skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How is FB Messenger on ios in terms of privacy?
I recently switched to an iphone from an android. Up until this point, I've avoided downloading Messenger because my old android phone was running an outdated version of android and didn't come with privacy guards. I now have an iphone SE, and I was curious after reading all the articles about the pro-privacy stance on the iphones, will ios provide safeguards against messenger doing shady things, like:

- Secretly opening the mic to listen in on conversations

- Block Messenger from accessing phone contacts, call history, and text messages

- Block Messenger from accessing my phone number, so that other people can't auto-sync me on their phone using their contacts list.

And any other sorts of weird things? A lot of my friends only use facebook, so I'm still tied to it. I also don't want to use a browser on the phone, because that is super clunky, so I'm thinking of using the native app. I tried looking for an open source privacy-friendly version for ios, but they are nonexistent.
i dont think you can do that
The best way to avoid conflict and encourage diversity is to force everyone to voluntarily think alike.
I’ve never understood why people get so upset at using the word “they” or “them”. We already use gender neutral pronouns in the plural or possessive cases (we, their, etc) all the time. Switching over to gender neutral for all cases seems harmless to me.

Personally I switched over years ago after a faux pas too many. Getting embarrassed sucks, and using gender neutral in most or all cases saves me mental cycles anyways.
It would be interesting to read their privacy policy, and then note if it has something like:

"We reserve the right to change the terms of this agreement at any time and only have to provide you notice."

That way, before the product is big, they can make those claims, but as soon as it has an entrenched niche, they can do the privacy bait and switch and collect all they want.
The UK?
To play devil's advocate why is it so upsetting that people don't want to use they?

(seriously just playing devil's advocate here)

It's not a big deal until somebody makes a big deal about it, on either side of the issue. What we have is one group making a HUGE deal about pronouns, and another equally making a HUGE deal about not using pronouns. At the same time each side is saying each other is horrible.

It's not a big deal until you make a big deal about it...
The construct has been used incorrectly for many years, to the point that most people hear it and don't shudder over it anymore even though it's incorrect.

As a non-native speaker, you learned it correctly and thus it sounds wrong once you've actually paid attention to it and studied it. Many native speakers never really study grammar and don't understand it -- I'm no exception, I took a course years ago but can't quote grammar rules and go almost exclusively on how things sound to my native ear. It makes it interesting at times when my non-native spouse asks me "why do you say it that way" and I have to research the rule so I can explain it properly or fix my incorrect impressions.
1. Yes

2. Highly Unlikely, but can’t be entirely disproven from what I’ve seen.

3. See #2
I wonder how good the disguise "technology" is that they won't disclose in a public YouTube video.

I don't know why you'd want to disguise yourself as the opposite gender unless you could pull off the voice, your cover would be blown almost immediately.

I still don't place any stock in intelligence operatives working in embassies, I can only imagine it works because intelligence agencies aren't sophisticated enough yet. You have a (relatively) small group of staff, and you know a portion of them are spies. Many "official covers" are extremely weak.
Worth noting that they do have an ad platform, actually, and that all apps on the App Store are mandated to use it if wanting to monetize.
WSJ, The Economist, Harpers, Pro Publica, etc.
It's like Amazon and Google are competing on evilness.
There’s this concept that any time you see a new story where the topic is your area of expertise, it’s baffling how completely inaccurate the story is.

And then we all keep reading stories about areas in which we aren’t experts, and it doesn’t occur to us that are likely equally misleading.

Because if we all factored that in, we wouldn’t believe any news.

And I guess we feel better thinking we know what’s going on, rather than acknowledging we are in the dark.
Shakespeare, who invented half of modern English vocabulary, used singular they.

You're anecdotal experience of getting called out as incorrect does not conflict with GPs statement that such things are and were rare.
I liked Brave New World better. I read it a few years ago and honestly it felt like it was just talking about present times.
So you're under the belief that you have hundreds of thousands of dollars obtained in some scheme and there's a court order to pay it back. And you're under the belief that if you hide those assets and tell the court to eff off, that you may go to prison for a separate crime than for what the judgement was originally for and after you serve your time that nullifies the original judgement and/or makes you untouchable legally?

It sure does seem like several folks have grandiose surefire ideas of how to beat the system. And believe they're stubborn enough that they can out wait everyone, that the courts, government, plaintiffs will all just give up and give in. Good luck with that. It sounds like a child's fantasy to me.
I recognize the difference, but still think that he makes a very valid point.

