skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He would not lose the rights to the characters. The characters in a series of literary works are eligible for trademark. He would just lose the right to prevent others from making exact copies of his older books. Derivative works with characters that are not important to the canon works would be allowed, but main characters would have to be licensed before publication, lest a C&D letter render the entire print run unsellable. A breakdown in license negotiations means running a search-and-replace on some character names.

Instead of writing about Jon Snow, you're writing about Dan Sleet, a suspiciously similar character.

In reality, this only matters for fan-fiction, multi-author universes like Star Wars or D&D Dragonlance, and cross-media adaptations. Most print-published authors have zero problems creating original characters. The problem is making them follow the plan for the plot.
Alright folks, it's time to bring back Geocities and Angelfire. Pull out your antique rotating skull and "under construction" gifs.
It's anything but. It's utterly useless. Just use virt-manager while it lasts. It is being deprecated though, after which you will be forced to use boxes or the other virt-manager replacement.
>most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online.

Where does the author get that idea? The majority of Facebook's 2 billion users do not post to their profile feed. Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content. Some of the content is from family and friends, and some is from media outlets (NYTimes, etc).

Recommending "personal websites" is talking about a solution to a problem that most of the billion users don't have.

The way most people use Facebook is more of an RSS feed rather than a 1999 Geocities personal website. (But that doesn't mean RSS readers can replace Facebook because that technology is missing a "real names" reverse directory lookup database.)
There's a move to work on ircv3 as well. Not sure how far we are from these sort of changes, but I would love to see rich IRC clients. I've seen IRC clients that preview images and such, so Slack isn't any more special in comparison (in my opinion anyway). Since it's all things a client can just support.

https://ircv3.net/irc/
Agreed. It's very obvious that Slack has zero experience dealing with regulations. They totally went overboard with deleting any account that ever connected from a restricted location.

There is no conflict with discrimination though. Sanctions takes precedence over pretty much everything else.

Don't expect your phone and applications to be usable when you travel to Iran/Syria, many services won't work. There was a news not long ago about Google Cloud blocking network access from Iran.
Imperfect Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice
This is every newspaper ever. I have probably already paid for a couple of extra weeks of the Globe & Mail at full price because I have been dragging my feet on calling to cancel my $1 trial. Same deal with the Economist and Bloomberg Businessweek.
there's activitypub.. it's a federated social networking protocol. the most prominent implementation is mastodon (joinmastodon.org). Counting almost 2 million users by now
I've been looking for a solution to this for a while. How can I let my friends and family stay connected with photos videos & related metadata, but retain security and ownership?

I thought NextCloud might be a good solution, but I'm still searching.
Amoeba finds approximate solutions to NP-hard problem in linear time
I mean, Slack recently announced that they would give employees complete access to employee's private conversions.

When a company starts thinking this way, you know there's no turning back, and more such (censorship/surveillance-friendly) actions will be taken in the future.
I still have a facebook for two reasons:

1. Chat - I have the chat app on my phone. The majority of my family and friends are on facebook. I can chat with them all in one application. This could be replaced by texting but facebook is simply easier and helps avoid and iOS to Android texting issues that seem so pervasive.

2. Events - I get invited to 2-3 events a week. If I'm interested in going I can let my friends know I'm going, ask questions, read event details, and even invite other friends who may be interested. This is the best use of Facebook for me now. In theory this could be replaced by something else but my parents are never going to join meetup.com
I'm mildly annoyed that images won't load properly with JS disabled due to lazy-load.js not running.
It is annoying enough that I never became a regular user and avoid them when they pop up in search results.
Valuable property existed prior to 2016, including digital assets. There are many valid criticisms of these business models but none of them are a significant factors in explaining this behavior.

If the parents won't discipline these children, the state needs to discipline those parents.
As long as the cost of living is lower it works for someone like me
This is a great article, even though the irony of the layout seeming to waste a lot of space/have a lot of whitespace/doesn't look/feel right on my mobile isn't lost on me, the content makes up for it. :)
Ephemeral content isn't a solution. The problem with any of these services is that your content, ephemeral or not, never actually goes away.
I tried to read the article about using screen readers with a screen reader! That was a lot of hard work, I am also feeling slightly ashamed that it has taken me so long to give a screen reader a go. I was using ChromeVox and it took me a long time to get it to read the page, it was reading other tabs at first and there was no easy way to control it, even with eyesight.

I think that accessibility can improve considerably with HTML5 and CSS grid. There is no need for pages to be a sea of divs, the document structure can be dome correctly so the page looks good with no styling, then the CSS grid layout engine can be used to make it look pretty for the sighted folk.

