skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ProtonVPN (operated from Switzerland) claims[1]: "Our security team has also identified at least one VPN service which is working on behalf of a state surveillance agency."

> If I had to guess, it would be PIA: the most popular, the most accessible, and the most affordable US-based VPN.

If I had to guess, the state surveillance agency-run VPN would be one that's still accessible from China. I understand (but I could be wrong) there are still a few that manage to evade the blocks and provide good service despite all the crackdowns. Chinese state security has many more reasons to want to watch domestic VPN traffic than the US does. Their motivation is proven by the fact that they've spent the effort to build and maintain the "Great Firewall," and crack down on VPNs that bypass it.

It would be reasonably clever for the Chinese to crack down on all the VPNs that they don't control, funneling all the "illicit" traffic to the few VPNs they do control. It would make spying, monitoring dissidents, etc. much easier for them.

The NSA and other US intelligence agencies probably don't care very much about anyone that's dumb enough to need to use public VPN. Seems like the only people who would care in the US are domestic law enforcement, like the FBI.
Laws and punishments were created and tuned expecting that only a small portion of offenses and offenders would be caught, or that punishment could be applied selectively. Punishment of some plays a role as a publicly visible deterrent. That means the punishments are more severe then could be reasonably applied for every infraction of the crime. Crimes that are very common such as speeding or cannabis make good examples of this. If detection and prosecution of those crimes became 100% effective and consistent, courts would be overwhelmed, and the economy would be turned on its head as people go bankrupt paying fines and legal fees or losing their jobs.

I assume people would very move quickly to get the speed limits changed to a number that represents the actual maximum speed you can go before receiving a ticket, rather than the vague percentage/luck combo that it is now.
Well, I agree with you about the point that what we perceive as "culture of a country" is often a made up construct which doesn't account for the variety of backgrounds and behavior of the citizens. It really is very hard to definitly say x is part of "the" culture of the country y.

However, what is here being discussed is not a second classing of non-whites by whites. First, how do you know that I or the persons from whom I heard about the problems with their Indian IT teams are white? You just assume that. Second, it seems that there really are issues working with some IT teams in India. Why is it wrong to attribute this to a certain work ethic? Or more prescisely: Why do I second class non-white people when I describe the work ethic I'm experiencing? Man, I lived in Germany, US and India (for a short time at least), and let me tell you, there are different work ethics in these countries. And there have nothing to do with the color of your skin. But true, mostly generalisations are unjust. But people here are describing what they experienced. And it doesn't feel for me like it is linked to skin color.
We're of the same mind on a lot of things. ;)

Watching recent history, I have a sneaking suspicion these same issues are why democratic nation-building has been such a failure.

Expecting a country to transition from 0 to democracy in one generation is probably impossible. Especially when it becomes apparent that even elder democracies are mostly held together by the strength of their institutions in times of strain.

Democracy works if everyone is educated, but as you pointed out, encounters substantial issues when (a) the problems at hand are too complex to be understood or (b) the knowledgeable vote (on both+ sides) is drowned out by an easily-swayed vote (e.g. for passion-arousing issues like free trade or immigration).

If I were attempting to build a democracy, I'd instead attempt to compress ~1000 years of European history into ~100 years of gradual government transformation. But probably start with a monarchy...
We’ve had newspapers for hundreds of years and they’ve been fine, but now somehow they’re gonna go out of business? Come on, you can do better!
wow, most of the photos in the article are so bad. certainly stressing the point that "oh, this is bad, low quality, cheap and poor, and so are the Indians we talk about in this article"...
> like Google is doing today.

any source for that?
It might. If there was a fee, then theoretically other companies could offer to cover it. Google still gets paid, but other companies get a shot.

MSFT has struck deals with OEMs in the past where windows 8.1 was free for OEMs if Bing was the default search engine, and $10 otherwise (for tablets). You could argue they were not a Monopoly on tablets, but it's one indicator.

Another is the recent Google Shopping fight; the "resolution" to that has been that companies can bid to display their own complete slate of shopping results and Google Shopping now has separate accounting and must run as a profitable business unit. Google is still taking most of the ad traffic since it can afford to bid more than the people who brought the original complaint, but it does provide a way for entities to be there if they have a business not predicated on free traffic from commercial search queries.