My phone probably doesn't listen to me right now, but what exactly do I know?
I would argue Agile is a Philosophy and Waterfall would be more of a Methodology. My biggest concern with Agile is that it's lacking integration with a methodology (ie: best practices of waterfall could be in an agile way). Companies and teams tend to just say lets do Agile/Scrum/Kanban and leave out the requirements definition, documentation, etc and replace it with "As a user create shiny button". Which, might be fine in some cases but as a new-start it lacks direction IMO.
Working in a midwest auto repair shop, we get our share of spiders and such. Brown recluse spiders are just that, reclusive. Ive seen them take up residence in old tire piles mostly. Ive rarely seen a recluse, but our shop bathroom has a small window where a particularly large hobo spider has set up shop. We named him Biggie because, well, its a huge spider that just sits on a web all day munching bugs and judging your poor dietary standard. We used to assign cancelled tickets to biggie. at some point, biggie had a small workstation and even an entry in our timekeeping software (for testing.)

So at some point he was just gone. We assumed he moved onto some nicer shop with tastier bugs, but as it turns out, biggie met his demise at the hands of our new tenant Goober, a chubby possum who made it through the window on a cold night and managed to scare the piss out of one of our front office sales folk.

This was completely unacceptable, shouting at a colleague at work is tantamount to casual harassment. So, we did what any coworkers did. We took Goober out to eat by luring him back outside with grapes and raisins. After he was out for the day, we built him a little workstation, fashioned some personal protection equipment, and even made goobers toolbox. It holds all our weird porsche/BMW bolts and nuts that, as far as we can tell, are in hard enough spots on the vehicles that only a German possum could install.
I really liked the previous champion's sportsmanlike response to his defeat.
An example of this is the two possible applicative instance of list. One is based on the monad instance and does a cross product if presented with two lists. The other zips its arguments. It is the more interesting one imho:

import Control.Applicative
newtype ZList a = ZList { runZList :: [a] }
instance Functor ZList where
fmap f = ZList . fmap f . runZList

instance Applicative ZList where
pure a = ZList [a]
(<*>) f x = ZList $ zipper (runZList f) (runZList x)
where zipper (f:fs) (x:xs) = f x : zipper fs xs
zipper [] _ = []
zipper _ [] = []

Difference of behaviour:

*Main> ZipList [(*3),(*5),(*6)] <*> ZipList [1,2,3,4]
ZipList {getZipList = [3,10,18]}
*Main> [(*3),(*5),(*6)] <*> [1,2,3,4]
[3,6,9,12,5,10,15,20,6,12,18,24]
*Main>
> One of my great pet peeves in modern usage of language is the lack of precision of usage

What makes you think this is a modern thing?
"Edited also why was this downvoted?"

I downvoted you because you talked about your downvotes.

Please don't interrupt the discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.
Do you have any carbon offset schemes you recommend? I feel like there are a lot of BS offsets out there.
Option/Either/Future Monads in JS, Python, and More
Drag it through the blockchain then.
> (1) if there are requirements set in stone up front, do the design work necessary to fit those requirements at the start

This is quite true. I often frame this as "design detail is inversely proportional to requirements volatility"
Many of these large governmental or bureaucratic organizations suffer from extreme inefficiency and ineptitude. The Red Cross's complete failings in Haiti have been widely reported. NPR ran a particularly scathing report [1] on it that includes nothing short of quite forward allegations of fraud. The Red Cross, for their part, make claims about what they did and provide extremely high level claimed expenditures, but then refuse to provide specific details of programs and costs.

As the article mentions when you donate to the Red Cross first they immediately take a cut of that money for themselves. Then its distributed to other charities which then take an administrative cut. And then in carrying out the program there are more 'administrative' cuts. In one program NPR reviewed, administrative costs alone ate up 1/3rd of all donations. Later in the article the Red Cross, upon discovering NPR is investigating their efforts, sends an email to NPR suggesting that, 'NPR and ProPublica were "creating ill will in the community, which may give rise to a security incident.. We will hold you and your news organizations fully responsible."

When the Red Cross says things like it "provided homes" for more than 130,000 Haitians - they include among those 130,000 "people who went to a seminar on how to fix their own homes, people who received temporary rental assistance, and thousands of people who received temporary shelters — which start to disintegrate after three to five years." In total the Red Cross's half a billion dollars in Haiti ended up creating 6 permanent homes. And this sort of inaction is not an isolated incident.

[1] - https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...
"Installing" this is as simple as:

curl 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dylanaraps/fff/master/fff' > fff; chmod +x fff

It's a 121 line Bash script, no dependencies. I suspect Emacs is slightly more intrusive than that.
Please re-read my comment. I have not stated that they are dependent.
the "and more" being Ruby, Swift, and Scala :)
> Perhaps it is cynicism, but I'm pretty sure this is just Apple exploiting a competitive edge, and does not necessarily reflect his own opinion, he is speaking to benefit the company.

