skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be clear, the scenario was this. Facebook allowed people to voluntarily share their data with a large number of third-party apps, including one called "This Is Your Digital Life". This was a popular feature; lots of people wanted to share their data in order to get quiz results and such. The guy who created "This Is Your Digital Life" said the data was only for his academic research, but it was secretly for Cambridge Analytica.

When the news reports that some company has exposed data, that normally means they set an S3 bucket to public or got hacked. I don't think many people would naturally describe the above scenario, where I voluntarily handed my Facebook data to a third party who lied about who they were, as "Facebook exposed your user data".
The man needs to hire a copy editor. My girlfriend would have that down to 70% of its current length on the first pass.
Serious Chrome zero-day
Not like I'm going anywhere with this, just morbidly curious but...this is spoken (typed) in parody/jest, right?
> Senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms – this is what we start with, and it is quite a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these capabilities at birth, we would probably have trouble surviving.

> But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.

Looks like a terminological difference?
Yeah, right. The US Congress is currently considering a Federal privacy law which will severely impact Facebook's business model.[1] Facebook is pushing for a Federal privacy law which will preempt California's new law, which turns on in 2020.

[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/02/28/congress-...
"I arbitrarily chose the shift amounts (135 and 66) to make the numbers look nice. Normally, you’d shift by the mean."
Sure... whatever... I'm going to be in the Late Majority or Laggards on this train.
get that this was not a good post. apologies. will be more cognizant of guidelines, which i was not before.

that said, not a troller or a troll account.

is there any metaprocess here for reviewing flags and/or flagging a bad flag?

(which, to be clear, i'm not saying this is, and infact, the contrary)

4+ pages of comment review doesn't show me any 'ask before', and I'd hate to get mis-banned by being too irritable in an actually better/on topic/etc post.. (which, to be clear this isn't)
There's another guy that bought a chiped frame Audi TT and reworked it. It was a bit impressive, also his soldering + reinforcement didn't inspire confidence.
Facebook’s Zuckerberg says he’ll reorient the company to encryption, privacy
Because not every person has the same brain. Pretty simple.
Everyone likes to say you can go back and do things like they did in 2000 but it's never going to take away the fact that there is more stuff out there. Back in the day this "old internet" was all there was. There was no outside influence and the rules were all just being made. Now even if you go to old forums you can't help but see the influence they've taken on from the "new internet".

It's like growing up. Even if you're immortal you're only growing up once.
With a title like that I expected a link to an Onion article.
But there are easy ways to kill dynamic range with an algorithm. On windows this is called "loudness equalization." On the otherhand, there is no way to go back from little dynamic range to more dynamic range.

So I think it makes sense that records are mastered with a lot of dynamic range, so the people who actually enjoy music can enjoy it, and the people who don't can just equalize it themselves.

You do realize that you just restated my comment, but left out the analysis of the current day situation? BTW, equalization doesn't directly change dynamic range. Equalization is meant to change frequency response. It can change dynamic range by causing clipping.
No, I completely agree. Having no meetings at all could hurt the team spirit. At the same time I doubt that you have only one meeting per day. This could be the case for small remote companies. I am personally using it and it works well. I have written more about the motivation behind the project here - https://medium.com/@ddobrinov/text-based-stand-ups-de741fa6c....

Thanks for the feedback!
What is more extreme? Firing off a few farewell missiles?

A no deal Brexit is literally the most extreme Brexit. There is nothing more 'Brexity'.
I wonder, who is supposed to be the recipient of that message. People, who care about privacy, will never believe it.
You bought property in Vancouver 5 years ago. That's like saying you bought AAPL in 2004 with a bunch of friends and it worked out great. Well, it wasn't the friends part of the scheme that made it work out. ;D
Honestly, I believe Tesla is not lying. They may profit from not having a backmarket.. but as of now, people doing part swap on cars is super terrible. It's also pretty easy to imagine that if anything happens on a Tesla, the company will be blamed no matter what. Some people might even sue.
Telemetry is not used for ads, but since it is open-source you can check and get a pretty good idea what they actually send.
> Shall we see anything bigger than VS Code?

.NET framework?
Here's what they are actually collecting: https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/blob/master/src/Calc...
What do you guys think of this "Facebook insider" interview?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYSmFI9GAAs

Facebook Insider Leaks Docs; Explains "Deboosting" "Troll Report" & Political Targeting in Interview
No thanks. Much better ways to make a buck. Quality of living space should not be an afterthought, or entirely neglected in this example.
source already submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321609
When I casually researched the upper limit of human hearing, I came across something that mentioned that some people can detect lowpass filtering up to 27khz.

That's less than half an octave over the "traditional" 20khz limit. Even the 20khz limit is more of an average then a strict biological limit.

