skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We did not have any visibility into the process. Overall I think they just didn’t see it as that big of a deal, definitely not big enough to change release schedules for. This got assigned a CVSS score of 6.8, so not Critical or even High severity. Still feels pretty severe to me, but I guess that’s how everyone who discovers an issue like this would feel…
Steganographic Packets
I have worked at big companies where this happened - one of my co-workers commented that their group found this easy one year as they had two people with terminal cancer.

This isn't as bad as it sounds as they got medical retirement.
Christmas has very little to do with religion, it's a cultural holiday across the world.
Project ideas come from real world problems.

Things like:

- I cannot keep my pets form eating each others food so I'll create food bowls with covers that are only unlocked via RFID tags on the pets' collars.

- It's a pain in the butt to keep track of these 30 different sources of information I use when preparing a report so I'll build API connectors to automatically suck in the data.

- I'm constantly spending 5 hours a week doing X task which could be automated and I have 10 friends with this time suck as well.

Creating a project that you use yourself to solve a problem or save time has so many benefits:

- you understand the problem

- you can easily determine if your solution actually works by using it yourself

- you kind of understand the consumer (one person isn't a good sample size)

- you'll have personal incentive to keep working on it when things get tough

It's possible to come up with side project ideas that don't stem from problems you've experienced personally but you'll be facing an uphill battle. First, you'll have to research what the problem is and how it affects potential users. Then, you'll build something awful cause you really don't understand the problem. Then, you'll rebuild it again after getting feedback. You'll have to figure out how to test it since the problem doesn't occur in your life so you'll probably have to recruit other people to help out which can be very time consuming.

One major factor is this:

- Don't be afraid to build 15 shitty side projects you throw out. Each one will teach you something and number 16 may be your next company. Almost no one strikes gold on the first try.
> You seem to negate the fact that the costs are burdened by law-abiding citizens to have them in jail/prison, anyway.

There is a cost yes, but the possibility of jail and all of its restrictions is also a big disincentive for would-be criminals. Right now, the ability of this subset of folks to live in SF on their own terms, appropriating public property, committing crimes, and not facing consequences, is a big incentive for them to become more brazen, and for others like them to come to SF to live that lifestyle (since they would face no consequences).

My point is that it isn't necessarily true that the same number would be jailed, and so the cost tradeoffs are unclear.

> Certainly, the costs of social structures for those people are far less than a for-profit system of incarceration

I'd need to see data on that. But I also think we could reduce the standards at jails to reduce costs further, if needed. And the additional benefit of containment has many benefits that confer utility on other citizens (not having to constantly be alert or think about the heightened risk of crime).

> Finally, since they are petty crimes, in and of themselves, wouldn't facial recognition be rough the equivalent of dropping a bomb on an ant hill? The scope of the effect far-outweighs the supposed benefits.

I feel like this is implicitly adopting a fallacious slippery slope argument. I'm talking about using facial recognition to more regularly identify/track/detain criminals. This would be accomplished by utilizing feeds from public spaces, where it is already legal to record, and simply being more efficient in the processing and analysis of those feeds, which humans already are able to access and view manually.

In the same way that our _existing_ police forces have not turned into some dystopian social negative, the addition of facial recognition to their tools is unlikely to turn into the same. I agree that there is a line that can be crossed, and we should be cognizant of that, but am just saying that I don't think we are there. In adopting facial recognition for local law enforcement, we wouldn't be changing the laws or expanding the legal rights that govern how police operate or removing the processes/avenues against police abuse. We're simply using an existing technology to make them more effective.
Absolutely! We should have laws protecting our privacy online and offline, from governments and from private entities. We should be able to sue Facebook and their ilk into oblivion. Until then, anyone who stands for privacy is on my side and has my business.
Thank you. Ah, the memories...
Yes, this has been my suspicion too. Calls out across a network like the Internet are always going to perform variably, and each new call you make represents a new roll of the dice on how fast you're going to get a response back. So passing the whole page over the wire in one call feels faster than breaking it up into X calls and then assembling the results of them all on the client end, with the page seeming slower as the value of X gets bigger.
Quote: "But the bank had not protected the server with a password, allowing anyone who knew where to look to access the data on millions of customers’ information."
Yeah I mean it's mostly interesting to see that at $0/mo Onavo was a fantastic deal for FB and they are willing to pay users at least $20/mo for the same quality data. I wonder what price this instrumentation is worth to them if $20/mo and PR risk was okay -- like, what is the upper bound on good quality iOS Onavo data?

Seemed like the WSJ described this tool pretty well [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-social-me... ] -- reportedly Facebook employees can just plug in "Snapchat" into the Onavo metrics and see "we estimate [XX] MAU, declining [Y%] year over year and [Z%] month over month", and they can use this info to short/long SNAP or to prioritize building/buying a competitor. Such a great idea.

