skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Totalitarianism and police states don't start by jailing the jaywalkers, but they do start by implementing the laws disproportionately against marginalized communities within the general population. This is generally overlooked by the remainder because they think, "Well, it's not affecting me."

The problem with this line of thinking, "they broke the law, they should be punished whatever it was" is that laws and morality, while sometimes intended to be aligned, are not.

Take, for example, "disobeying a police officer". On the surface of it, no one would argue that that is a problem, thinking, "of course I'll follow a police officer's instructions". However, the system has evolved to the point where someone who has initially committed no crime, stopped by the police under suspicion, can end-up dead or incarcerated due to a sadly more-and-more common sequence of escalations.

Asserting that the law is somehow perfect to the extent that all illegal behavior should be punished is also poorly framed because not everything is illegal everywhere, and in fact, what is legal and illegal is not universally known or clear. For example, to access some laws in some municipalities, the laws themselves are under private copyright and a fee must be paid and they are not accessible except directly in person, as in, not remotely (this was news a while back, not sure if there's a HN story about it).

So, I feel this viewpoint is missing some fundamental realities that may drastically change the underlying assumptions.
> I hope people are beginning to understand that the presence of software in any system is a liability.

I do not understand this point of view.

If you don't have software, you are going to replace it with something mechanical. Or with people. Or lose the functionality entirely.

Do you want to bring back a 'flight engineer' to operate airliner engines?

Do you want to bring back mechanical autopilots? Analog computers? Let's ditch GPS while we are at it (GPS failures can cause deaths, specially under poor visibility).
Some friends of mine built a micropayments platform.

https://tapview.com/

Conclusion: micropayments are hard.
Social Security, dark web crackers, and crappy online forgotten passwords websites want to know your location. I jest. But seriously, DOB is extremely valuable, which is why I never use my real one online except for government stuff like that.
AMD Talks Datacenter Share Gains as EPYC's 2X Uplift per Socket Drives Revenue
So how many individuals and organizations do I need to get permission from to install something on my phone?

All these privacy histrionics are supplanting all other individual rights, personal accountability has to break out of this permission loop, even legally speaking, otherwise no one would be able to do anything.
Free speech is a good thing even when the speech is bad, even when spoken by foreigners, even when it's illegal.

It seems you're confusing "has a right to exist" with "is a good thing".
Not that simple. Buying something requires value judgement, and doing that repeatedly takes effort. Also many people can't afford it.
I remember it always being political. Back in 2002 most of the posts in the Command and Conquer Generals forums where various views on if Bush should invade Iraq or not. That community died the day EA banned political discussions.
Give the state some credit. It voted for Evers by a larger margin than Trump won and voted for Baldwin by a larger margin than she won in 2012.
Yes and three consecutive years of lowest performance. This was not set in stone or written in any emails but an HR's email about "Consistent low rating" mean the employee would be on his way out.

The decision and final axing was always done by the HR and managers could only intervene if they thought it was unfair.
Every law has a letter and a spirit.

Assuming a law is morally correct, trying to find loopholes to legally bypass its spirit, makes you a jerk.
"SCL/CA has never undertaken voter suppression and there is no evidence to the contrary."

Hilarious - like the guilty parties in 50 years of cop/detective/courtroom/true-crime shows, he doesn't just stop with "we didn't do it" but feels compelled to tack on the part about "...and you don't have any evidence we did it!"
Where does Facebook offer a place to put "content"? AFAIK You can give them personal info and suggest interesting things, and Facebook decides how, if, or when to present this information, and to whom.
To play devil's advocate:

It's not worth the time. People don't want to make decisions about quantifying if something was worth $0.10 of enjoyment. They'll just go elsewhere to slightly worse but totally (guilt-)free content.
Our Never Ending 'Scam Season'
You could democratise the config -- allow users to choose the median setting made by those who manually intervene? Power Users get granular control, other users get sane (?) defaults?
Please don't. The high-quality stuff from r/technology and r/programming gets posted here by users. Posting the rest would make HN worse.
This isn't the kind of thing anyone can answer without a real world scenario. An abstract problem like a counter may or may not need to be in the DB, and just because you have a DB doesn't mean you should rely on it for locking or atomicity (maybe you have a read replica and your writes/reads are happening in different places, maybe the data is only useful temporarily and if the service dies it doesn't matter that it's lost, etc.)
Looks like you're not working for 12 hours. Maybe 3-5h actual work and 5-7h of surfing, switching, returning to a context.

It happens because a nature of current state of an internet. You can try to limit your working time to a few slices of 4-6 working hours. Also try to replace short and vivid content like any news, videos to the weekly newsletter, books, tv series and so on.

I used to have the same issue and it's solved now by removing news, youtube, all social networks, junk spammy content with ads from my life.
The fourth industrial revolution is not what you think
You're confusing consciousness with free will.