It also means that a sampling rate somewhere at 54khz is the "ideal" limit when trying to pick a sampling frequency that is completely transparent to everyone.

This is less than half an octave higher than the traditional 44.1khz rate, just 22% more data.

That's the thing that really drives me nuts about high sampling rates. The minute improvement really only needs a very slight boost in sampling rates, not 96khz or higher.
Or, just turn on software compression on a modern device with such a feature implemented, and there you go.
I took myself off my SSRI's about a decade ago, and I experienced the brain/hands/feet zaps, but none of the other symptoms. I'd been on the medication for about 4 years at that time.
Try having a look at Saw Palmetto tablets. It’s stopped my dad from having to wake twice in the night to use the bathroom.
I might try to commit to this.

I've always found the "App" version of Calculator lacking compare to its Win32 predecessor. In particular History. On the old Calculator you could double-click the history and edit the equation, and get a new result, no go on the App.

Plus the Programmer UI, while being more powerful is actually harder to use since the information is now split between two screens rather than one.

Oh and you cannot paste in currency ($10) is now invalid. The old one just stripped the currency symbols.
FWIW, I'm an engineer and creating a stable financial environment in which to (hopefully) one day raise family is definitely a goal, but maximizing total comp sounds like a miserable way to go through life. If I wanted to maximize total comp, I'd go into finance.

I think folks generally forget that money is a tool to help you achieve what you want in life.

Anyway, thanks for the heads up about Blind, I hadn't heard of it and I'm quite curious now.
ROCm, or more specifically HCC, is comparable to CUDA: AMD needs to develop it more before anything else. Its the fundamental structure to GPU-coding.

AMD can't even write a comparable library unless it is built on top of ROCm / HCC. Like, how would you even start to implement Tensorflow 2.0.0 for AMD Graphics cards otherwise?

OpenCL was theoretically an option. But the old AMDGPU-pro driver had the OpenCL compiler as part of the driver stack. Which means OpenCL Compiler issues would appear and disappear as you updated your graphics card. Uhhhh... not good for deployment to say the least. Lots of OpenCL code with "This causes the compiler to enter an infinite loop on AMD Driver 12.5.whatever".

There are serious issues about OpenCL's fundamental design. You really shouldn't have a full OpenCL compiler hidden inside of your device drivers. Its a nightmare to test and deploy, especially in a world of changing device drivers.

--------

ROCm is a proper compiler stack and a proper development environment. If anything, AMD's mistake was taking so long before ROCm became usable. Even today, there are some issues (it doesn't work with Blender 2.79 OpenCL code yet), but at least its a proper development environment where you can build libraries on top of.

AMD needs to get its compute stack in order if it wants to be taken seriously. Fortunately, it seems like they understand the issue. Hopefully the next year or two will be helpful, since they're ramping up on ROCm development.
Yep... any enterprise is likely full of them:

ldap: authentication microservice
syslog: logging microservice
smtp: messaging microservice
smb/nfs: file storage microservice

They haven't been called that for the past 40 years, but that's what they are.
Thanks for this - its an awesome service.

I was just wondering if you'd seen FF Chartwell? Its a font that allows the creation of these kinds of charts, albeit it uses typographic ligatures to produce the end results ..

https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff-chartwell

How to use it:

https://vimeo.com/41772735

I've found this to be a brilliant tool for the creation of neat charts in a jiffy - just like quickchart.io, albeit without requiring a network connection.

Anyway, thought you might be curious bout Chartwell, in case you hadn't seen it already .. maybe there is some synergy for a new version in the future?
Oh gosh.... that was so many years ago. I suspect I could never find the floppy, assuming I haven't chucked it.

All I can remember about it is that it was structured to ask the user one query per card, and there was some kind of global function that kept the state of the consultation and navigated to the next card.

The expert system that I implemented was a simple toy, because the point was to explore the UI aspects. For instance, you could easily embed images and ask "Click the image that most closely resembles your specimen." Stuff like that, intermixed with traditional text queries.
> I have never met a scientist that came across a discovery and said, "Wow, this is a huge discovery and we're not even close to being equipped enough to process it correctly, lets just seal it up again and wait."

This is pretty much exactly what happened with the tomb of the Qin First Emperor, a site of obvious historical importance in a country with extreme respect for history.

And I'm given to understand that it is now standard practice elsewhere to try to leave most of a site buried, so that future archaeologists with better technology may be able to dig in the more pristine part.