I am confused that the Google product which also says it can collect usage data from 13-17 year olds [ https://support.google.com/audiencemeasurement/answer/756613... , https://support.google.com/audiencemeasurement/answer/757381... ] is still allowed by Apple. Maybe Facebook is just learning for the first time that Apple's control over what applications can be installed is arbitrary and capricious at best?

I do feel bad for whatever PM in Facebook (on Project Atlas or whatever) has been watching this news for the past few days and saying "whoa, this seems disproportionately unfair, given that Google and others do the same thing on iOS". I'm just wildly speculating here but that project team is probably getting a firsthand lesson in the "New York Times test" rule: if what you are doing were published on the front page of the NYT, would you regret it? (This is a particularly rough area because I think a lot of current employees probably feel like the NYT and peers have some kind of vendetta against them and probably don't really understand the hostility.)
The Hiya app lets you block calls that start with a particular string. It looks like the app allows for blocking just an area code. The only downside is that numbers being blocked by Hiya will sometimes start to ring for like a quarter of a second before the blocking takes effect - still better than having them ring through. I have the area code and exchange for both of the numbers that ring to my phone automatically blocked in Hiya (so, first six numbers) and it makes a big difference. My LG G7 has a call blocking feature, as well, but trying to block only the initial string of numbers for the area code and exchange didn't work. I'd recommend Hiya.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.webascende...
That's true, but it also lets poor people keep the team members they like, rather than the good ones.
I thought that most modern aircrafts were not allowing the reverse to be deployed if the wheels didn't touch the runway.

Talking about an odd safety override. It's kind of a self-destruct button.
No... That would be banks and governments with decades of lax tax laws. This wasn't created overnight, 2008 just highlighted it.
The Art of Crowdfunding War
Do you have any interesting stories about your time there?
I wonder what the actual effects of saying “Period! End of Story!” are in a discussion forum.

Obvioisly someone is still free to respond, and then that won’t be the end of the discussion. So what’s the point of saying it? It seems to escalate the stakes basically: “if you disagree then you are a LABEL!”
“A strong, novel baseline for sentence embeddings that requires no training whatsoever.”
You’d be surprised.
> That aircraft was knowingly flown with multiple broken sensors. It was unsafe on takeoff.

You'll need to cite that, since it contrary to any information I can find on the Lion Air accident e.g.:

> The chief executive officer of Lion Air, Edward Sirait, said the aircraft had a "technical issue" on Sunday night, but this had been addressed in accordance with maintenance manuals issued by the manufacturer. Engineers had declared that the aircraft was ready for takeoff on the morning of the accident

Your claim that it was "unsafe to takeoff" and had "multiple broken sensors" is pretty remarkable. So I'll definitely need to see a source backing up such remarkable claims.
I used that for a little bit. It was fun, but a bit clunky to get going (dial another number, join the calls).
Liberal arts kids doing the mandatory math classes? Sure.

CS major in first year who has been interested in math and science as a kid? Probably not.

First year college in the USA is very broad. It’s not like university in Europe / UK where you specialize in one subject only for your bachelors.
The bell system was a government granted monopoly, as in it was illegal to compete with them.
I fail to see how this would reduce the incentive to collect data. If anything, wouldn't it require _more_ information on users to figure out whether or not showing an ad would be worthwhile?
My point is that a thread (topic) + comment mechanism provides a feature for humans to stay consistent at any given time. You have a submission box and you have a comment box. That's what I specifically mean by 'technology is designed to achieve that goal'.

> I believe a good conversation does branch out and lead one into a myriad to topics

If you look at this from your personal/individual perspective, then yes, that's no issue. But look at it from the perspective of the platform and the audience as a collective whole. The "branching out" leads to reduction in quality for everyone (may not necessarily so for one or two people who are engaged on the branched out topic). People who are not engaged, may not necessarily achieve anything if there are tons of branches under one topic.
The thing is - quite often they aren't renting them out; but simply holding them as "assets". Or when they do rent them out - they tend to raise the rent. Which is why the supply of affordable apartments tends to "dwindle".
How is a reddit thread considered the source of truth? I know we have daily posts about Amazon getting too large, but this is getting kind of ridiculous.

The forced attrition is no surprise. I’m in Seattle and considering the thousands and thousands of people they were hiring in recent years, it would be impossible to not get the bottom of the barrel devs who can pass algorithm problems but fail to work independently or deliver at all.
That's not what I said at all. I said that Scratch is akin to writing your words on pieces of paper and then arranging them into sentences, instead of writing them as individual letters. Its a text editor that represents words and expressions as draggable boxes instead of giving you a freeform text input. You seem to be saying that since everything is essentially a turing machine, all languages are basically just an IDE for programming a turing machine.