I think that document outline is really important, and to ask yourself the question of how you would present something if it was typed up, Word document style or like a formal letter.

There is no excuse for developers to not be using the correct tags, so that means header, main and footer, with articles and asides. The nav tag can be used for anything that is navigation and structured in a list. Pictures with figures and figure captions can be used too. All these elements can be targeted with CSS to be styled, there is no need to have documents have 17 nested divs each of them with many meaningless class tags when there are perfectly good elements to style. You can take a document and get the structure right and then use the elements as a skeleton in SCSS to style it. If structured properly these need not go '17 deep'. I think that if people had div-less and class-less markup and were used to styling it that way with SCSS generating the CSS then it would seem absurd to go to the unmaintainable sea of divs and class tags that passes for normal today.

There does need to be more work done with HTML5 to get the perfect outline, I do use outline tools already but that is a fine art.

Back to the article, the BBC do actually have people that use screen readers, I met one recently and how he used his iphone was a sight to behold, just playing with it more like how Jimi Hendrix played the guitar.

Since the author works for the BBC and with the BBC being so vast he might not know the screen reader community that work there.

I have suggested to people I have worked with that we get an actual partially sighted person to test web pages for accessibility. I got a 'why would you want to do that' attitude. However, I think that this is a service that should be offered to clients.
> We’re back to building sites that are not for everyone - huge, bloated sites, running fragile imperative code on the users local device. We have started to explicitly say "I think you should have this level of tech, processing power, and bandwidth before I think you're eligible to use my site".

This isn't in and of itself the problem, per se. Sometimes a more powerful and robust UI / UX / application is necessary. The problem is when said "solution" is applied to __every__ need. The problem is, when screwdrivers are being used to pund nails.

Much "like publish of perish" there's no (ego) glory in saying "Yeah. It's relatively lo-tech but that's the solution that best fit the business need." Rare is praise and/or hiring based on good analysis, appropriate tools and smart solutions. Nah. Size is all that matters. How people who can't do what you do it more important than doing the right thing(s).
You'd think she would've thought of that on such a post. :P

EDIT: Isn't there also a way to pre-cache images with just CSS? o.o
Off the top of my head...

persistence, history, search, rich formatting, image previews, synchronization between devices, usable mobile clients, group/here/channel mentions, channel directory/search, channel descriptions, file upload/sharing (XDCC is not this), multi-line/expandable messages (eg, paste code or logs without flooding the channel), user status (away/DND).

Some of this can be approximated with bots, of course, but there's a lot of extra work then required to make that work (namely, setting up, writing and maintaining the bot). Some of this can be done client-side, but then you have inconsistent experience.. you don't know if the other user is going to get the image preview or if their client understands markdown or some other formatting, or is going to interpret and display your message using some other markup format. Some of this you can also work around with one of those persistent IRC connection proxies, provided each user gets one and that is also maintained by somebody.

Eventually someone packages this stuff all together for simple deployment.. and basically creates a bad clone of Slack, but with 10x maintenance requirement and so many more things that can break.
When I use a Google or Facebook account to sign into other services I do not expect private messages to be exposed. My likes, pages I follow and other relevant stuff would be expected. I do not expect a company to share my information to a 3rd party just because one of my friend consented.[1]

Congress needs to lay the hammer down and come up with privacy rights akin to GDRP.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/18/18147616/facebook-user-d...
There's a difference between acknowledging the problem and tackling it, versus cynically shaming the person. ("well if you get your cup in 30 seconds, I guess destroying the planet is fine") That just makes it into a personal attack, regardless of being a casual user or a Nespresso devotee.
Would you find an issue with user interaction though? If you provide a means of customization, then your site’s aesthetic depends upon a user’s incentive to change their page’s display. Once a certain fraction of ppl stop caring, then you’d see a visual degradation of the site that would cause a ripple effect.
This is not about logged in or offline.

Facebook is giving fairly precise technical information about what happened. The New York Times is being as coy as possible, using obfuscating language, to ensure it's readers do not understand what happened but assume the worst.

The reality is that Facebook allowed me to send messages from within Spotify, when and if I agreed to grant that access to Spotify. That's the baseline.
somewhat? it's _completely_ speculative!
That would not be the same situation at all. In the case of general knowledge questions, obviously the small groups will do better because people who are uncertain and would have voted randomly will instead listen to whomever is confident. And everyone works together to pool knowledge.