So archaeology has certainly developed in this direction, probably through the experience of wanting to test new techniques on old sites and not being able to. I'm not sure why this concept would apply to "scientists" in general, though. If you're looking for facts about the present, you can't really contaminate them by investigation.
I'm pretty sure I've entered 58008 in every calculator I've ever touched. That's probably in my Microsoft file somewhere...
Cool stuff. Love people who are passionate enough to embark on a tenuous DIY journey!
Translation: "We're finally getting a bit worried about all this talk about social media regulation. Still, we're going to do our best to implement the smallest possible privacy changes to minimize the impact on our revenues, while still looking like "we're doing something" about the privacy scandals."
"Microsoft open sources MSPaint.exe"

two weeks later

"Show HN: I added transparency support to MSPaint"

two (more) weeks later

"Adobe shares plummet as users cancel their subscriptions to Creative Cloud by the thousands, analysts baffled"
I see downvotes, but I have to agree.

I skim-read this, partly because it’s ludicrously long, but mostly because my feeling about Facebook at this point — more than a feeling, my entire mental map of the company — tells me that this is just a big pile of horse shit.

Put another way: this memo could have said pretty much anything, but as long as it purports to be about Facebook doing “a privacy thing”, I’m just going to ignore it.

Why would I believe them?
That has no use, as you can almost certainly not install and use it anywhere. .NET framework is an OS component you probably don't want to mess with. And Microsoft neither, given they only innovate in .NET Core nowadays.
You also lose some of the fullness on the extreme low end, it's noticeable even with a fairly low end subwoofer.

Something also ends up missing in the midranges. I was working on a track once where all I had was 320 mp3 version of the vocals. At some point I replaced it with a flac copy of the same vocal recording, from the same original wav source and the difference was noticeable right away without changing any of my equalizer settings or anything. It just punched through more and the clarity improved.
This sort of thing needs to be built into password managers.
Thanks for dropping by! And definitely: our goal is to keep improving and company culture is very important to us. Some of our harshest critics will give us the best feedback and we have to be prepared for that, too.
Now if the would open solitaire, that would be huge.
I've been a subscriber to Snigdha's Inkmango newsletter (https://www.inkmango.com) for many months — I look forward to it every Sunday. Even though I generally try to stay up on South Asian news, her newsletter always contains fascinating links/stories that I really enjoy — and wouldn't have seen otherwise. She's a fantastic curator and I'm excited to see she's launching original content.

I worked briefly in Indian media, at a magazine based in Delhi, and one takeaway was that there's unfortunately a paucity of well-reported, hard-hitting, speaking-truth-to-power journalism in India and South Asia more broadly. The mainstream papers and TV channels just don't do it. It's easy for Americans and Europeans to take the presence of publications like the New York Times for granted, because that level of journalistic quality and resource doesn't exist in much of South Asia. It's especially unfortunate because many of the countries are on a march towards nationalism (India being the most obvious example). Great journalism is so crucial in such a vibrant, important, rapidly-changing region of the world. Hopefully The Juggernaut and projects like it can help raise global awareness about the injustices happening in South Asia — I wish them good luck and I'll be reading!
Comments (on the letter) like these are why FB still exists:

> Data protection is a huge concern for us all, and appreciate Facebook are working to making this platform the best it can be, with our safety in mind.

> Thanks Mark & the FB team.

I mean, seriously? That is some strong Kool-Aide that person has drunk.
I have a related question that someone here probably has a good answer for. I recently heard a song I like on the radio while driving. Shortly after it played I pulled up the same song on Spotify with my phone, plugged my phone into the car stereo through the headphone jack, and played it. The quality was MUCH worse. What's the likely reason for that?

I know very little about audio but my best guesses are:

1. The media cable was poor quality and/or playing music through the headphone jack is worse quality than radio station airwaves.

2. Spotify was sending back poor quality audio, possibly because I was not on wifi.

I'm sure the particulars matter but does anyone have a best guess as to why the quality would be so much worse? I don't really expect mainstream radio stations to serve up the highest quality audio, but maybe my assumptions are way off.
This appears to no longer be true: http://gregpytel.blogspot.com/2009/04/largest-heist-in-histo...

By financialising the mortgages and other loans, the banks can now treat them as if they were lendable cash. A bit like they can treat gold bullion like cash.
> But we've repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.

Do people really want bots in their private messages?
Didn't Instagram and Facebook steal the stories feature from Snapchat?

What people really want is React. How about making a React library for making facebook apps? Like AWS Amplify, but for Facebook.
Let the fox guard the henhouse
An Introduction to Probability
From the beginning, the NSA should have held itself to having a primary purpose of cyber defense and deterrence. Even if it has some more aggressive programs running sub rosa, those defensive programs should be its central focus, and it'd be easier to sell as a patriotic career choice if cyber defense was what the NSA was known for.

Now we're left playing catch-up, and the NSA is mostly known for cyber espionage against global adversaries and domestic surveillance.
The risk of overcomplicating. You can put a lot of effort into detailed game AI which just makes for a hugely unfun experience. Something simple or predictable often leads to be better gameplay.
I wonder if the aim of this statement is to make it harder for a privacy focused social network to raise money.
If you're gonna tip, tip in cash. Don't give these fuck head tech companies power - they clearly have no ability to use it responsibly.
There is also something to be said for separation of concerns.

