skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Never underestimate the capacity of government, in ALL its forms, to fail.

The fault lies not so much in systems as it does in people. Certainly some systems are a better "fit" for people than other systems, but to say that having a 5 year plan or not having a 5 year plan is going to be the key to success or failure is incorrect.

Even more than how they are incentivized, WHO the people are you have working on something is the key to its success or failure. A team of uninterested geniuses will be as useless as a team of diligent dullards, and in either case, there is a high probability of failure for your project. It won't really matter how you organize either of those teams to get the job done.
Hackers Are Passing Around a Megaleak of 2.2B Records
I understand the proliferation of film streaming services is causing us a lot of frustration--and, possibly, money--but with the closing of FilmStruck last year I was really missing this collection.
I don't have to look back too far to see that the last anti-intellectual occupying the hot seat had no problem getting us involved in more wars. ISTM that is not a defining characteristic.
From the article, sounds like they'll soon be blaming the occupant of the Governor's mansion for this deal falling apart..
Burn:
We have all seen unbuttoned beer-bellies slumped in front of the TV set, and transitorized morons twitching down the street, puppets controlled by invisible disk jockeys. These are not the highest representatives of our culture; but, tragically, they may be typical of the near future. As we evolve a society orientated towards information, and move away from one based primarily on manufacture and transportation, there will be millions who cannot adapt to the change. We may have no alternative but to use the lower electronic arts to keep them in a state of drugged placidity.

For in the world of the future, the sort of mindless labor that has occupied 99 per cent of mankind, for much more than 99 per cent of its existence, will of course be largely taken over by machines. Yet most people are bored to death without work — even work that they don’t like. In a workless world, therefore, only the highly educated will be able to flourish, or perhaps even to survive. The rest are likely to destroy themselves and their environment out of sheer frustration. This is no vision of the distant future; it is already happening, most of all in the decaying cities.
> Router could mitm and chrome could allow it since they have google CAs in their chain.

That would require Google either sending the traffic back to google and out again (slowing a lot of things down) or Google putting a signed private key on the router themselves (a violation of CA agreements and a remarkably stupid thing to do in general). If they did that it would not be difficult for someone to extract that key and certificate. This would be a huge security breach.
The Space Shuttle’s Military Threat
There is research being done on targeted advertisement, and apart from the obvious effect of altering your behaviour and your attention, there has been research shown that it can go as far as changing self-perception.[1]

So to claim that there is no downside to targeted marketing is simply false. We have very little understanding what sort of effects it has on consumers, and as far as we know they're not all good.

There is no reason to believe any deliberation on part of consumers here is rational. The relationship between self harm and social media usage in adolescents are well documented as well.

So it is quite ironic to assert that being concerned about facebook's behaviour is 'ideological', when in fact advocates seem to willfully ignore evidence that suggests that we're playing dice with people's psychology here.

[1]https://hbr.org/2016/04/targeted-ads-dont-just-make-you-more...
They certainly track it, so it may be telling that they are not reporting the trend in this measure.
> 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”. I think it’s been empirically demonstrated that won’t happen.

It's very much the other way. Strong encryption algorithms have been available to the public for a long time now. You can ban using them, but the only way to effectively enforce that ban would be for the government to require that all devices capable of running code from external sources run only code that's signed by that government.

Without that, you can ban all you want, but terrorists and others who need that stuff will have it anyway. So the only effect would indeed be no privacy for saucy emails. Of course, intelligence agencies would love that, since it would allow them to have a society-wide dragnet.
> An old photoshop copy is more like an old almanac, it is a tool.

Sometimes, though, the old tool is better than a new one.

For instance, if I have a choice between a Craftsman wrench from say, 1970, vs a brand new one from today - guess which one I'm going to choose?

Software can be like this as well; indeed, there are some DOS apps out there for which there isn't a good replacement available (though they can be niche - which is probably why).
Other lists in the similar spirit:

http://www.cs.ru.nl/~freek/100/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_from_THE_BOOK
A Pigovian Tax on People’s Attention
Ask HN: How do you find a good therapist?
One possible fallacy here is that people who vote have done their due diligence. I don't think that's a given, especially with how many 1-topic voters there are in the US.
What? How can you make that argument? The average person has absolutely no clue of the various ways websites are tracking them already, let alone the potential amount of data Google would be getting by aggregating all this through their router.
Things to do to secure MySQL 8.0
MySpace was a centralized for-profit site that owned your data, no different than any other, they just happened to allow more advanced design editing than similar sites today (which we look back on nostalgically, but I promise you they were ugly and crappy and fb an amazing breath of fresh air at the time). They do not, however, represent any sort of utopian free internet.

