skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The minds that were behind LiveJournal, Friendster, and MySpace, to name just 3 other social platforms that had monthly active usership in the millions, were not as disgustingly criminal and unethical in nature as the mind of Zuckerberg, so, to answer your question, another online social platform could be more civil and nicer, and not as aggressive (with auto-playing, auto-looped videos, for one thing), and manipulative, and silo-creating in terms of the design and algorithms in the same way, and could be far less ruthlessly greedy, invasive, and devious toward its users in terms of the requiring, gathering, selling, and sharing of those users' data.

An online social networking platform could even take a total different format than one that invites users to upload all their real personal life information and photos; there could be a platform as one where the users are playing ficitonalized characters in a make-believe world, and there isn't the same severe data-mining and harvesting of users' minds and lives, let alone with clear algorithmic and editorial favoring of political-themed content; I'm thinking first of something like the The Sims from 2000 to 2015[0], but there is a now a certain game that has become the de-facto social network of pre-teens to early teens, and that is Fortnite Battle Royale - see these 2 articles from December 2018[1]-[5]. Yes, there are other risks and dangers with such a platform (where gamification is taken to a much further extent: you're playing much more of a character in a game than you are with the "character" you "play"--in the sense of "portray" and "direct" on Facebook)[6], but it's not, in my view, nearly as immoral and irresponsible as what Facebook does.

[0] Sims popularity, as recently as 2014, when the latest version of it was still the #1 computer game:

https://simscommunity.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Screen...

[1] Charged: Fortnite isn't a game, it's a place - As social media becomes ever more toxic, Fortnite has become the new social network and a place to hang out where you go to talk to friends

https://char.gd/blog/2018/fortnite-is-the-new-hangout-spot

[2] WSJ: How Fortnite Triggered an Unwinnable War Between Parents and Their Boys

http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-fortnite-triggered-an-unwinn...

[3] See the selected tweets here, including: "Fortnite is the tween generation's Facebook (at least for boys). Spent a few hours last weekend with a friend's 12 YO, Fortnite is the platform for his entire social/academic life. FYI i was labeled an 'old noobie'."

https://www.techmeme.com/181222/p8#a181222p8

[4] The astonishing usership stats (scroll down to the list):

http://www.businessofapps.com/data/fortnite-statistics/

[5] Many more stats:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnite_Battle_Royale#Player_...

[6] Impact:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnite_Battle_Royale#Impact
This is a browser problem. I get the same issue working on IoT devices with limited number of inbound connections. If they can't open up their 6 sockets, all of the mainline browsers fail to consistently reuse existing connections for missing resources.
Are Facebook and Apple competitors?
Time spent in front of screens hinders child development
This is exactly what Apple would do to a small indie developer if they found they did something similar. Glad to hear that they aren’t afraid to do it to a company like Facebook.
The strong point was embedded in the text... that "science" becomes a cover for plain old prejudice. And even a bright mind like James Watson can fall for it.

edit: If you're one of the downvoters who think my argument is weak, google "phrenology". In the 19th century, it was widely believed that intelligence and character could be measured by the size and shape of the skull - with Europeans on top, of course, and non-white races showing "deformities" that reduce their intelligence and morality. It's totally debunked now, but that's what "scientific racism" sounded like not that long ago. So when I see DNA "science" used to justify racism, I think of phrenology, and think of the possibility that otherwise smart and well-meaning people are using "science" as a shield for their own prejudice.
Chrome 72 is now available on Desktop, Android and iOS
> equivalent to selling information on what websites you visit.

You make it sound like they're just obtaining a list of URLs, but that's not it. For $20, they get to impersonate you while you're in the VPN and after you leave (they have all your passwords and session cookies). They can also impersonate anyone you deal with. They have all decrypted information going between you and the rest of the internet. Not even your ISP gets that amount.

Even further problematic is the scale at which they can do this. This isn't just a concern we should see as individuals but also as a group. They can control a grand portion of information flow and authentication in the whole web.
>If we agree that they didn’t claim to be doing CVD

...and...

>I mean it’s not relevant because that’s not what they were doing.

If they first reported it via the product-security@apple.com, what were they doing then?
> They likely did not understand the effect of installing the VPN and trusted root provided by the app.

I'm just not convinced on this point. I think it's likely a lot of people did understand that Facebook could see all their internet traffic, and thought for $20 it was a fair trade. There's a HN user down thread (anonymous5133) who says he used the app and quite liked the exchange.

Now, it's possible these users did not think through all the consequences that sending this data to Facebook could have—but just how much responsibility does Facebook have here? Does Facebook need to say in big red type, "This data could be given to health insurance companies some day and used to deny coverage?" (I'm not even clear if that would be legal, but I bring it up as an oft-cited nightmare scenario.)
Tech Salaries Stagnant Despite Low Unemployment: Survey
> it's probably just a case of not eating your own dogfood.