There's indeed no free will (basic physics tells us that, can be also experienced directly via LSD or meditation), but to see if there's consciousness just inflict pain onto yourself.

All this being said it's pretty clear why would humans, or any other apes, or any other species, have morals - to reduce the pain/suffering that them and others receive.
I totally understand this difficulty. My startup's browser plugin [1] changes text appearance to make reading on-screen easier, and this obviously requires the ability to "view and change content on all sites you browse". I'm sure this permission request scares off some people, but we've not had too much trouble with it.

We make it clear in our privacy policy that we don't tie any usage information to user accounts, ever. I think it also helps that we have awards from social-good type organizations like the United Nations, NewSchools Venture Fund, and Stanford. (OTOH, given the leaked emails from the Stanford-based founder of Snapchat, maybe that last one hurts more than it helps....)

1: http://www.beelinereader.com/
> Why do you want any of those things to run inside a browser? Those all sound like great candidates for being actual installed software.

The point is to remove the need to install things.

> security

An image editor that runs entirely in the browser and only has sandboxed access to open and save dialogs is more secure by miles than running a random .msi installer.
To take a simple example, HTML was originally a pure markup language, so if you wanted to make text bold you <b>would do it like this</b>; simple, declaritive

But then it was decided that there was no semantic purpose to the <b> tag, <span style="font-weight:bold">so it became this</span>.

Now, with the ubiquity of js, it's more like
<span id="bold-text">this</span> (along with something like
getElementById("bold-text").setAttribute("style", "font-weight:bold") in the background).

It should be pointed out that things come full-circle: frameworks like Bootstrap define the <strong> tag which, via similar JS to above, all-but-duplicate the functionality of the original <b> tag. I think the OP's point though is that you have to add a JS framework to do this.
It's not just the internet, it is the whole life.

For ex. in Switzerland, almost almost all citys did forbid cheap (plastic) chairs in street restaurants.

We used to have very old cars, when we started to drive a car. Today they start with a new leased car. We could do funny things and if the car broke it was an easy fix (one door has a different color, who cares). Today if you do just a little bit something forbidden,10 people make a picture with a cellphone and send it to a newspaper.

Also just on the street, people dress much nicer than a couple of years ago, allways ready for a selfie ..

Jokes are not allowed about anything, because somebody could get a bad feeling, etc...
Typically when children participate in a study, it's their parents that have to consent. I don't know how scientific research would work any other way?

Also, what do we know about the contract they signed? It's probably not the regular privacy policy.

Informed consent is kind of a grey area. How much do you normally know about the consequences of your actions? How can you prove that you know what you're doing? Should your freedom to enter an agreement be restricted if you can't prove that you know what you're doing?

Legally, you prove consent by signing a contract. Sometimes people go above and beyond that to make sure people really and truly know what they're getting into, but there's a question how far you should go.

I don't think we can know just from reading this article how informed the people signing up were. They didn't interview anyone to find out.
even for foreign powers.

Not in the view of U.S. campaign law.
As an industry we need to call people out on sexism whenever and wherever we see it.
Decrying modern JavaScript is upvote bait on HN.
Hi, author here. Thanks for the kind words!

I ported the static site generator for patternedpom.com (sells handmade cards) from Python to C# without changing any layout or styling (PS I don't claim to be a frontend person). It was a code port only. 1000 LOC of C#, and it took me two weeks.

I am happy with the result code - The classes are immutable (auto properties / read only collections)[1], LINQ is a very suitable replacement for list comprehensions, and it's faster than the python.

Razor Templates are very nice - I have an outer layout file and an inner template for each page. I think they came out very cleanly, and I can do LINQ inside of them[2]. Obviously you can do similar things with jinja templates, but razor templates won't compile if something is wrong / doesn't match what the model exposes (yay for catching bugs early). And you can still pass a "dynamic" type object if you want python like behavior (that throws an exception on unknown property).

The "backend" is a google spreadsheet (using their .NET SDK) and some CommonMark markdown files. So it's not doing anything dynamic (yet, I'm almost done adding digital purchases using AWS Lambda / PayPal IPN, which would be a new feature for the site). And it syncs using AWS's S3 .NET SDK.

I don't think it was actually that many more lines of C# compared to python, in any case it's worth it for me. I am tired of using scripting languages for things other than, well, scripts. I hope Microsoft doesn't break things on me in a few years (fingers crossed).

That said... let's look at some other issues.

- vscode is ok. not perfect, probably some bugs (I get "file not found" popups from time to time that I have to close), but it's free. At least if you have the time to learn it. (I'm overwhelmed by all the configuration options really... and I'm trying to use the vim plugin which probably isn't helping my cognitive load)

- minor things: no generic ordereddictionary (casting isn't horrible though), no inplace collection sort() that takes a simple Key lambda, like the LINQ OrderBy() that copies.