Of course. This is how all companies work. I just really like that this competitive edge exists in the first place. If this competitive edge exists and works, it might actually be stronger as Apple can continue maintaining this stance in the future.

Although I'm not a big Apple user myself (I think/hope I can defend myself enough on other platforms that have a lower cost of entry), it's nice that you can point to iPhones if people are asking for on which they can take reasonable ownership of their privacy without needing to be very tech savvy.
Check Point Software to Acquire Dome9 to Transform Cloud Security
I wouldn't be that sure whether it is any more likely to hit than any other prognosticator. For every Go or Rust that gets a lot of play here, there's a D, or Nim, or Crystal, or Pony, or a half-dozen promising upstarts that never amount to anything. There's also perennial interest in esoteric academic languages, and productive but niche languages that will never go mainstream, like Haskell and Lisps.
Loading Global Vue Components
I'm curious about how expensive the restructuring is, and importantly, can that be "scheduled": can i violate some conditions and then do the expensive restructuring at a time that is convenient?
I live in Brown Recluse country. For a little over a year, I lived in an apartment absolutely infested with Brown Recluse spiders. The entire block of apartments (i.e. units sharing one roof) had the problem. AFAIK, we were the only block at the complex with the issue. Early on in living there I captured several of the spiders and had them identified. I was terrified, to say the least.

When I say infestation, I mean it literally. It was very unusual to make it to bedtime without killing at least one Brown Recluse. The most we ever killed in one night was 15. We would wake up all hours of the night, turn on our phone flashlights, and scan the room for any lurking on the ceiling or walls. Usually, the midnight scans would bear fruit. To this day I wake up in the middle of the night and reach for my phone before remembering that I'm no longer in that situation.

One year and one week after moving into the apartment, I was bitten. One of the poor creatures found its way under my covers and into my shirt while I was sleeping. I rolled over on top of it and it bit me. The burn/itching actually woke me up shortly after and I was able to recover the spider from inside my shirt. I absolutely panicked, rounded up my entire family to drive me to the ER at 3 AM (because surely I was going to go into some kind of shock or other state of impairment) and even called the doctor on the way. Halfway to the ER, the doctor called back. He told me not to panic, and that there was actually nothing they could do about it right this minute. He told me to go home, go to sleep, and watch the bite for any signs of infection/necrosis.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the best advice I've ever heard regarding Brown Recluses.

All in all, the bite amounted to little more than a massive mosquito bite. My body did have an allergic reaction (broke out in a rash head to toe) but it was honestly nothing like the horror stories. We moved two months later, but I'll never let myself forget the overreaction I presented and how silly it all was.

I actually started to feel that I was getting to know them. Brown Recluses are exactly that: reclusive. They want nothing to do with us. They are magnificent hunters and terrible climbers (this is how they end up in your bed: they fall). They tend to stick to the edges of the room and are the only spider I've ever seen with a distinct "stalk" instead of a twitchy walk. They're honestly beautiful to watch (as I used to often).

If you do have a Brown Recluse problem, don't panic. It took me over a year to get bitten while living in an actual nest of them and even then it was a freak accident. Buy yourself some of those rectangular glue traps and place them along your walls, behind furniture, and in the back of closets. Brown Recluses can be dangerous to children under the age of 7 and the elderly (which is why we moved promptly) so don't ignore them entirely. Learn to respect them for what they are just like anything else.
It might not be listening to you but it's almost certainly reporting on everything you do on it, your location, your contacts etc all the time.
Me too. And Facebook from all companies.

There's probably yet another of Zuck's apology tours coming in 2019.
Go is far more complex than Chess, and also far more familiar to people raised in the Asiatic regions. Might be either a cultural thing or simply the fact that Go is only similar to Chess in terms of it being a strategy game, but not similar in difficulty or style of play.
Belief that (extreme) precision of thought and communication has been achieved is probably more harmful than words having slippery definitions.
Carrier IQ, etc. Look it up.
One problem with linking to anything on 4chan is that it will be purged within the day and no longer available.
I have a couple black widows living in my basement. They each chose to live in a small crevice in a concrete wall. I can go watch them, but if my shadow accidentally falls on them, they hide as fast as they can.

Some people thinks it’s crazy that I don’t kill them, but they certainly aren’t trying to hurt me, so I don’t see why I would.
The singular they has been used at least since the 1300s[0]. At what point does it become correct?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage
Smells like Regulatory capture by a competitor.
This is a particularly appropriate link right now, given that the core idea of "saving data and state is something which should be avoided" is seeing a renaissance in both privacy-focused circles and in privacy-focused regulatory policies. I love the idea that saving state is to be avoided, and I hope to see it implemented with increasing granularity, both on other people's computers (e.g. web services) and locally.