If the CEO of Ford was gay or pro-choice, should she be deterred from supporting such causes because many of the people who buy Ford trucks have contrary opinions?

And being forced to support marginalized causes in public rather than in private will de fact out you as a member of that class. Which means less support for marginalized people, by the full measure of what they could get in private but not in public.

Moreover, what is knowing the source of money supposed to get you? If you see some "climate change is a hoax" rhetoric, you don't need a paper trail to know who is behind it, and the answer in any case is to disprove it rather than ad hom the funding source.
On my windows machine I use Windows 10 Firewall Control (and outbound LittleSnitch type thing .. except crappy). I don't think it was calculator, but there was some other basic Microsoft app that wanted to make an outbound connection. I remember thinking, "WTF?! Why would this need to connect to the Internet ever." .. maybe it was calc. Is this telemetry currently enabled on the released version or is it only in the OSS code?
Today I learned SF is not really considered part of Silicon Valley.
Here is the list of events, the jokes seem pretty on point to me: https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/blob/057401f5f2b4bb1...

A small selection:

constexpr auto EVENT_NAME_INVALID_INPUT_PASTED = L"InvalidInputPasted";
constexpr auto EVENT_NAME_VALID_INPUT_PASTED = L"ValidInputPasted";
constexpr auto EVENT_NAME_BITFLIP_PANE_CLICKED = L"BitFlipPaneClicked";
constexpr auto EVENT_NAME_BITFLIP_BUTTONS_USED = L"BitFlipToggleButtonUsed";
constexpr auto EVENT_NAME_ANGLE_BUTTONS_USED = L"AngleButtonUsedInSession";
constexpr auto EVENT_NAME_HYP_BUTTON_USED = L"HypButtonUsedInSession";
constexpr auto EVENT_NAME_FUNCTION_USAGE = L"FunctionUsageInSession";
constexpr auto EVENT_NAME_BITLENGTH_BUTTON_USED = L"BitLengthButtonUsed";

Do you have a source for "not used for ads"?
If the applications are running on Windows I tend to use RDP, if they are running on Unix I tend to use VNC.

Running Firefox over a WAN is slow-going with X11 and ssh, VNC is much faster. The first one I tried was tightvnc, and it did the job for what I needed, so I have stuck with that.
>gaming on remote Windows machines

I have a linux desktop, but would love to do some windows gaming remotely. Isn't the latency introduced by gaming over VPN a problem? If not for single-player, then certainly multiplayer?
> open source the famous and non interesting parts of its products.

I appreciate you're probably referring to things such as the Windows kernel (just for an example), but this reads like an oxymoron. :)
Heh, no. This is yet more empty promises. They'll not do anything in this letter.
I disagree with all of those, but more specifically with

>> 1) The core product is good and useful to people/society.

Definitely not. If you had to put a numerical value on Facebook impact on society, it would be extremely negative I think. You grab attention of weak users, that end up spending so much time on your platform doing nothing instead of contributing in things that would benefit society. You create an illusion that everyone got a beautiful life, pushing some people on the verge to suicide//depression. And maybe the worst of all, you block free speech based on whatever private criterias you decide and you allow for mass brain washing by pushing ideas on your newsfeed. The only positive side is your utility of connecting people which already perfectly existed before.

The only reason why you get away with all of this is because it is so difficult to put an actual number on those.
Speak of the devil—I was just thinking about diving in to fix that issue. Thank you! :)
speaking from experience working in a truck repair shop, I quit using calculator in windows as it was rather unreliable. if im calculating inner diameter or outer diameter for a part, or doing tooth math for machining a new bull gear, ive often encountered wildly different values in calculator from what a machinists handbook tells me. Ive even had an old-timer warn me about different depth and feed rate calculations that calculator has never done right. This is simple shop math, but i think we're calling it trigonometry these days.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/04/04/annou...
> Improperly repaired and modified cars are a detriment to the safety of others on the road

I'll take streets full of gearheads tinkering with their cars over soccer moms ignoring grinding brakes until the rotor disc completely separates from the hat/hub any day.
You can also mix in signal from multispectral cameras to get a sense of the health of the flora.
Facebook Drops to #94 in Top Brand Rankings
Not having a for-profit rationale would cut down on most, if not all, attempts to sell personal information, because funding could come in different ways (donations, for instance).

Some non-profits have a terrible track record with information security, but that's mostly because their major focus is not IT.
> First, Apple doesn't allow apps to interoperate with SMS on their devices, so we'd only be able to do this on Android.

Mark, I don't want you to read my SMS. Thanks.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321217.
Thanks for the critique of Facebook as a technical implementation. I was curious as to what societal good the company and its products have done.

It sounds like "saved people a bit of time by doing all the things separate services used to do".