skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It defines de-identified as “information that cannot reasonably identify, relate to, describe, be capable of being associated with, or be linked, directly or indirectly, to a particular consumer.”"

I'd love to know what they mean by reasonable... I've seen some demos of tech that can do some pretty amazing things at de-de-identifying.
A bit of a tangent, but if you use a Mac, I've found that Dash is really great for getting things done without internet access. It's main purpose is to pull in local copies of docsets and search those, but it can also pull in sections of stack overflow (such as all Python questions, or all Pandas questions), and it integrates with things like Alfred, so you can do scoped searches without any GUI interaction.
Another angle is whether you want the backdoor in your core infrastructure. So far other than the fbi cases and the trade issues, the concentration is on the 5g backend. It is not bad mouthing. It is a real worry.

Not just American. The Microsoft has to show source code I read in news has to demo it to china. But china has no choice here.

But when it happens to America, natural course of action I think.
Googlers should be asking: did the folks who did this go through privacy and security review, because I'm really surprised this was approved.
The nature of the government matters.

The US is a representative democracy that has rule of law. This is not denying the bad behavior of intelligence agencies in the past. Supporting the ideals of the west (representative democracy, independent court system, individual (minority/women's) rights, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, etc.) require organizations like this to exist. This doesn't mean they shouldn't be held to a high standard (they should), but that good people should work with them and that it's critical good people do so the standard is high.

The UAE is a religious dictatorship with pretty much none of these things, supporting their intelligence agencies (particularly when they're targeting political activists that they deem a threat) is worse and not morally equivalent. This is likely why they painted it as entirely for defense against terrorism to most of the contractors.

I find it pretty disturbing that this person, knowing about the offensive targeting (particularly of political activists), only finds this morally concerning when it involves the surveillance of Americans.
To downvoters: That point is valid.

It's the golden cage that allowed them to do of course good things this time. This argument is the old one against a walled garden and it still stands.
And so they should be fully understanding why Apple enforced them. Furthermore, the terrifying level of abuse of the Screenwise program has been going on a really, really long time: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/02/google-paying-users-...

It's hard to tell exactly how long the iOS app has been available, but I found version 7.x of the Android app all the way back in 2015 on APKmirror (it's archive only goes back so far). So presumably the mobile app strategy has been around a long time.
Do they really get 1099s? TIL

Seems like this doesn't apply then.
What I really like about both the Facebook and Google scenarios here is that Apple's response causes inconvenience for the developers (the party at fault) but not for end users. Facebook's app still works fine, it's just Facebook employees who are affected.

Before Apple's response, it seemed like Facebook might get away with it because their app is so big and important -- blocking the app would hurt a large fraction of Apple's own customers.

But Apple's response is a clever way to show that, hey, they're big and important too! A large fraction of Facebook's employees use iPhones, not just for developing the iPhone app, but for general work purposes, because the iPhone is a great product. (I wonder how many of those employees will now switch to Android, though...)
The Buttcoin Standard: The Problem with Bitcoin
As a developer with a Mac and the knowledge how to do this.

That is a very limited subset of iPhone users.
Who Is Bob Swan, Intel's Surprise CEO Pick?
Apple actively avoids no anything - the primary difficulty in collecting nothing, and having no access to it, is users expect not to lose data. Even in that case where they’ve lost all of their devices (which could obviously be just a single one). Making that possible was the topic of Ivan Krstic’s talk at black hat a few years ago.
Is there any other language with such thing like lombok? How would one explain why "lombok" is necessary at all? Specially to a newcomer.

With efficient/safer languages like Golang and Rust getting track, I don't see a reason into trying to keep Java around.
I have a gHome Mini and an Echo Dot. Both are fine for turning on bulbs, answering random trivia questions etc., but the gHome is especially nice for "Hey Google, please play BBC Worldservice on Chromecast Audio". I remember when I had to string a 30ft shortwave antenna for that... (you can do it in a browser, too, but running a 1000W power supply to listen to the news seems a bit wasteful).
"Digital data doesn't exist unless it's backed up in at least 3 locations".

I had a professor back in 2008 that hammered this into my brain and I share it every chance I get.
Apple can't pay attention to it though.

The whole point of enterprise certificates was to allow creation of internal apps that even Apple shouldn't know about.
Assuming the startup has a product, your questions should center on impact and growth.

1. Impact: What problem are they solving for users? How are users using the product?

2. Growth: How quickly are they growing users, both free and paying? How are they acquiring users?

If the startup has a convincing answer for 1, they're working on something concrete. If they don't have convincing answer, probe deeper to find out if they have tangible plans for what they're going to create.

If they answer question 1 well, ask them 2. If they're growing users quickly (for instance, double digit % week over week), the startup is totally worth considering. If they're not growing quickly, ask them how they plan to grow. It's useful to know how they're acquiring users -- if they're spending money to get users, you should ask if it's scalable. If they're getting users without spending much money, great.