The problem is our wants have become too complex. A blog site that used to be simple self-hosted markup, now requires commenting, moderation, voting, recommendations, authentication, backup, performance, media, analytics, seo, and more. How much coding skill can we expect from people? And even if they had it, should everyone use their time re-implementing or deploying and maintaining tens of individual platforms to participate on the web? There doesn't seem to be a feasible way but to centralize. And now you need to monetize and people have shown they are not willing to pay money, leaving the only other possibility we know: monetizing the data - which, of course, only encourages even more centralization and data capture.

None of this is new, but these are the fundamental natural forces that need to be addressed.
Yes, you're right. It's turtles until RAM locking mechanisms.

RAM does the locking inside it, and expose it as "compare-and-set" and "compare-and-swap" etc primitives. Various computing languages that use those primitives usually call that "atomic data structures". The thing is that RAM is way faster in that regard than locking on user/kernel level, so for program it looks like there's no locks. But atomics indeed do slow down your program, if just a little, because "compare-and-set" is still slower than just "set".
The way the author describes static and dynamic typing seems to imply that static == compiled and dynamic == interpreted. I probably misunderstand something, can someone help me clear things up?
فرشته – Hfarashte Twitter Profile – Twipu
These numbers are unreal. From 100 cars in 2011 to 140,000 Model 3s (+100K Model X and S) in 2019. And all electric. I personally am not interested in minor changes in financials, and want to just sit back and marvel the machine that Tesla and Elon Musk has created. Kudos to everyone at Tesla.
I suppose like many things it comes down to what you grew up with.

Very few people in Australia think we should move to a voluntary voting approach, and I don't see much inclination in the US or UK to move to a compulsory voting approach.

This despite the absence of a clearly favourable outcome in any of those nation states -- which makes me think it might not really matter, other than perhaps hopefully requiring more effort and money to manipulate a larger number of voters. But again, no evidence of that either.

Whether compulsory voting leads to a more informed population, as you suggest may happen, I'm not sure if it's true, or how you'd test for that.
Reveling in the suffering of gormless Wisconsinites is actually pretty good. They had their fun, electing Walker inexplicably, over and over again, despite the horrific things he did to that state and the rights of the people in it, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Alternatively, Facebook engineering could just, you know, test their app. Instead of moving fast and breaking things.
(The following is completely predicated on the truth of the report that a customer tipping $x doesn't result in workers' total compensation being increased by $x)

As a YC alum, I'm disgusted to see a YC company behaving like this.

Instacart: It shouldn't have to be said, but you don't cheat your customers and workers. Whatever internal rationalization you've developed for this practice is just that — a rationalization.

Stop cheating people. If your unit economics are so broken that you can't survive without deceiving and cheating people, then shut down instead.
The change is already happening: People don't care about privacy that much anymore.

Any regulation introduced, would be to stop this change. But it will never work, you can't make people care about privacy through regulations.
The impact of color palettes on the prices of paintings (2017)
One thing I would love personally is the ability to restrict JS usage to a CPU limit, which increases in response to certain events and gradually reduces to 0 if unused. This could be

* A number of seconds on page load,

* a fraction of a second in response to network activity (eg. image loads),

* a small number of frames in response to significant user interaction (mouse clicks, typing),

* one frame after less-significant user interaction (mouse movement), limited only to local operations (no network activity).

The vast majority of sites should need nothing more than this, so opt-in to unlimited usage should be fine. Sites where the user has enabled extra permissions like notifications should be allowed extra time for those.
>interesting, impactful, challenging, lighthearted, or otherwise more satisfying areas

These things are mostly subjective, I think - different for everyone. But still, good question!
I don’t really feel like gloating over someone’s death.

The flu also isn’t among the bestexamples for the success of vaccines. It is both less effective and far more cumbersome than, for example, MMR.

Last I checked, it was not even recommended for healthy young adults, where the risk of death is rather low.
A Reality Check on the Future of GANs
What got worse? In terms of reaction to the article by Amazon I'd think positive actions or inaction were more likely than negative actions.
Who's your VPS provider?
Erik Olin Wright, 71, Dies; Marxist Sociologist with a Pragmatic Approach
I think you overestimate how deep investors dig. I did find this from a few years ago which contains a bunch of rather fuzzy language: https://www.adweek.com/digital/monthly-active-users-definiti...

My interpretation of that would be that if, prior to that change, you logged to spotify with facebook and didn't uncheck the 'share' button you would have been counted, but after you would not have been.