I agree, though I'd qualify it because I'm sure they're testing the site, but it's on a fat pipe with low latency that easily hides any performance issues. It doesn't seem limited to web development though - game development seems to have the same issue, where it's clear devs are playing and testing on overpowered rigs with little regard for low-end systems.
I wonder if google will do the same for their "install a VPN and app outside the app store to look at what people do" app:

https://support.google.com/audiencemeasurement/answer/757389...
Bitbucket having issues
Either both positive and negative anecdotes, related to addiction treatment in America, are welcome and on topic for an addiction thread, or neither are.
This sounds like a first order objection to a second order concern.

In particular:

> What’s not going to sell, and what the tech industry needs to get over is “lulz, it’ll impossible to intercept military or terrorist information because I need absolute privacy for my saucy emails”

Seems to be an ironic mischaracterisation of the parent’s point, which was precisely that one coubtry’s terrorism is another’s gay rights activist or high ranking foreign official.

From the article:

In 2017, for instance, the operatives used Karma to hack an iPhone used by Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, as well as the devices of Turkey’s former Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Şimşek, and Oman’s head of foreign affairs, Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdullah. It isn’t clear what material was taken from their devices.

“Saucy e-mails” is a bit tone deaf :(
It's a disciplinary action for outrageous behavior.
"...while a framework will let you create standard solutions to standard problems very quickly, you always then have to add that little special sauce that makes your app unique, and that is where the frameworks can slow you down instead of speeding you up. Vanilla coding, on the other hand, is just as fast whether you're doing something "normal" or something unique to your particular app."

I've been saying this for years and always get heavy push-back by the framework proponents. I've also encouraged them to look at history. Ten years ago, it was ALL about Backbone. Then Angular came around and it was ALL about Angular. Then React came around and it's currently ALL about that. But, wait! Now Vue is starting to gain some traction. In 3-5 years it'll be ALL about Vue.

My point is this: if the frameworks are so great and all-encompassing (I've literally heard, "you can build anything with [FRAMEWORK]. You don't need anything else!"), why doesn't one of them stand out so solidly that nobody would think to create another one? Why do we, like toddlers grown tall, keep rushing to the next latest and greatest shiny object that catches our eyes?
Maybe focus on making the less competent more competent?
There is a "Blacklist Block" app on F-Droid that (despite the name) will do that on any Android phone.
that's the feeling I sometimes get. Let's all go back and discuss microservices and virtualization and keep pretending technology is neutral. Because if we were actually to confront these issues we might actually get somewhere.

I have said shit before that I regretted and where I have rightly been put in place. The above comment isn't one of them though. Also I'm not a robot so maybe feeling something when I read this scoop is my own fault. idk
The already tried (kind of): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home
Perhaps he should stop funding it then.
Yep, but even reference counting doesn't really help: the basic building block of many lock free algorithms is the ability to read/write a reference to/from a shared location atomically.

With a reference counted pointer, you cannot "read" it without incrementing the count, or else someone else might drop the count to zero and free the memory. You would need hardware support for atomically reading a pointer, dereferencing it, and then incrementing the value at that location.

GC (whether tracing or epoch based), hazard pointers or avoiding dynamic memory allocations in the first place (so all memory is pre-allocated, outside of the lock free parts) are the only solutions to this I'm aware of.
I disagree that what Safari is doing is good for the user. Safari used to show https://stripe.ian.sh/ as "Stripe, Inc". By hiding the URL, it significantly increased the phishing potential of the website. Feel free to visit the above false stripe site, its not malicious and has a great write up in the issue. In this case they are putting a lot of blame on EV Certificates - which I agree causes more harm then good - but Safari's decision to cover up the URL made the issue significantly worse.
Has there ever been a case of the latter without the former?
Ask HN: Can you share your problems?
Many of us are here in search of new business ideas. Maybe your problem can reveal a business idea. I don't think it will work, but it's worth trying.
They’ve also been expanding the reach of TestFlight apps through public invite links. There are some notable apps (iSH, a Unix terminal emulator, comes to mind) that are only distributed through TestFlight, since that sort of thing would never make it through App Review.
I feel like I've been ranting about this for years. Way more the 50% of the web is simply content - text and images. Pages that serve up content should be HTML and CSS, period. Why do I sit around waiting for pages to render on magazine websites? Because the developers built what should have been a very simple website as a single-page app with a fat framework and 9000 supporting libraries. Development tell the business and tell themselves that it's about creating a great user experience, but it's really just fashion, and what sounds like fun to build.
Just look at your average job ad. Its basically a checklist of tech exactly like this.
I think it's fair to say the browser has a ton of potential performance pitfalls in it, regardless of framework or lack thereof, and it's really easy to make a slow thing no matter what you do. There's definitely a ton of people who take relatively fast frameworks and do slow things with them.
My favorite part:

# Remove the stupid footer
footer = soup.find("footer").extract()
> If they first reported it via the product-security@apple.com, what were they doing then?