In political voting the problem is not a lack of information- everyone has a strong opinion about everything already and putting them in small groups would just result in unproductive bickering.
This starts off a bit get-of-my-lawn, but is a fantastic article with some very important points. Do yourself the favor of finishing it.
We're getting pretty good at being examples to the rest of the world of what not to do recently. Might as well sink our ship in style.
Why dependencies are ****ing you over and over again – and why you are to blame
I think it's true that many sites are over engineered for what they are. Does a site that's primarily for reading articles really need to be an SPA? Why can't your sign in fallback to being a simple form? Etc.

Then again it can actually be pretty easy to over engineer nowadays. Once you have your node/npm environment set up with webpack and all the rest you can quickly iterate a new site based on an earlier project. And if you hear of something new and cool it's only an npm command and a few hooks away.
Meh, using shouldn't wouldn't have the same rhetorical impact. It's similar to the phrase "Can't complain.". Sure you could say "Shouldn't complain".. but it doesn't work.
Agreed. I avoid using public sites like Facebook and Google+ while on it because of possible geolocation issues.

Slack was the exception because it's the tool people use when developing, so I somewhat blindly expected them to be alright with it. Especially since there are public answers to VPN issues on Twitter (https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/510137942296518657?lang=e...).
Homepage. It's your home on the internet. It's good for you.

Things to get started with:

- https://www.netlifycms.org/ - completely free static website on top of github pages

- http://mastodon.social/ - federated microblogging, which can be self-hosted as well

- https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/ - one click wordpress for 5$/m

- https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/projects/wordpress/ - another near one-click wordpress for near 5$

- https://yunohost.org/ - easy self-hosting, even on top of a raspberry

- https://indieweb.org/WordPress - make your site communicate with other sites

- https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ - decentralized, sneakernet friendly, private social system
That was how the US Senate originally operated. You would elect your state legislature (where your vote is much less diluted than at the federal level) and they would elect your Senator.

Early 20th century populism took that away. It also meant that the states now have no representation in the federal legislature, which led to an almost immediate federal takeover of basically everything.
Why Is America So Angry? The Real Roots of American Rage
Landing page is great - good job!
I'm always impressed by the real discussions that take place here in the HN comments section. They're characterized by civility, respect, and intelligent perspectives; great community to be a part of, for sure.
This is separate from the guest extensions ISO image, right?

What kind of functionality do the extensions discussed here cover?
True, but it looks like the "100 miles from an airport" part of the law was not enacted after all. My mistake.
Excel is probably mislabelled, it should say HTML instead. Look at the list above
I'm actually surprised how negatively people are taking this.

>but seems unlikely

I'm sure it's unlikely, but how great would it be to have a small black hole in our backyard to potentially visit with a probe.

>After collapse to the neutron star stage, stars with masses less than 2-3 solar masses should remain neutron stars, gradually radiating away their energy, because there is no known mechanism for further combination, and forces between neutrons prevent further collapse."

We don't understand all the mechanisms that lead to black formation. Most likely that kind of black hole would not be a result of neutron star merger or supernova, but maybe it came about through another unknown mechanism (primordial black hole?). How great would that be to find out!

>That would take forever to pinpoint an object with a radius of a few meters (apart from its existence as a black hole).

Sure, but maybe we could detect it indirectly. Maybe this tiny black hole has moons or satellites that can be detected. Or maybe we can detect it during an asteroid or comet collision.

For a non-physicist, you sure have strong opinions about what is possible and not possible.
After you've tried setting up and conducting fuzzing (rather than just reading someone else's success stories) you'll see why we cannot assume they haven't. Fuzzing isn't a binary state, you can spend weeks Fuzzing something, and then someone else with a different methodology can find dozens of new bugs.

Fuzzing scripting languages is particularly complicated because the languages themselves have infinite state. The more complicated the Fuzzer the more coverage it has, but even writing a bespoke language specific Fuzzer is about as complicated as creating the language itself.
> admitting that Slack beat IRC.

In which world does it beat IRC? Number of users? That's not even sure, since there are dozens of thousands of IRC servers worldwide. And that's not even counting the private, self-hosted IRC servers.

IRC runs everywhere and does not need a fat browser or a RAM-and-CPU hungry application to enable "chat".

As for the user experience, this would merit a whole post in itself, but Slack sucks in many ways: threads are completely unusable, channels are hard to discover unless you know about them, and now Slack makes you pay for searching thru your past messages.

I'd say there is a lot more to this topic than "Slack beat IRC".
I'm the first person to hate on Facebook, but for once I think this is hugely overblown. They didn't sell peoples data, that made it possible to voluntarily connect accounts.

It's the equivalent of complaining that hotmail sold your private email data to Thunderbird when you used Thunderbird as your desktop email client. No. They didn't, you gave them access to it because that is what connecting the accounts does.