Having a language compile to C (as many languages do) does not at all mean that writing in that language is the same as writing in C and that the compiler is essentially just an IDE or for C. Languages, visual or textual, encourage us to think in a certain way. Even though a visual language compiles down to the same thing as a textual language does not necessarily make them equivalent and certainly doesn't say anything about the kinds of problems they help you solve or the type of thinking that they encourage.
If a company isn't positioned to turn a profit on the output of a rockstar, why is that company trying to retain a development team at all? Every company I've worked at for a decade was eagerly hiring every rockstar they could find, except the one on the verge of bankruptcy that was trying to get acquired.
"Too quickly" appears to be the article's wording, not Boeing's, although I couldn't find a copy of the actual bulletin to confirm that.
Oh, come on.

If we're going to go historical, we'll have to include company towns (which Facebook is revisiting as a concept, incidentally) and debt slavery, the Pinkertons machine gunning strikers...
That was my point. The reason why atomic reference counting can be a bad idea.
The article made an interesting point, namely manipulation.

As you say, most people wouldn't pay to avoid the tracking, the people who would pay could just as easily do without Facebook or Twitter. The question becomes: Would you pay to not be manipulated?
Maybe it's just me but I don't think Facebook is particularly bad. They acquire user data and sell it to anyone who wants it. They should better limit the data they collect and who they sell it to. But compared with stealing tip money or literally killing someone? It's just not nearly as bad.
Ha! Let me explain to you how the sausage is made at [American] universities. You're a fresh-faced researcher with a brand new PhD and you got super, super lucky and landed one of the very few tenure-track positions at a research university available each year. On your first day of orientation, your department head hands you a piece of paper with a number written on it. The number varies every year based on the university and the economy. Maybe this year it's $500,000, maybe a few years from now it's $1M. That number is how much money in research grants you need to bring in to the university over the next 6 years.

If you bring that money in, congratulations, you get tenure; now you get a chance to work on whatever interests you for the rest of your life. But if you fall short of that goal, you're denied tenue; GTFO. You might think being a really good teacher will save you; it won't. You might think that volunteering for some annoying university committee will save you; it won't. You may think writing some really impactful papers (that nevertheless fail to bring in research grant money) will save you; it won't, unless you're really, really, really close to your monetary goal.

So how do you get across the hump? In your first year or two, you think that ethical projects can totally work for you. You bring in a $10K grant here, a $25K grant there. Then you realize you're far short of your goal. So you do what most successful professors do. You start taking DARPA money, DOD money, DOJ money, Amazon or Google or Facebook money. You start building (or facilitating the building of) technology that kills people, that selects people to kill, that monitors populations for trouble-makers or for people susceptible to advertising campaigns. Of course, those aren't the words used in your grant proposals, instead you keep it really abstract. But deep down, you know what your research is going toward.
It's a liability when you're getting equipment serviced, whether there's software or not. We have a Cat 287B skid-steer. After a month of inactivity, it wouldn't come out of "park" mode. A mechanic lifted the cab, tested a couple of solenoids, and stated "must be a bad computer". This is an old machine, so I called Cat and confirmed that it doesn't actually have a computer. I took up the floorboard and found some wires that had been chewed by rodents. We're lucky we don't have a computer, because replacing it wouldn't have helped...
What kind of strength? Every aspect? Super. If it doesn’t have the stiffness of titanium it isn’t really as strong.

Edit ok sorry that I confused stiffness with strength. Sorry my lay opinion was factually incorrect

If it turns out to be brittle it can’t be used in the wings. That is my lay opinion on making an aircraft.
Forcing a certain rate definitely makes sense if you're large enough and have the data to back it. If you're a small dev team with 10 people, it's possible everyone's doing great. If you have 20,000 devs, it's unlikely. You know the % of bad hires over a long enough time period. Forcing the rate often forces managers to disregard emotional connections to make the best business decisions. It sucks but you have to remember a company has no loyalty to you anymore. You should show it the same.
If programmers are so anti-social
Ask HN: Lack of quality Junior Developers? Bad luck or an industry issue?
I have been working with a few Junior Developers recently, almost all out of coding bootcamps.

Now, I will say I have (what I think) are realistic expectations about what a Junior Developer is - little or no commercial experience and with often significant yet understandable (and forgivable) holes in knowledge.

However, the (majority of) Juniors that I have worked with of late seem to really lack a) common sense, b) problem solving ability, and c) curiosity to learn.

I have one Junior at the moment who literally copies and pastes every error message in the console and Slacks the whole chunk to me. No context. And waits for a reply. Sadly, this mentality seems to be more common than not. My default response to this is now that 'you can work this out for yourself' (am I being too harsh?).