It's not totally clear that this will be accepted, but if it is, then you could imagine a similar structural separation argument being used where Search & Android have separate accounting, Android charges $10 and Google pays phone makers $10 (the same way they pay Apple). While leaving a path for the status quo, this would let anyone building a search engine or mobile OS not have to build both at once to provide a competing alternative.
When you get headaches, chances are you are dehydrated. I would suggest to drink a lot of water before and after drinking coffee or when you feel pain in your head. Drinking a lot of water works for me many times while enjoying too much caffeine in my body.
In this case, a little obscurity goes a long way. A $5/month droplet is more than enough for a single household’s internet use. If you make cash purchases with any frequency, it’s very possible to make your once-every-10-months $50 Visa gift card purchase nearly untraceable (at least by dragnet/mass methods). Your cover is far more likely to be blown by other things, like which IP address connects to the droplet most frequently.
Right, but again I think they end up drawing incorrect conclusions about the state of Indian engineers in general based on what they see with their H1-Bs.
An organic wild blueberry + strawberry smoothie (no other ingredients). But that's not the point - you shouldn't stay awake for too long of a time in the first place.
You don't trust the creators of Python or Linux then, eh?
Yep, I remember I discovered node (was @v0.1.20 or so) when I was working with Jaxer, 2008 maybe.
Apple is free to not sell their OS to others. The app store could be problematic due to conflicts with Apple apps, similar to the Android issue, but does Apple dominate any market? Maybe one could construct a case if Apple dominates spending on digital media or something (Apple customers are often cited as spending more money), but even then it's kind of awkward that it's a minority of devices.

Google on the other hand clearly has the largest market share for phone OSes and uses that share to push other products.
> In my case, all postal balloting, which is worse than the touchscreens.

Got any more info on this? I'm in a state where all voting is done through postal ballots.
A key insight is less that all Indian devs are bad, and more that they tend to be called in by companies who are incapable of knowing whether they are doing good or bad. So when a competent team comes in and sees an Indian team that has operated incompetently, things get pretty nasty pretty fast.
I have a theory that a certain percentage of any given population can do good engineering or IT in general. The US and India are pushing up against those limits. This leads to recruiting people without the lust or mental capabilities to do said work. This leads to shoddy output for the customers hiring the tail end of the bunch... a very long tail because the demand is so high.
This nuance has been erased by an administration that has canceled programs for legal immigration, then used that retroactively-illegal status to deport people who have been here for decades.

Perhaps for you the distinction is important, but in terms of policy, there is no difference at all.
For sure--see the examples of FontStruct, TiVo, DAZN, Heidi, etc. in the article, along with the part just before the quick start section. :) (It's true, it does have a large gamedev following, but it's actually quite versatile.)
"The Phase 2 datacenter can house 27.6 petabytes of data."

Assuming you're using 15TB as one LoC unit, then about 1,800 LoCs.
Google violates a very clear concept in antitrust law known as tying or bundling: Forcing a manufacturer to install x and y apps in order to get the z app that they actually want. Apple is installing their own apps on their own phones, and therefore, cannot be violating the law in the same way.

The fact that Google forces manufacturers into this arrangement is exactly what makes it illegal. If Google was just selling Pixel phones with Google software, nobody would bat an eye.
Except when enforcing these policies they always seem to target those of darker skin - irregardless of the actual status of their immigration.
Billions in U.S. solar projects shelved after Trump panel tariff
This works. Be sure to try different compilers and optimization levels.

You can become a better programmer this way. You start to get a real feel for what the compiler can and can't optimize. For example, you can see how a do...while loop is usually the best kind of loop, but without seeing the assembly you might assume they are all the same.
Show HN: Track and Control Your PDFs
Seems common in Asia. I had the same experience in cambodia.

One example:

- I was very, very sick (Traveler's diarrhea) and we were about to embark for a 5 hours minivan trip with a guy without a driving license.

- 5 minutes before departure, I ask the organizer "do you have a vomit bag?"

- "Yes"

- I wait around a bit, but he carries on with his work and just ignore me

- "Sorry, did you have a bag, any bag? maybe a plastic bag, as I'm sick"

- "Yes"

- Now it's 30s before departure and I get pretty stressed as I have nothing should I need to throw up. So I ask him again, and he actually get pretty mad (with that asian "must not lose face" style though) and ignore me because I insisted and didn't just drop the issue (I didn't know what was going on at the time ...)
We have not looked at E Rate yet but we have been at a few conferences and related to K12 space with Clever - they are really good people. We originally were targeted to parents and only recently have tried tapping into the school space. It's not easy to get the word out to the right people, for example we get rejected by Peach Jar for many districts and have $1500 of funds sitting there until we can find a strategy.
There are some people used it quite extensively for web development (both front and back-end). This year's Hong Kong Open Source Conference will feature two Haxe talks, both are web focused:

* https://hkoscon.org/2018/topic/haxe-better-javascript-practi...

* https://hkoscon.org/2018/topic/type-safe-rest-api-haxe

I believe there will be live streams, or you can checkout the video that will be available shortly after.