Growth can fix most problems in a startup -- it attracts users, investors and talent. If they aren't seeing growth, they should at least have a tangible impact with the users they have and plans for growth.
I agree that Google & FB violated the terms of the agreement they had with Apple.

I think an interesting question is: What is Apple's best move from here?

I would suggest that Apple should leave Google/ FB blocked for ~1-2 weeks, to remind them who's boss on the iOS platform. However, I would argue it'd be smart for them to switch them back on after that- there's a chance that this looks anticompetitive to regulators at some point, which isn't something Apple wants to mess around with.
So... Xeon Phi?
Of course you should. It's my device, I should be able to do what I want with it. The default should be protected but root should be available.
CSS-Tricks is a great website.

Also, this "SVG Can Do That??" presentation[1] is "old" by internet standards but is still (to me, at least) somewhere between eye-opening and mind-blowing:

1. http://slides.com/sdrasner/svg-can-do-that#/
Has this group tried outright banning states with overly complex or onerous tax policies?

Voters might suddenly care about this legislation, if suddenly found themselves banned from large swaths of ecommerce sites overnight, with messages telling them it's because of their state's tax policies.
Drains batteries. Consumes storage space. Requests unnecessary access to my personal files and contacts. Difficult to shut down. Push notifications. I want NONE of this.

The last straw for me was when Facebook messenger pocket dialed a "friend" I hadn't talked to in 7 years. Not only was it something I had no use for, it was outright invasive.
Though I have absolutely no evidence to support this, I suspect that gambling doesn't suffer the same, uh.. stamina issues, that porn probably does. I assume that the sustained stream of small amounts of currency would easily add up to more revenue for gambling than porn, resulting a larger market.
Normally, AT&T would add a number before the port that would be the sacrificial number.
You need a mac with Xcode to sideload apps for iOS (unless you want to deal with jailbreaking)
ot: What's wrong with this website? It loads super slow and behaves very weirdly on my iPhone.
This is similar to saying that since error codes are ignored by most developers, functions shouldn't bother returning them at all.

Error conditions captured in the type system are a vital part of making code robust. The fact that some developers don't know how to properly handle these error cases doesn't change anything to the soundness of checked exceptions.
If you want to sell your privacy, buy an Android I guess.
Google has ended the "AdSesne for Domains" direct program. You have to use a parking company.

Just putting AdSense code up a bare domain is a good way to get banned.
> The difference is that Apple are controlling what software individuals can run on their own phones that they paid good money for.

Maybe, except that the enterprise app distribution system is a service provided by Apple. It has associated terms and conditions.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't think it's the argument to be making right now; if the topic were jailbreaking, sure. As it is, it's about abusing a service. The enterprise app distribution system is not sideloading in the same sense as it is on Android; it is a service for a specific purpose.

> But I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple phone purchasers are clearly told when they buy a phone that Apple can disable their employer's internal apps

For the individual employees, no, they probably don't know this. However, they have no real need to know; this is an implementation detail on the employer's end.

The employers 100% know about this, or else they wouldn't agree to the terms and conditions of the enterprise app distribution system. Legal teams will have pored over this. Nobody is ignorant of the implications of their actions; it just happened to be that two high-profile companies made the mistake of thinking they were immune to punishment.

But no, any company involved in the enterprise app distribution system knows 100% what getting that certificate revoked means. Especially a tech company!
Depends what you mean by AI... yea if you ask Siri for a cure and she succeeds then you're the instrument, but if I make clever use of the statistics and math behind it all, and find a way to apply it to some drug discovery or procedure, then I'm the hero, and the AI was just a tool.
> brick and mortar is dead.

Honestly, partnering with Amazon and basically giving you a product instantly would make brick and mortar thrive.

You want to buy this thing? If it's available at Best Buy, you can pick up within minutes at the counter and Amazon can ship a replacement to Best Buy in the next few days.
I'd also prefer immutables.org over lombok, because it cleverly gets by without changing the way sourcecode is turned into bytecode. All it ever does is generate additional class files that add the boring stuff. If lombok says "we can have all this awesome stuff if we break the rules a bit", immutables.org answers "we can have almost as much of we don't".
Did they get w2s and 1099s? Did FB did employment authorization verification? Did fb verify that the contracts were in fact signed by authorized guardians? A minor signing a contract has no meaning - so no “employment” contract would be valid.
Same. I switched recently after an increasing distaste for how Google makes money and have been fairly blown away by how much better privacy is on iOS. Nearly every app that has asked for permissions has explained exactly what they're used for. I don't know if that's required, but it certainly seems prevalent. Then I can do things like only give the app permission to location data when I'm actively using it. These settings aren't buried - they are in your face when the permissions are requested.