I do find it rather curious that they simply count any user that logs in and 'visited' facebook. i.e. that no 'actions' need to take place or there isn't any metric for time on site required. Seems rather easy to game that number by just not going after bot accounts.
If you don't think the internet is fun and weird, you're visiting the wrong sites. Period.
Yup, just like America can't claim moral high ground over Mauritania because of large amounts of slavery happening there, because after all America was all into slavery 200 years ago.
It's not going to happen on "slightly preferable terms". Either those with political power in society want surveillance, or they don't. If they do, they'll take all that they can get, and the only thing cooperating with them will do is make it all happen faster - the moment you provide a "compromise" surveillance scheme to them on a silver platter is the moment when they'll start devising how to get around the remaining limits.
The Deep Learning Textbook
There are a number of problems that vanilla/standard library doesn't solve, so developers need to rely on libraries or spend an enormous amount of time developing those from scratch.

Date and time manipulation, reactive programming, data binding, etc. Those are bread and butter stuff that the standard library should solve but doesn't.
Crazy idea, but why not put the onus on the browser and require that EU browsers have the ability to block and manage cookies and tracking scripts.

Much less to regulate plus we wouldn't have ugly banners all over the place.
While I find this absolutely disgusting and horrifying, at the same time I hope this becomes extremely widespread and rapidly. This needs to happen to Americans. Only then will we, the collective we, wake up and actually do something and maybe start to take privacy and security seriously.

I am rapidly becoming anti tech, as I think I can clearly see where this is all going. That's hard for me to say, as my whole life has been tech focused. I'm 47 and started coding when I was 10. My whole life centers around it, and always has.

Hitler, Stalin and Mao would have absolutely loved to be alive today and have these types of tools. Maybe we need another 100M deaths to see what this kind of information and power leads to. We are recording everything we do digitally, all to be easily analyzed by whomever comes to power at some future point of time, where the rules might be different. Most of what is recorded about us we don't even know. It will also be easier to find all of the relatives, so they can be killed off too. They like to make examples and ensure no one steps out of line. They don't just kill you, they kill 1-2 generations of your family.

This data won't go away. Ever. They will know who likes what, who supports what, etc. Just a keyword search away from getting a list of names and addresses. We think we are so clever. We are building our future jail. For the first time in history, we have the ability to track every single minute detail about a persons life from birth til death, in extreme, high resolution which grows by the day. I don't just know you went from point A to point B. I know the exact route you took, how long it took to complete each segment, how long you stopped at each place along the way, what those places were, etc. That's just gps data.

I saw the 60 Minutes piece on PlanetLabs recent launch of 300 satellites. They're taking pics of the globe in very hi resolution, constantly. Better than some of our spy sats. Oh, and anyone can access that data. It's free! They showed how they were able to go back in time to when the compound that Osama Bin Laden killed in was built. They were then able to create a very accurate model of the compound which led to the raid that killed him by going so far back in time to when they started building the thing. Obviously we think that's a good thing because it led to a mass murderers death, but think about that technology.... recording everything 24/7, globally, going back years in time to reconstruct something that happened in the past... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/private-company-launches-larges...
<span style="font-weight:bold"> is not invalid from a literalist perspective. It will still be bold.

Semantic markup is nice, but 'div/span soup' is still very popular and isn't technically incorrect.
Exactly, the web became less weird because it got bigger. Back then, the entire web consisted of early adopters, so obviously they were trying out whatever they could.

One “simply” needs to look for communities where this happens now. But of course, these days it's a pure game of chance and/or years-long riding on the edge to find oneself in such a community. Just like in any other saturated creative field.
Well yes, given they are the most egregious violator with Facebook, it's to be expected they would be among the first hit, and the hardest. This complaint also only scratches the surface.
About the only thing you can do is keep a copy of them, keep the copies updated and backed up, then wait 20-30 years, and assuming anyone is still using the hardware, let them out then.

Likely, any principals or others with any interest about the game probably won't remember or won't care - heck, they might even be happy.

It has happened with a lot of 8-bit stuff from the 80s (mostly home computer software); with the exception of Nintendo of course. The Disney of games I guess.

Ultimately, you have to wait and hope such companies pass away - though as we both know, Nintendo is a very old company, so that might not be an option.

At that point, I'd just wrap up your archive, then figure out a way to put it on the internet with plausible deniability and/or anonymity (it can be done).
It's always wise to be careful how you pick your targets because people optimise for them in ways you don't expect so if you pick the wrong ones then you get unwanted outcomes.

I've seen it happen in sales, you focus on add on warranties at head office, store level they convince customer to buy cheaper product and sell the warranty (now if the margin on the warranty is high enough to offset that might be a smart move) or in one memorable instance give everyone a discount equal to the cost of the warranty..