Have I just had bad luck?
Is there a general lack of good quality Junior Developers, or do I have unrealistic expectations of what a Junior is these days?
Is this because of the fast-track nature of these bootcamps, or maybe even the "framework" culture that means you don't really need to understand what's going on under the hood most the time?

Would love to hear thoughts. I'm really keen to help Juniors, but I can't help but look back at when I was one and compare my peers ability to figure things out for themselves (is that not how you _really_ learn?).
Reading from the article, this was READ ONLY access. So privacy implication only. It doesn't make it any less sinful though.
> There's an inherent bias in the choice of analogy. There are many potential metaphors that aren't as favorable as hardhats or seat belts. How about a leash or blinders?

A leash and blinders are put on an animal which is not free, to control it. But nobody is proposing removing your freedom to use any web browser you want. In what way is that metaphor applicable?

> The problem Google seems to intend to address, and the way they intend to address it, has nothing to do with the type of the URI but ultimately how its value should be conveyed and heuristic restrictions on what forms the values may take.

I suppose it depends on how one defines "type". I'm not just thinking of the "java.lang.String" level, but the broader level of anything that can be checked by a compiler, without evaluating it.

Consider the basic problem of navigating a link. We get a big stream of bytes from the network. It's pretty easy for the computer to identify URIs in it, by the syntax of HTML and CSS and URIs themselves. It's not an easy problem for humans -- I wouldn't trust myself to always accurately identify URIs in an arbitrary buffer! It's hard to tell what's a valid URI, or where (say) the URI ends and a color or some raw text begins. That's a type problem, and humans are bad at it.

This project sounds like the next level beyond that. My computer can already parse the stream and analyze it to find the URI, and automatically paste it in my URL bar when I click near it. Nifty. But "URI" is a richly structured type (just look at the URI class in your favorite programming language), and the browser can do far more with it, even just at the UX level, than simply treating it as an opaque string.

> The more apparent problem, from your description, seems to be that websites can at all use your computer to execute arbitrary third-party code.

No, sorry if that was misleading. I was not presenting it as the problem that this team at Google aims to solve, but as an example of the security issues at stake. Just as seatbelts aren't the only safety feature keeping my face intact on the highway, a sandbox shouldn't be the only safety feature keeping my disk intact on the internet.

What's the difference between viewing the source of some malicious code, and running that malicious code? Only the type system: it's in a SCRIPT tag, or a PRE tag. What's the difference between seeing a malicious link, and following that malicious link? Pretty much the same thing.
Your forgetting that the cool dense intake air is expanded (greatly) in the engine via combustion with fuel, so the volume of air being exhausted is much greater than went in and at much higher pressure, this is where the thrust comes from in the first place. It's not just a big fan :)
I believe he means literally people in prison but with enough power and influence to continue to manage operations from within.
JS is something like 23 years old, so it cant be blamed on trends or youth. I think the problem is that nobody tests dependencies. There is a misguided belief that everything is community tested, wonderful, and that this community stamp of approval is superior to any decision a person could make. To me this sounds stupid and criminally negligent, but I have heard this very reasoning more than many times.
Even Shackleton faced a mutiny at one point. Those governing always need the consent of the governed, it’s as close to a universal law of human nature as we’ve got.
The actual number of really bad hires is actually quite low give my experience at BT (15 years) and I only knew two cases of really bad performers.
Maybe, but you can always rotate managers around to deal with that problem. And you can have dotted-line relationships.

There are more good ways to deal with people problems as such than there are good ways to deal with people problems as data problems.
I pay Apple $35 a year for iTunes Match. That puts my "ripped" music into their cloud. Years later they introduced streaming and I got hooked on an Apple Music Subscription.

The biggest issue I have these days is that Apple's smart home stuff is overpriced so now I also pay for an Amazon music subscription to us with the Echo hardware.

That all said I am so uninspired by the Apple hardware offerings these days. The high end Macbook Pro 10 years ago was around $3K and these days its over $7k. 10 years ago it had an expansion slot (ExpressCard) and now it doesn't even have magsafe.
Keep in mind, just because everyone does it doesn't mean squat for is it legal or not. It means it hasn't been tested in the legal system, such that a judgement has been passed regarding legality.

If somehow, the practice were found to be a key part of circumventing some large industry's means of controlling something, it could realistically end up becoming illegal once subject to legal scrutiny.
Do you remember mp3.com’s Beam It service?

http://www.freedomworks.org/content/case-missing-copyright-l...

How times have changed.
The TrickURI tool mentioned in the article: https://github.com/chromium/trickuri
Terabytes of Enron data have quietly gone missing from the Department of Energy