"awfulizing" from Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
https://qz.com/989112/how-to-stop-jumping-to-the-worst-case-...

"Catastrophizing"
https://www.harleytherapy.co.uk/counselling/catastrophizing-...

"Catastrophic Thinking"
https://psychcentral.com/blog/catastrophic-thinking-when-you...
Isnt this the truth. People always find a way.
Maybe we had it all wrong. After settling literally everywhere on earth, maybe its the plastic bags that become sentient ... not the apes.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing but entertaining the salesman's claim. Although I could see his claim being true for certain parts of the service industry, overall I doubt that he's telling the truth.
Paper is behind a paywall. Sci-Hub doesn't have it.
Does anyone have a link to the paper PDF?
We need to get Trump on the Twitter bully pulpit (actually, he's been there since before being inaugurated) and chide China. He's already got the trade war narrative going, what's one more issue?
As soon as you walk by someone or shake someones hand, they can copy your implanted RFID. Now, if you want to 'change the locks' to your house and car, you will need to dig out the chip in your hand and implant a new one.

To me, adding the capability to a watch, fitbit or other such wrist wearable is the far more practical option. Easy to change out if it gets compromised, plus you can build in a switch so that it is only capable of broadcasting when you press a button.
"I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs."

Funny he should write that. Many, many years ago I wrote an email to John Carmack asking something about his .plan postings which must have seemed fairly mundane looking back on it now. He was nice enough to write me back. And I thought that was pretty cool too.

I guess it just goes to show that even the people you respect or admire have people they respect and admire themselves.
... which is just as privacy-averse as having facial features which are visually distinguishable from other peoples' facial features, right?

i apologize for the sarcastic example, but the point i was originally trying to make is just that media doesn't understand implantable RFID and constantly implies that if you get a chip you'll end up in a government database with constantly refreshing latitude and longitude.
All of these icons have tooltips that appear within 100ms of hovering over them. Surely there is a better part of the new gmail UI to pick apart?
The idea of time being real or not raises the question of whether it's, a) always necessary to consider, and b) whether viewing a problem in the scope of a time domain always necessarily adds more information than it removes from scope.

It's just interesting to consider whether assuming time as a necessary variable can create an artificial constraint on reasoning.

The specific example I was thinking of is in an ontology, where you have all these types of information, related in different ways, that are all factors in each others behavior, but you can't model the whole thing as a function or transaction. That is, adding time (a transaction order) reduces the scope of what you can include in your model.

From a writerly laymans perspective, asking whether time is a real and universal property of all systems or an artifact of how we interpret them, is analogous to imagining we were studying physics with a heuristically useful, but generally limiting presupposition. One which would be like presuming all algorithms were in P, all graphs had hamiltonian cycles, all consistent theorems were true, etc. Then considering the consequences of the alternative.

It's all very meta and fun to think about, but I suppose that's what this topic is about.
We badge in/out. Which is supposed to be security, but the reality is that they wanted to see everyone had an 8 hour workday.

I think it backfired because the amount of people coming in late/leaving early hasnt gotten better. Tbh, fridays seem worse.

Now that we know we are tracked, people dont even hide it. Sub 40 hour weeks are becoming norm.(assuming you dont have a major issue)
This is a great response post!
Microsoft didn't initiate any of this. US Customs officials went "That's weird, why are boxes of Microsoft/ Dell restore CDs coming from China to this random outfit?" and the answer of course was "You have just detected a counterfeiting operation, try to figure out who the principles are and imprison them so they can't do it again".

Microsoft's first involvement was after Lundgren was arrested (maybe even after he was charged?) when the US government wanted to know what these things would be worth if they were real (Lundgren's lawyers told a court it should ask what fake ones are worth, which is zero of course, but that's not what the law says, nor does it make any sense) and to what extent they'd fool purchasers.

It suits Lundgren to portray this as "Computer recycler jailed by Microsoft" rather than "Counterfeiter caught" and in the tech press it appears he has been at least partly successful. I presume it's hoped that this will influence the actual jail time.

You don't actually have to defend trademarks. Corporations would _like_ you to help their Sales and Marketing divisions by treating their mark as special, and they will sometimes try to harass people into doing things the law doesn't require (US tech companies spent a few years trying to get UK magazines to write ® after the names of their products, the Editors of those magazines declined because there's no basis in law for such nonsense). Abandonment consists of not _using_ a mark, not of declining to chase each and every unauthorised use. For example if Apple decided today to stop selling the "iPod" and not use the mark in any other way (e.g. "iPhone with iPod features" or "Download iPod for your macOS today" or whatever) a court might eventually conclude that this mark was abandoned, and in say, 2060 if I sell the "iPod" bright orange sphere that plays Whale sounds, an Apple lawsuit insisting they still own the name "iPod" might fail due to abandonment. But if they don't sue a guy with a Geocities home page called "Gary's iPod" for eight years it does't magically mean now iPod isn't trademarked and anyone can use it.
J. Balvin – Ambiente (Official Video) – REACTION
The ruling was that the Fed government can’t withhold all Medicaid funding if it wasn’t expanded.
@vishnu_ks , I also recently found https://github.com/priologic/easyrtc which worked out of the box, and automatically connects to several public STUN/ICE peers. I'm planning on using it (when I get a chance to finish the WebRTC adapter), maybe we can tag team something? It worked super well on a P2P/decentralized 3D VR multiplayer game somebody had built.
How about "Handy"? That's what Germans call mobile phones (Wikipedia says usage started 1992)
If a few inches of fake fur[1] is enough to block it, I don't see how it can be tracked at a distance.

[1] (the video is loud) https://twitter.com/The_Sass_Hole/status/982519966225305600
Ask HN: Why aren't blockchain messaging apps available yet?
Telegram has made claims that it's working on a blockchain version for its app, but hasn't released it just yet. Why aren't there any widespread IPFS/serverless/decentralized/blockchain-enabled messaging apps out there?
Maybe they should get better garbage trucks. Ours load from the top, so there is no way for trash to fall out.