Some parts of the walled garden are annoying - having to go to the browser to buy Kindle books for example - but I think the tradeoffs of the Apple ecosystem are more than worth the benefits.
Yes. The vast majority will redeem at Movies Anywhere or Vudu or both.
If that were true rich people wouldn’t be paying half of the taxes.

Even when the US had high marginal tax rates for the wealthy, there were tons more loopholes so the effective tax rate was significantly less. That’s the reason people were on board with lowering the marginal rate in exchange for the elimination of lots of deductions.
I have an echo dot hooked up to my living room sound system which allows me to use my phone to play music wirelessly over bluetooth and Spotify connect. My TV also has a terrible sound board so instead of plugging an aux cable directly into the TV, I connect my Apple TV to the dot over bluetooth, which has much better sound quality. It's a big convenience over switching the aux cord between the various devices.
All the ones that I want!
Won’t speak for others but I’m one FB employee and also an iOS user. I’m not offended by Apple’s move.
Google can make that app public.

Or stop abusing the terms of the enterprise certificates.
No one taught me to code. I realize that this is not true for everyone, but for me, it is difficult to comprehend "being taught how to code." What does that even mean? Learning to code is synonymous with reading documentation and then implementing it. Do it a lot and you get quicker at it. Do it enough, and you memorize the standard library. Congrats, you know how to code. It's an entirely self-driven process.

I have helped engineers get up to speed on new tech more quickly than they otherwise would have. But that's not really teaching a skill. It's more like cutting down their search time for information a little bit. It would be completely useless if they didn't already know how to use documentation.

Software engineering, on the other hand, is something that can be taught.
Hi - cool thanks!
What do you exactly mean by this?
Waiting for geoqueries also. Would make a bunch of features in a few of my apps so much easier.
Apple Still Charging Customers for iPhone 7 Microphone Defect
The same can be said about Scala and Groovy. (Groovy brings in those generators via an annotation)
The thing is with RTFM is that it takes time. We don't all have time. So while RTFM will sometimes help, almost all the manuals lack good examples. It would be much more useful if all manuals had an equally extensive examples section. Then we could say RTFE(xamples). `man awk` and `/` for `examples`, they have a great example section. `man curl` doesn't have a specific section but does have examples sprinkled throughout the options. `man kill` has zero references to `example`, yeah, probably don't need it but there are some nice `kill` tricks that could be in there.

I do read `man` pages daily, and it does get easier & faster with time. I am a pro at searching man pages, but again, most lack good, high quality examples, which would be most effective. As soon as I open a man page I press `/`, which lets me search. If I am looking for an option (e.g. -F) I search for ` -F` with the preceding space, this almost always gets you the actual option, not just mentions of it. Then I press `n` or `shift + n` to go to the next and previous results.

Also keep in mind that some apps don't have man pages, for those try `help <command>` or `info <command>`.

Another tip is that the `apropos` or `man -k|--apropos` command can search all man pages for you. Also there are hidden man pages, like `man 7 signal` instead of just `man signal` (try it). `apropos` can find those for you.

Getting faster at reading is a key part of this, I spent some time exercising my eye muscles and it does help. (Eye Q) was the name of the software I used, I plan on revisiting that again.

I also spent a lot of time reading technical books, which _only_ helps if you practice the information you learn. Otherwise it just goes in and out. You want to take knowledge and turn it into skills, by practicing. Deliberate Practice to be more specific per the book Peak by Anders Erickson (must read for all learners).

At any rate, don't be afraid to ask and use StackOverflow, we don't all have many hours to find answers, we need to be effective, that includes reading a lot, but also knowing how to search, very effectively. Search Engines are a manual in a sense.
„Google is correct, there does not appear to be any Root Certificate install for their app. pretty substantial difference. I also notice a phrase completely absent from Facebook’s replies: ‚We apologize‘“

https://twitter.com/chronic/status/1090761957194502150?s=21
You may want to follow the development of Jellyfin (https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin), which is a fork of the Emby Media Server when it became proprietary.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Jellyfin's team, I just contributed one patch to the codebase.
Small companies that are just starting out may use real data in test environments since it's a bit easier than using mocked data... Honestly this really only holds for companies that also avoid unit/integration tests (which will generally require that data to support the tests be explicitly mocked in some manner)

Since this involves computers nothing above is a hard rule, but it goes along with my experience.
There's a lot more in the program agreement I didn't include. These are just a few of the highlights I happened to notice.

> ...though perhaps they could make a case that these specific networking hooks were walled away to a separate, non-prohibited purpose.