Just reporting it by email! Why does that mean they thought they were following someone else's idea of how to do disclosure? It's not called cvd-only-security-reports@apple.com is it? Maybe they'd never heard of CVD. Maybe their idea of disclosure is to email and then Tweet it as well.

Do you see what I mean though? You snarkily ask 'maybe I'm wrong but this doesn't look like X' when nobody ever said or implied it was X. It doesn't make any sense as a criticism.
That's where I see this going. Perhaps Facebook will fork Android. Today it's Apple interfering with Facebook use of mobile devices. Tomorrow it could be Google.
The article indicates their lunch menus and staff transportation apps don't work.

> Apple has shut down Facebook’s ability to distribute internal iOS apps, from early releases of the Facebook app to basic tools like a lunch menu. A person familiar with the situation tells The Verge that early versions of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and other pre-release “dogfood” (beta) apps have stopped working, as have other employee apps, like one for transportation.

I'm totally fine with this house burning down. Just noting that this is apparently having very significant internal effects, even if the public Facebook app is fine.
It depends how you see things. imho some things are intrinsically wrong, doing them because "someone else would have lined up to take advantage of the opportunities" doesn't change the fact that it's wrong in the first place.

Just the same way that if something wrong is done by a lot of people it doesn't make it right (smoking, drinking &c.).
Correct. There is nothing intrinsically noble about technologists. No Hippocratic oath, no unifying moral code. They’re susceptible to the same pitfalls of professional disregard as anyone. Understanding that will help you temper any unearned trust in software and technology companies.
I know this is crazy talk, but facebook could release the code and allow users to load onto their phone using xcode.
I don't think, that unsubstantiated fears should have that kind of effect on the society's policies.
Sounds like it would require customers to provide you with all their contacts for creating the filter? If so, no thanks. This feature could be implemented 100% on the device itself, without leaking information.
There've been similar issues in both iOS and Android before - iOS had one recently where a text would cause repeated app crashes. Back in 2009 there was a full exploit via SMS on iOS, and just a few years back the Android stagefright exploit was barely spared from turning into a giant worm due to exploit mitigations and the diversity of devices. It's quite possible to see these attacks come to light in a much scarier way. That exploit is solid gold and they probably paid a small fortune for it.
I remember being on dial-up as a kid back then and being insanely jealous that kids in college got T1 connections in their dorms. One of the reasons why I wanted to go to college as a kid was the blazing fast internet speed. Downloads that took hours for me, took seconds for them. It sounded like heaven to me back then.
I've been playing Verdi's piano reductions lately as a way to get to know his operas better, so this comes as a wonderful surprise! He was not only a master of lyricism and orchestration but also quite involved in politics and well-loved during his time. Fascinating man.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20131002-verdi-when-music-m...
This debate is needlessly muddled by this fuzzy notion that because it is "the Internet" therefore something different needs to be done, that this is somehow a new situation. But it is not.
If it was the 1970s and people were told to sign a contract to allow a company to physically track every single event in their lives, they would not consent to it.
If it was the 1970s and some company tried to get exclusive access to people's TV and radio to bombard them with bespoke advertisement and propaganda, they would not consent to it.
So then what is so different? Nothing much. What Facebook and Google and others are currently doing is way beyond what a sane society would allow. It is just that people are confused because it is done through a new medium, but nothing much is different.
Really cool concept. Thanks!
Thanks for the heads up. We'll get that information incorporated into the piece.
> But then again many physicists were also convinced Nazi officers.

If the Germans would have won the war, we'd probably celebrate those officers :/ All the torture and killing would be spun as "necessary evil" (if it even came to light), and further investigations would be blocked by the government. How we perceive the past is...complicated.
If only forced attrition were so enthusiastically applied to Amazon’s recruiters.
This is a classic "you ran out of pins / wanted a convenient debug feature, didn't you" design indication.

I'm slightly unclear on what the Paula pulse train would have looked like; is it what would normally be called a "1-bit DAC", or is it PWM at the PAL frequency?
Oh man, this is amazing. I'm teary-eyed with nostalgia, too.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the demoscene and tracker music, here are some recommended old-school tunes to spin up to get a feel for the art at the time. (Someone more in touch than me will have to lead you to the new school!) Just keep in mind the technological limitations on some of these songs: 4 channels, maybe 100k all-in for such wonderful music. Truly amazing.