Remotely, a trend away from "You must create an account to view this cat meme, now enter your date of birth and present a working email address which we'll send a message to" is particularly appealing. And with hosted services, particularly paid ones, I'd love to see privacy policies focused on how little data is kept, rather than how much. I keep hoping that the regulatory or legal or insurance environment will change such that sooner or later, companies will view stored user data as a liability more than an asset, and 'zero knowledge' will be a desirable thing.

Locally, as per-application permissions and sandboxing grows stronger, I can picture a class of applications which would be hard-restricted from saving data between sessions (e.g. the browser, a calculator, a scratch-pad app). Or perhaps, "the only data you can save must be XML, in this plaintext file, so that preferences are saved, but nothing else. Qubes (OP's baby) does this already, but I think a dash of this in existing OSes would be a small step towards big security.

As an aside, in my estimation, Joanna Rutkowska is one of the most compelling computational thinkers today. Although her work tends to be at the most elaborate-threat-focused edge of computing security, reading it, it often feels like she's already running "where the ball is going", and I wouldn't be shocked to find that in 20 years, some of the 'whoa, crazy' things from Qubes or this stateless approach are actually regularly used in mainstream computing. I have no particular threat, and no particular need, and I suspect that many of the programs I use regularly wouldn't work there, but there's a part of me that would love to spend more time in Qubes.
The mid-Atlantic is pretty good about nature not killing you. I grew up in suburban Philly — the only wildlife really to worry about were deer (and deer ticks). Every few years there would be a bear sighting, or a tree branch falling on someone’s head while out for a run, but if you’re inland, hurricanes aren’t a problem, you don’t really get snow that can’t be dealt with, no earthquakes, volcanos, wildfires, etc.
So, when will this data be sold to your insurance company so that you pay a premium?
The highest discriminatory factor I see in the tech community is the English language. You either have to invest a lot of energy to master it or you are left with local niche communities.

Of course that is difficult to tackle, but it can serve as a benchmark. You can offer a french speaker to be addressed with the wrong pronoun in french or the correct one in English. How would the majority decide?
If they have a better product, so be it. But I'm not convinced that more engineers and more R&D necessarily lead to that, nor am I convinced that smaller, more niche products are always choked out. If that were the case, we'd only have huge companies and a bunch of choked out entrepreneurs. Rather, a bunch of us out here with small companies are doing just fine. Definitely not a give up situation like "we just can't compete". That mentality gives rise to nuclear options with unintended consequences.
Psychologically Manipulative Marketing
The case against colonizing space to save humanity
Just because some teacher had a stick up their ass doesn't make them the authority of the English language.

I'm going to blow your mind, but you totes can start a sentence with 'and', and 'but' too. This isn't some new thing, it's always been this way. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/words-to-not-b...
Doesn't fit the bill yet. It's not cheap enough (you can get an iPhone 8 for the same price) and it remain to be seen if it'll manage to generate a viable ecosystem of apps around its platform. We also can't judge of the quality of the finished product yet.

I genuinely hope they succeed but that's clearly not the "Honda or Kia" of smartphones the parent was talking about, at least not in this iteration.
That's true, Haskell and Lisp get a lot more love here than they do in the real world.
Right?! I've always wondered that about this smart stuff. Like the smart water bottle that counts how many bottles of water you've had. Can't you just keep a tally? Like you said, this stuff is just bullshit that rich people buy when they have nothing better to do with their money.

I also really like your point about the data being skewed because of the price!
Of course your iPhone is listening. The difference is that it's supposed to listen only for commands after "Hey Siri..." instead of "Alexa...".

Even if you turn Siri off, it is up to Apple whether or not to really stop listening.
In a similar vein, supposedly a lot of "spider bites" are not spider bites (according to source): https://www.livescience.com/37974-he-surprising-cause-of-mos...

I've known people to theorize that many small welts are caused by spider bites even though they didn't see the spider or know when they got bitten.
"Jim, I have detected signs of Dextromethorphan abuse in one of your children. No need to worry, Jim. Help is already on the way, the door will be unlocked automatically via Amazon Key..., your children will be returened, clean..."
It’s constantly listening for “Hey, Siri”, unless I missed your point.
"Let people choose their own words to describe themselves."

How is that PC? How is that not common courtesy??
Grassfed does not necessarily lead to more methane production, it depends on the mix of grass and secondary vegetation, on the grain mix being compared to, and on potential supplements.

https://prairiesoilsandcrops.ca/articles/volume-1-3-print.pd...
I've used Ranger in the past but eventually went back to Midnight Commander. From a usability point of viewer nothing compares with a fixed 2 panels file list.