If should be fairly clear to anyone that if you connect accounts you are exposing data between the accounts. The debate about the granularity of permissions is neither here nor there, everyone should have a clear expectation that connecting accounts = sharing lots of data. Unless it is explicitly stated what is excluded the assumption should be that everything is shared.
Myspace wasn't even meant to be a social networking site when it started. When I registered all the domains initially, there were hundreds of variants of "myspace, mylinuxspace, mywindowsspace, mydesktopspace" and such. It was supposed to be the box.com of the time. There was an app you installed and created an "X:" drive.

They had a couple HP SureStore arrays.. I forgot how much storage exactly, but they were about 19TB comprised of 9 and 18 GB drives in raid 50 or 51. There was no de-duplication and basically it was the same few hundred megs of music, animated gifs and porn over and over again.

They didn't make any money and sold everything to some news company. Even then, it was quite a while before it started to take shape as a social networking site.
The hypothesis that this is somehow related to a shift to modernity was utterly undermined for me as soon as I learned about poems like the Li Sao[1], written 2000 years before the author claims that literature developed to allow people to decipher complex societies. The character clearly feels—it’s not the case that what we interpret as their feelings are actually just actions taken by gods:

Nine fields of orchids at one time I grew,
For melilot a hundred acres too,
And fifty acres for the azalea bright,
The rumex fragrant and the lichen white.
I longed to see them yielding blossoms rare,
And thought in season due the spoil to share.
I did not grieve to see them die away,
But grieved because midst weeds they did decay.

No doubt a cursory search of ancient literature from other cultures will find similar examples. In the end this enduring myth seems to be flawed in the same way as the hypothesis that somehow a cabal of medieval rulers invented a couple centuries of time out of nowhere.[2]

[1] http://www.lingshidao.cn/hanshi/quyuan.htm
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis
There is this project which has the goal of building a decentralized Facebook - https://www.scuttlebutt.nz

I think it will eventually happen, but I don't see how mass adoption will occur. Facebook grew a lot by getting our complete address book on signup and sending invitations to the whole list.
nope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#Algo...

"Carl Shulman and Anders Sandberg suggest that algorithm improvements may be the limiting factor for a singularity because whereas hardware efficiency tends to improve at a steady pace, software innovations are more unpredictable and may be bottlenecked by serial, cumulative research."
The example above is Facebook charging a single person $1k/year while not charging other people. That's called price discrimination:
https://econsultancy.com/what-is-price-discrimination-and-is...

It would be a slam dunk lawsuit.

You can still offer discounts (airline tickets, Adobe, etc.) or negotiate pricing (cars, etc.) legally.

But, it is illegal to isolate someone and charge them more without justification as in OC's example.

So yes, Facebook charging a single person $1k/year is a true hypothetical. It couldn't happen legally in the US.
Slack's "persistence and access to history" seems questionable.

And re IRC, I gather that Sabu got doxed based on EFnet logs from the late 90s.
+1 for A Man Called Ove - surprisingly good.
Isn't google more vicious and powerful in data gathering. Why is google being given freepass.
Plenty of people installed Facebook apps that required permission to read all text messages
Don't you get in the way with facts. They don't support the narrative. Iran is an unfortunate victim of Western politics!
Medium's got a few dark patterns too. Most notably, how hard they try to trick people into viewing paid articles and losing their three or so free articles supply.

Seriously. Every single article on the front page is usually a paid article. Every single article in the email digest is usually a paid article. And in all cases, actually figuring this out is pretty hard, since you have to know the tiny star icon stands for 'paid' rather than any of the four million other meanings it may have.

Let's not forget how hard they push you to register either. Those giant modals and bars can be utterly obnoxious.

Other examples I've seen recently are:

Twitter and its absolute obsession with getting you to view tweets in 'non linear' order. Every time you set it to 'chronological order' or what not, it seems to revert back to their algorithm the next time you load the site or app. No, I don't want this. Why is the idea of a simple timeline so scary for social media sites now?

As well as YouTube and its attempts to smuggle content you don't want into your notifications list. Again, if users click subscribe, they want to do just that, not get spammed with promoted content so you can make a quick buck.

It's annoying how bad most large sites nowadays seem to be about stuff like this.
It wasn't about signing up to the accounts using FB though (as far as I understand it). These were services that acted as clients for the private messaging so they could send media directly to your friends via FB messages. I could see the granularity being too low (maybe they should have only had access to messages created in that 3rd party service), but I don't think it was necessarily nefarious that they had blanket access to all private messages, that was just the most straight forward way to implement it during a time period when people were way more excited about open APIs then they were about strict privacy.
The New Way to Manage Open Source Databases