(I'm a member of the Haxe Foundation, also the organizer of the HKOSCon Haxe track)
In what way did Microsoft force OEMs that Google doesn't?
Android is mostly open-source and nothing prevents manufacturers from forking it for their own purpose. Google play Services is not an obligation when you see things this way.
On the other hand:

Murder and rape? Same deal.

I think it's perfectly correct to believe that the US government in its current state is pure shit for more than just the reasons you mentioned. But forced inefficiency sounds like a ridiculous way to go about fixing it.

If society takes issue with the laws, fix the laws. But having a law that relies on selective and inefficient enforcement is a stupid law.
Smartz: all about smart contracts and our team
>>Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India?

Obviously no. But NRIs have an incentive to portray that image. Once you go out of the country, you have to now worry about your own interests. If you keep singing praises about your ex-countrymen they will outsource more work to India, and you the newly minted US passport holder, who has a job in the US will suffer. Or worse you might be on the path to receive a GC and may have to restart the process if you lose your job due to outsourcing.

Please note, everyone protects their own interests.
And nobody has any way of knowing if this is actually true do they? There is no independent third-party verification of your assertions is there? So why not commission such an audit then. Why not make actual verification your distinguishing characteristic then?

I am also very curious how support and operations troubleshoot client issues in the absence of any logging.
And Musk started with very little - at one point seeing if could get by on a dollar a day if it came to that. Or Kalanick who things went bad enough for that he was forced to move back in with his parents as an adult, and then later to Thailand for a lower cost of living. Or Dell who worked as a dish washer and newspaper boy - eventually using those funds to drop out of college to focus on his booming computer assembly/upgrade 'business' he was running out of his dorm room.
Show HN: How to train a spam detector with a 97% accuracy with Machine Box
Are you the only one? No.

Will that habit do long term damage to your physical, emotional, mental, and professional health? Absolutely.

It's so common and acceptable to be physically addicted to a stimulant (caffeine) that people tend to forget they are indeed physically addicted to a stimulant. Not saying I haven't been there in the past... but wouldn't you view your habit differently if 'I'm not alive before my second cup of coffee, hehe!' was replaced with 'I need a bump of cocaine to start my day'?

I'm not implying that cocaine and caffeine are equally harmful drugs, just pointing out that physical dependence on a stimulant is NOT healthy, even if it's the norm.
Yes. Any feed back is appreciated it's okay to be critical and we know we are not perfect.
Phrasing a question in a way that ensure it will be understood by the reader is non-trivial. For tricky problems that might require several steps of back and forth, the ability to ask clarifying questions and access tone of voice that you get on a voice call is valuable.

I'm not saying that this guy was thinking this through that extensively, but IMO there are times when a voice call is more effective.

Did you attempt to explain to him why you didn't answer the phone as opposed to trying to "train" him? i.e. engage in open communication and have a conversation about what works and what doesn't for each of you about various modes of communication.

His request for you to "give him a call" moves thing for you back into the realm of the asynchronous.

I wonder whether maybe you have some other issue with voice calls?
Show HN: Pensieve – One Search Across All Your Tools
Aww how cute, the CEO defends paying his employees 50,000 while he makes 10,000,000. "Its just jealousy folks!"

I'm sure Louis XVI was thinking the same thing right before the public summarily removed his head from his body.
Have you read the laws on soybean farming or are you just making assumptions? Computer programs are small because they have limited forms of input. Because the input to law is the full universe of possible human behavior, law as code would be much larger than it is today, and would require pre-imagining every possible human action, rather than using a phrase like “malicious intent” and letting a judge and jury figure it out.
> Google - Allows any hardware manufacturer to use their OS, and you can install any application you want.

Google publishes the stripped down version of Android because the original open source license demands it. It also bend over backwards to make that version as out of date and useless as possible, and as a result, non-Google Android clones make up a negligible part of the market. The official version of Android is tightly licensed, with a proeminent Google controlled app store that the hardware manufacturer cannot override etc.

So in reality, they are doing the same thing as Apple. But I believe you are correct, Apple too should be investigated for the way it runs its app store.
>lobotomize ultra high IQ children

Who said anything about high IQ? You think kids who inherit their parent's money have high IQs?

>However, some janitor’s kid could become a millionaire if he can execute on good ideas.

He could win the lottery too.

>Some milkionaire’s kid

Freudian slip.

>what someone else has doesn’t affect you.

Maybe so, maybe not, but if I have something a rich kid wants, like say a software idea, they can easily ruin me through lawsuits.

>can become broke if she doesn’t manage the money well.