They could not. The primary purpose of the Facebook and Google research apps was not to provide a VPN service; as such, using VPN services was a violation of the program terms. The use cases mentioned -- "to serve advertising or to otherwise build user profiles for advertising" -- are examples of prohibited use cases, not the full extent of the prohibitions.
Medicaid covers the poor and preventative services. Adjust your political rant accordingly.
I thought that using plastic flechettes was illegal because you can't x-ray to find and remove them.
No, one can of soda daily, vs one cigarette smoked per week.
I think contractors working for your company is exactly what the enterprise program is for. Basically the public at large can’t get the app, but your company has a lot more control over its distribution. IIRC they can push updates and of course deactivate it on devices of people who are terminated, that kind of thing.
Yes, I'm sure they're all filing Form 1099.
it may been born in the smalltalk world, but it really was worked fleshed out and challenged and hashed and rehashed in the world of java ( and mirrored in other languages like C++, C#, and ruby ). The XP forum was very active in building what it meant to unit test and how to do test first development, it was highly motivated by the idea of being able to robustly respond to change with quick feedback loops. What became apparent is that the smalltalk world of small modular highly composable designs is kind of critical and much of the C++ / Java world struggled to achieve that, but there was a lot of advice on design techniques. Over time what's been left is more of an emphasis on test than design when talking about that pros and cons of unit testing. So we now want to validate our software works more than we want techniques to quickly evolve our designs and adapt to change in a robust way. Both achieve the idea of working software. So unit testing as a technique to test your software works may not be as good as integration testing and E2E testing, but that wasn't its sole goal, adaptable design was. Not that design has been left behind, if anything we are seeing quite a lot of focus on things like functional programming and new design ideas for putting software together. The key thing is not really the dogma of practices but the ideas of working software and adapting to change and that the idea of robustness and good design is embraced in the core of what you do.
If they are intelligent they just installed a lot of cheap neon signs :)
It briefly looked like they would move towards requiring software to come from the App Store. They did add the warning you see the first time you open any application that you downloaded from the internet, which is still there. That alone isn't problematic, but if they'd truly locked down macOS they would have alienated all of the programmers who use Macs. Thankfully, they seem to have dropped that idea.
Paying a random consumer $20 does not make them a contractor. Do you think they all got 1099s?
Yeah, I think you're missing what happened.

> Google’s private app was designed to monitor how people use their iPhones, similar to Facebook’s research app.

Googling this, I don't see references to 1099, W2, or Corp to Corp contracts which might help anyone say it's "internal." Paying someone for a service does not make them a part of internal operations of a company.

It's this Screenwise Meter app which got the certificate nixed, and with it, any other apps on that cert were shattered. The aforementioned app was a non-internal app used in a production capacity, which falls out of the bounds of test/dev/internal apps enforced by the contract.

Tl;Dr: Google had in service a production application using a developer/internal cert. This caused the cert to fall in scope for revocation.
Lots of reasons. People tend not to appreciate what they have. However I think the main reasons are economic and political. Companies want to keep costs down. They don't want to pay market rate. Some employees will stay put, because they're comfortable, and don't want to uproot they're life; so you can pay them less.

Politically companies "want" to budget raises as a fixed cost and divy up among employees. So they'll try to negotiate against their budget and fixed, manageable raises / promotions. Lots of people will play along.

The logic is insane. Suppose I'm the employee, and selling a car; the company is buying one. I want 10k, the company says, I've only "budgeted" 7k, but will agree to 8k. Meanwhile I have a buyer willing to pay 12k; company says no deal, and instead goes out and pays 15k for the same car. This seems to be how many of these situations unfold. The crazy thing is many employees are willing to stay for less than they can get on the market; but the company just won't do it.
Yeah this is article comes out and says that it's based on gut, not science. So speaking for anecdotal evidence, unit tests that don't break and frequent deploys are way better than finessing one more Gherkin test.
Why would Apple enforce its rules for only 1-2 weeks? The rules are the rules; they aren’t doing anything bad here.
LM's developers regularly communicate with users, and the remote-backup option seems like something they would want to think about.
Nice apps don't do this. You don't have to install the bad ones?
Define "deeply immoral". I'm sure we'll have different interpretations and so do many others (obviously). Completely disagree that there are two root problems. It's still one and that's the parents. Media and social companies are not obligated to tailor to bad parents.
Meet IceWorm: Nasa’s New Ice-Climbing Robot
I know some people who moved from the 'infosec underground' in Western Europe to the Middle East 10-ish years ago, nowadays they mostly don't have contact any more with anyone from 'back then'. But I've wondered - how much would one make in such a role? It doesn't seem like it would be a 'lifer' job, so you'd have to be looking at high 6, potentially 7 figures to make it worth while. But from what I could tell back when these people I knew would still post a picture here or there - it wasn't even close to that. It would be something that would let them live a comfortable middle class life style there at best.

So, anyone with some gossip from that world care to comment?