- Library ecosystem - this is probably the #1 thing to check out. Does a good library exist, and does it run on .net core. Compared to Java or python, it's probably less, but do your own DD in advance. There is not even a standard command line option parser in .NET Core - so if it's anything you need outside of the core language, you need to build/buy/find it. It doesn't try to be a "batteries included" thing.

- Another example with libraries: I was looking at adding dynamic search with AWS lambda, but the .net lucene library seems to be an old port of the java library.

1. https://github.com/kjpgit/ppom/blob/master/source/SiteBuilde...

2. https://github.com/kjpgit/ppom/blob/master/source/SiteBuilde...
I think the concern is the breadth of information that the NSA has been known to gather.

This is all speculation (though informed by the Snowden revelations), but if the NSA asks DDG for data for some legitimate reason, it is likely that the NSA would just demand "all" the data, and not a scoped version of it. Meaning your information could get caught up in it.

I agree that for most people this may not be a concern, but if you would like to learn more, privacytools.io has some more information about the "14 Eyes" and other nation state information gathering efforts.
Understood. And I MUDded with some women. Am I disappointed that the net is less masculine? Not particularly. I certainly felt more welcome, and more comfortable with the net before when it was a more masculine environment, and in some sense I miss that. But I'm not the deciding user, and as a parent with kids... my feelings are complicated.
> This is a much stronger type of individual protection than any other body of law.

In theory, but apparently not in practice? Because the practice seems to work out like this: You are protected from government overreach until you are not anymore, by, for example, being a convicted criminal or maybe even a "terrorist".

That criminal lost his protections, he's now suddenly something like a de-facto "lesser citizen".

Now you can argue he's to blame for that and thus it's totally okay. But at the same time, it shows that the US approach does not actually protect the individual that well, because those protections seem to be rather easy to be undermined, as in the end, it will always be the government that defines and decides who should be considered a criminal/unworthy of those protections?

The above scenario would be absolutely unthinkable in Germany. If the German government would attempt something like that, it would run into very clear boundaries set by the Grundgesetz, which also guarantees all the rights from the UDHR [0] and you can't simply deny somebody their human rights, they are after all still human, regardless of what crimes they committed.

Sure, the German government also regularly tries to find ways around that, but there is a deep understanding among the German society that a lot of "rights" and "protections" always apply naturally, without exceptions, because exceptions would hollow out their whole purpose of being "undeniable human rights" in the first place. Denying people these rights would be the equivalent of declaring them "not human anymore".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Germany#Law
> But their mission isn’t to own every device — it’s to own a select few, probably on the order of hundreds or thousands a year.

This is patently untrue. Snowden and much more have made it absolutely, unambiguously clear that national spy agencies do wish to gather and collect absolutely and every bit of information possible about their own law-abiding citizens as well as those here that are not.
For actually serving Siri search results directly, I'm not sure what benefit the search provider gets. My guess is they're really after the "Search Web" fallback if you're not satisfied by Siri's initial synopsis, which will take you to the search page (and therefore the search provider will now know who you are).
Crony capitalism, the Republicans here were awful. I hope others learn from the mistakes
He lost the championship by one point. The movie Rush on this story is also amazing.
True. And the rating was by a higher manager across multiple teams. And he was under no obligation to give lowest grade to anyone. Most of them got "average" and few of them exceptional or very good etc.
I propose we reach for Dickens to name this form of insincere disclaimer, and call it a "Heepsclaimer": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uriah_Heep
I have the same experience at transloadit. 10 years of slow growth, but likely we can enjoy another 10 of those optimizing for fun/honest work instead of getting someone their 5x roi already.
Agreed. The Internet is just as fun and weird as it always was, if not more so.

However, some of that weirdness has moved a level of abstraction "up" into mass platforms like YouTube, Reddit or Minecraft which some people might accuse of not being that under the radar.. yet the oddest subcommunities exist on such sites that few people are aware of. Amusingly, there are actually subreddits dedicated to unearthing such things on other sites, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube/ :-)
My vague recollection is Apple would actually take the Siri request and route it to Bing for you, so Bing doesn't know your IP, and they would attach a unique identifier that they'd rotate every 15-or-so minutes, so that way Bing can correlate multiple requests done back-to-back but loses any correlation with requests outside that 15-minute window.
https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article7110907.ece/ALT...
You know, I'd completely forgotten about forums? I used to be active on two. Doing a quick search now: one seems to have disappeared, but I managed to log in to the other one for the first time in nine years! (Those were the days before I used a password manager.) And it's actually still semi-active...
Aviation professionals discussed this incident on the Aviation Herald website. http://avherald.com/h?article=4c2fe53a
We need a public database of voice prints of political figures. Not hard; they talk in public a lot.