My recommendations, running from 1986-1993ish:
Karsten Obarski - Crystal Hammer
Firefox - Galaxy 2
Uncle Tom - Poseidon
Jester - Elysium
Captain - Space Debris
Tip + Firefox - Enigma
Mantronix - Act Of Impulse
4-mat - Red Sector Theme
Romeo Knight - Cream Of The Earth
Greg - Odyssey Part 2
Jugi - Onward Ride
Laxity - Desert Dream

I'm sure others can add more. What amazing times!
Isn't the UAE muslim? Why Christmas? or is it because UAE dollars bought Christian mercenaries? We are still in the middle ages and the crusades are still raging. Time to get rid of money - or at least build walls that prevent money from crossing borders as well as criminals. We are not worthy of the the technologic advances that a few geniuses have bestowed on us.
Why does it have to use tech to be your side project?
As someone who ran a solo consultancy for a few years and probably was not exploiting myself, I think you're undervaluing what an employee W-2 consultant gets from their employer and also what the client gets from what you describe as the non-productive labor of the employer.

When I consulted, delivery was only a portion of the package. Sales work isn't just "Convince the customer to buy the engagement", it often required substantial (and often speculative) work on creating proposals, doing client education ("Why should I even send email anyhow?"), scoping projects, attending conferences, writing publicly (an activity which is both marketing and produced substantial value despite not being directly billable), etc etc. Clients were not strictly buying delivery; delivery came with a bundle of requirements like e.g. having to deliver while being insured. This produces client value, because they sensibly don't want to give a commit bit to someone who could accidentally bring down the business and has no meaningful assets if sued. Warren Buffet will happily take that risk off the client's hands, to their happiness, but he won't do it for free. Clients similarly can't engage consultants without lawyers being involved. Lawyers materially de-risk engagements; de-risking is something both sides very much want; professional labor is not free. Clients benefit from receiving trade credit (the consultancy will advance you $60k of value and you pay them back months later, with no interest charged, minimal underwriting, and functionally no recourse in event of default); trade credit isn't free.

From the perspective of a W-2 consultant, the things you get from the enterprise include having predictable work lined up by people who specialize in getting gigs and scheduling them so that you can focus on delivery. The set of technologists who can deliver is much larger than the set who can both deliver and convince software companies to pay premium rates for their time. (Trivial proof that this is true: look how many delivery-focused technologists say that business owners on HN are blowing smoke about rates clients are happy to pay every time that subject comes up.) The consultancy insulates the consultant from market risk; regardless of whether the consultancy is having a good month or a bad month in pipeline or cashflow management payroll happens on the day everyone expects it to in exactly the amount they expect it to. The consultancy invests in the professional development of their employees and in the specialization of their offering on the marketplace, which specialization increases the market value of their employees while at the consultancy and in the future.

There is a way for delivery-focused employees to get ownership. It is to become a principal consultant. Some firms offer promotion tracks which get one there. The faster option, if a delivery-focused employee thinks that the enterprise is not adding value, is to walk out the door and hang out their shingle. If the delivery-focused employee was right, they immediately have 100% ownership of the enterprise. If they were wrong, oh well, capitalism happens to capitalists.
But the reason to use a framework is to have a fast path for devs to write SPA's that feel fast without having to know the intricacies of the DOM. I'm honestly not trying to be argumentative, I really though that was the reason for using react/vue.
Nothing is hellish when you’re waking up from ketamine, dude. If it was, not all of the soccer players would have survived.
About Napster and on evolt, the whole thing was a nostalgia bomb as soon as I clicked the link.
You are welcome to! Just pay for your subscription in the usual way but print slightly different business cards (which Nudge unfortunately won't be able to pay for)
Several such cases are made public every year.

Here's one:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-jet-vulnerability-st...

"The vulnerability came to light in mid-September after the Trend Micro Zero-Day Initiative (ZDI) posted details about it on its site. ZDI said Microsoft had failed to patch the flaw in due time and they decided to make the issue public, so users and companies could take actions to protect themselves against any exploitation attempts."

Or how about this?

"Google Admin, one of Android’s system-level apps, may accept URLs from other apps and, as it turned to be, any URLs would be fine, even those starting with ‘file://’. As a result, a simple networking stuff like downloading web pages starts to evolve into a whole file manager kind of thing. Aren’t all Android apps isolated from each other? Heck no, Google Admin enjoys higher privileges, and by luring it into reading some rogue URL, an app can escape sandbox and access private data. How was that patched? First, allow me to brief you on the way independent researched disclosed the vulnerability. It was discovered as far back as March, with a corresponding report submitted to Goggle. Five months later, the researchers once again checked out what was going on only to find the bug remained unpatched. On the 13th of August the information on the bug was publicly disclosed, prompting Google to finally issue the patch."

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/security-week-34/9637/
I Am a StrykerX Assault Backpack, and This Airport Lounge Is an Insult