We did wonder how that branch was selling more warranties than the next three best performing.
Thanks for the question! Many companies are already paying or willing to pay for open-source software, especially when a lot of their critical infrastructure in production is open-source. This is becoming a more common occurrence as open-source rises in popularity. In many cases it’s cheaper and faster for a company to pay expert maintainers rather than hire more developers or get their current developers up to speed (and keep them up to speed) on the open-source software they use.
Just !s will do actually.
> There were some mining deals in northern Wisconsin that would make your hair stand on end.

Go on...
The numbers here are staggering. The state of Wisconsin under Scott Walker subsidized this project at a rate of $14,000-$19,000 per citizen, not including the environmental and infrastructural impacts.

I wonder how much economic stimulus to existing businesses would be created by dropping $15k into everyone’s pocket.
Amazon will oppose unionization bids in New York City
Would you say this is another way to explain the value of distribution channels/bolt on acquisition?

A company can have an incredible product and weak distribution (and not be very valuable per se), but the company’s value can be multiplied by a lot if the product can be folded into a very strong distribution channel (salesforce, for example).

Great thoughts on CAC, etc. certainly a fair way to value a sale.
How often do you clean/update the dependencies in your software projects?
sheesh - wandered around the site and found angela.txt, an ascii nude (which i now know was/is a thing and wish i didn't). and people wonder why other people think on-line culture is a cesspool.
Sad that these are the only euro tech news
These buttons...
> With most sites using https, not much beyond DNS requests and plain IPs can be captured

Agreed, but don't minimize the value of logging all DNS requests. You can get an unbelievable amount of deeply personal information from having a list of every DNS lookup. As an experiment, fire up a pi-hole and look at the logs of your own requests. There will likely be a lot of info in there you wouldn't want public.
Apple runs certain aspects of iCloud on the Google Cloud Platform so there are likely to be fairly hefty contracts at stake...

Search for ‘Google Cloud’ in the following:

https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf
Ha! ... you think the middle class is growing ...
You would be surprised at just how safe and 'normal' shutting off the engines on a plane is.

Related, British Airways Flight 268, a B-747, when taking off from LAX had a problem with one of it's engines so they shut it off, and continued flying all the way to London, albeit to Manchester instead of Heathrow, with one less engine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_268
I'd personally be extremely happy if Medium blinked out of existence.
Well I guess you can nail it down to that but in reality it's ways more, especially for who we work with.

It would be a whole series of steps including selecting and picking the technology, testing and deploying it, working with low capacity groups to help them train on areas from basic user security to advanced monitoring, working with it within those orgs, more testing, then having the right people doing daily response on alerts, action on things etc etc...

So yes at a basic level it is just VM chips but in reality it's much more than that.
Why don't we just institute a national call tax of 1/2 cent per call? It would be negligible for any legitimate call, but it would totally break the business model for robocalls which require millions of calls to get through. I assume an extremely small percentage of people actually buy stuff from robocalls. am i missing something?
As long at it is well documented and part of the training, and also ideally the system should indicate to the pilot why it is shutting down the engine(s), to avoid something like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAM_Transportes_A%C3%A9reos_Re...

"The safety system automatically cut the power to the engine suffering the thrust reverser malfunction. There was no alarm in the cockpit to indicate that a thrust reverser had been accidentally deployed. The crew had no way of knowing what the true problem was. The copilot, seeing the right engine power lever automatically move to the closed position, thought that the lever had slipped back and pushed it back to the full power position alongside the left engine throttle lever. Once again, the automatic safety system closed the right engine throttle and the captain, who was conducting the takeoff, called for the autothrottle system to be switched off. After switching off the system, the copilot again pushed the right engine power lever fully forward and forcefully held it there."
A huge amount of games - most, even - are not multiplayer. It’s only within the current AAA environment that multiplayer is placed as a primary feature of many games, but even there there’s plenty of options for single-player experiences.

And in any case, there’s still dozens of communities around old arena shooters and the like. If those had an arbitrary lifespan applied to them based on when some company or other shut down, that’d be impossible.
ISTM -> It seems to me
ITBWTCL -> "In the Beginning was the Command Line" By Neal Stephenson

In case anyone else was also puzzled.
Actually, they're not that much scared that weird content will scare people off, they just don't like weird content exactly because it's weird and therefore unpredictable and hard to put into Excel planning charts.

Marketing people like boring and predictable.
A more accurate title would be "Someone who once tweeted something negative about vaccines dies, probably from Swine Flue", but it wouldn't get the clicks.

Maybe take the grave dancing and bury it deep inside where no one else has to see the idiocy?