Political figures have no expectation of privacy, after all.
Just thinking about this problem and the proposed solution is making me flustered.

Remember those popups in IE "Do you want to continue running scripts on this page?" Nobody knew what they were, where they came from, or what they were talking about. Even wose than that was the fact that nobody knew what the Yes/No button was for and if you clicked "Yes" sometimes it would just keep popping up over and over again.

They got rid of that for a good reason (although its still alive and well in MSHTA.exe). It sucked and offered nothing of value to most users.

On the other hand, the New York Times's website has 5 external scripts that total over 1mb of just text. They've got their CMS, 4 DIFFERENT ad agencies, analytics, and some other crap the site problably never "needed" before 2010. That's disgusting. And that's what you get from a $300m+ company that RELIES on technology to stay in business. Missing a feature? Fuck it, just have the client pull down another 400kb of js from a sixth CDN. Nevermind the actual CONTENT that attracted the user in the first place is measured in bytes.

So while I think this is horribly misguided, I do agree that something needs to be done to deincentivize lazy Javascript programmers pasting all their problems away. Perhaps the lock icon in the address bar should also turn yellow or red to reflect external script resources? Or maybe whenever multiple frameworks are combined or multiple ad networks used?

Almost every page of my WP website has just 8 internal resources and a page size of <310kb. There's no reason NYT can't stay in that ball park with their deep pockets. Megabytes of tracking and bullshit for basically a white page with text is disingenuous.
There is a search engine (https://wiby.me) that is pretty good for finding old/weird websites. Feels like I'm browsing the web in 1997 again.
You might be correct, good person. I'm curious if this is standard in the industry...
> This scares me.

> It's easier because.. FB has access to millions of people that universities do not? Because fbook can manipulate the minds, emotions and money and politics of highly targeted groups without anyone knowing and the universities could never do that, or would never do that?

> Is it because fbook has less ethics / laws / rules in place? Because universities need to answer to the community they are in and have the fear of pitchforks and loss of funding / donors / non-monopoly and need to think of their future and reputation and fbook does not?

> What other reasons could there be?

Money. Lots and lots of money, a scarce resource at most universities.
Plus, you'd be competing with the other bots that are already doing that.
Typically when you sign up for a mobile line in the US the carrier will assign you a number whose area code (first three digits) is "correct" for your address. But it's not strict, and you can keep that number anywhere you move after that.

I got my first cell phone when I was living in central Missouri, so my area code is 573 even though I no longer have any ties to that area. Identifying this type of robocall is very easy for me.
Only saw Sean Parker in a meeting once (and I don’t believe I was ever introduced) so, difficult to comment on that. My sense is that he was more involved at the beginning of the service. I got involved around the time Bertelsmann made the investment in the company.
Happened with GTA 4 this last year too: https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/27/17292836/gta-4-soundtrack-...
> They talked about ‘honey traps’ that used Ukrainian prostitutes and boasted of secret teams who “ghosted in, did the work, ghosted out” of countries, and “put information into the bloodstream of the internet… with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable”

You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and write lies?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...
New program with a 50% chance to win cash
What are the details of this? I've seen how things work on the Chrome Store side, and it's completely haphazard. There isn't an official audit schedule, as far as I can tell, but like with the iOS App Store, they do sometimes decide to flag/remove an extension for completely bogus reasons, with little/no notice: https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/google-yanked-my-chrome-ex...
Giving devs 4yo laptops when they only need then for testing seems, erm, strange, limiting.

Just have them test under processing and bandwidth limits?
Speaking as a web developer myself, I 100% abandoned supporting users without javascript a decade ago

The number of people with JS turned off are so small they don't matter, and on top of that, they're not monetizable, so I really don't care if the site works for them.

There is virtually never any business rationale for making that extra effort.
Thank you. I discovered last night that some of the shows you mention are not on amazon Prime. Only the more astronomical and physics-related ones are (Gravity; Order/Disorder; Everything/Nothing; Beginning/End of the Universe).
You're kinda proving my point. You have to jump through all these hoops. Most people never will.
Maybe, but imo there's an infinitely-recursive (up until hardware or wetware limits) nature of introspection to consciousness. I can reflect on reflecting on reflecting on reflecting etc etc, until I stack overflow. But on each level of reflection, I can do something useful wrt adjusting the processes that I am reflecting on.

I'm not sure how you could program this recursive nature unless you generalized what it means to be introspective. But by definition, introspection defines itself. The process of introspection has to also be aware of itself in order to "break out" to the higher level.
lol, good luck getting this through in Safari with the current state of Apples websites.
Well the internet is military project to begin with, it is not born to be fun and weird.