Yes, but I'll bet bad choices from a millionaire's kid has a less likelihood of ruin than bad choices from a janitor's kid.
On reactor antineutrino anomaly, what do you think of https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.00574 ? It seems to me both Daya Bay collaboration and RENO collaboration suggest anomaly is explained by nuclear fuel evolution.
> a society where people can move out of poverty is a better one than a society where people remain in poverty but can move from the middle to the upper class

This is a very subjective claim. I would certainly prefer to live in the latter country and so do most people I know (and we do, by moving from Canada to the US in much larger numbers per capita than vice versa).
This is getting tinfoil hattery.

Microsoft sells a platform. The success of that platform is based on convincing users and their agents to buy the platform. The platform is appealing because developers make money by creating apps or it. Has Microsoft done awful and possibly illegal things to competitors? Of course. But they've been the best for developers. Best dev tools, most powerful and widely deployed OS, at least in the PC era that made them famous and infamot.
I was hell banned on HN for mentioning it so this will be my last post, but think about royalties. Do you get any of the things you build?

Or if you left your job, would you be legally required to delete all your work and have to pay tax money on an illiquid second-class asset that only has a percentage chance of payout(the startup scam).

As for HN, I love engineers and have been on HN for over a decade, but this site is the same as startups and ycombinator in general. Built for VCs to extract value out of engineers and the public.
They seem to have 66% market share on mobile apps, and I'd say they are abusing their power as much as they can:
https://beta.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/scree...

And if we're looking at e.g. "tablets", I wouldn't be surprised if they had something like 90% of the market, in some countries.

It's funny how Apple is simultaneously depicted "non-dominant player" and "the only mobile platform where you can make money", sometimes by the same people.
The odds are stacked against both in those scenarios. Some janitors kid is unlikely to execute on good ideas, as he has nothing to fall back on if things go wrong, so he is unlikely to take the risk in the first place.

Meanwhile, some millionaire's kid is also unlikely to end up broke even if they criminally mismanage (see current POTUS as a prime example)
The UK has a fair amount of high-tech manufacturing (In terms of value, the manufacturing industry in the UK is bigger than it's ever been). Things like MRI machines, jet engines, etc are all manufactured here.
I'm glad any random billionaire with cash to throw around gets to make these decisions for us.
No. They gave a better deal to OEMs who used Windows exclusively
HN has been slowly alienating the people who would disagree (mostly by downvoting without replying), it seems. If I were designing HN today, I'd probably make it only possible to downvote a post if you have either replied, or upvoted an existing reply.
Another analogy would be EU membership and trade deals, they curtail others members from doing any trade deal as well as charge a fee.

Though the sign of a true monopoly would be issues in trying to cancel the deal. Which is way easier with Android compared to many examples.
Hi,

my name is Wiktor. Together with my friend Tom, we built HelpRange, tool to help you track and control your PDFs. What do you think about the idea? I would love to get feedback!

Best,
Wiktor
We used Haxe for a while at my last company for a cross-platform engine that would actually run well on web (browsers couldn't yet handle "real" Unity WebGL builds at that time).

While it "worked" and the resulting engine / suite of games ended up net profitable, and I'm a fan of Haxe's features as a language (I am really missing the pattern matching and macros in Typescript these days), I must say the build pipeline and available tools for OpenFL / Haxe games was lacking at best.

On the plus side being able to fork and fix issues we ran into was a game changer over Unity IMO.

Not sure if the ecosystem has evolved / improved on the build and tooling fronts in the last 18 months since I last interacted with it directly, but that would be the one word of caution I'd offer to anyone after they read this article. Be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get a little dirtier than usual if you really intend to ship on both web and mobile.
Also reddit, which is , afaik, currently the biggest site made with python.
Nothing was done about Telemetry (maintain state after updates, better options to disabling PARTS of it, documenting it) till AFTER people discovered it and there was a public outcry. And they still didn't document it till it was becoming clear that GDPR would go through and they'd be legally liable for not doing so. And there's currently still no way to completely disable Telemetry's data collection. It's a simple on/off toggle and potentially a registry entry that determines if the startup scripts of the OS should start the Telemetry application at all. I'm sorry but at best that's pretty myopic for a company who claims (paraphrased) "trust is our most important resource", or (literal) "judge us by the actions of our recent past, our current actions and our future actions". And it certainly doesn't help to shake the notion that they have larger and more maligned plans for what they intend to do with their greater OSS influence, certainly not when you consider their history. But even if we're to take those statements at face value they still don't completely align with their actions.
The Wikipedia article on this case is much more informative:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google

> In their Statement of Objections, the European Commission accused Google of the breach of EU antitrust rules in three ways:

> - by requiring mobile manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Google Chrome browser and requiring them to set Google Search as default search service on their devices, as a condition to license certain Google proprietary apps;

> - by preventing manufacturers from selling smart mobile devices running on competing operating systems based on the Android open source code;

> - by giving financial incentives to manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-install Google Search on their devices.