skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The political science aspects of this are super interesting. I would prefer perfect privacy for everyone and consistently argue for increased privacy rights, but if that is impossible I would definitely prefer everyone has equal access to surveillance on each other.

Having considered how I would attack this it seems trivial for the super rich and mega corps to defend against this and maintain the asymmetry however. They would merely need to buy up enough land that outside cameras could not see all of it or build walls to block the view. Then when traveling outside their land they would just need to travel by vehicle that occluded any view of them, and simultaneously have a few other duplicate vehicles move with people in them who don't have to look identical but close enough that the cameras and system cant differentiate.

Its overly expensive to a normal person, but whats a few hundred thousand or million a year to a Zuckerberg or Bezos to maintain their privacy? I know Zuckerberg already does this to some extent with his house[1]

[1]http://money.com/money/4346766/mark-zuckerberg-houses/
Airbnb Sales Second Only to Marriott for Vacation Travel in 2018
Listening to Ketamine
It was probably Pegasus, from NSO Group. 60 Minutes just had a segment last Sunday: https://www.cbsnews.com/video/ceo-of-israeli-spyware-maker-n...
The data I recall is the number of movies, miniseries, and TV shows has gone up by at least a factor of 20-40. There's a vast industry created to support this. Netflix, for example, seems to produce a new show every day or two (I haven't collected data on this). Then there's Amazon productions, HBO, AMC, all those channels on cable with content being produced for them, etc.

When I was a boy, there were 3 TV channels, much of which was filled with cheap crap like Jack Lalane's show and dull soap operas. Saturday was filled with retreaded WB cartoons. Once a year the new shows were rolled out. Maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks a new movie was shown in the local theater. I don't need statistics to believe there's been a DRASTIC increase.

And that's not counting all the people who make a living creating and posting youtube videos, none of which is possible without automation.

> regional acting companies

There are a lot of stage productions in Seattle. I haven't noticed either an increase or decline in them over the decades. Burlesque, of course, died out in the 1930's or so.
So if I understand correctly, it's an anti-anti-adblocker...?
The problem is "unattractive" is what women think of 80% of men (and that's being generous) in the current dating game.

When you bar a majority of males from a very strong reason to invest in society (wife and kids) , you plant seeds of societal discontent that spill into crime, rebellion, and war.

We're still apes in business suits with instincts bred in radically different environments than the post industrial revolution world. We react to things like social status on a primal level that all the ideologies of the world can't paper over.
This really reads like it was written by someone who does not know how React and Redux are used. Both of those libraries are incredibly straightforward and minimal in their functionality — orders of magnitude less complex and multifaceted than something like Hibernate or Spring. When you compare a React app with something written with what JS “used” to be (vanilla JS with browser hacks, jQuery, Backbone) the number of hacks or workarounds per line of code in the React app is much lower in my experience.
One problem is that quite a few people (myself included) have entirely written off the idea of "actively searching to purchase a new home" in the Bay Area because the prices are so insanely high even for the "affordable" properties.
This hit upon a larger issue within the programming community - the idea that the brain's abilities can be reduced into discrete parts (see the comment about how a programmer's CPU is the bottleneck, not I/O). While computers may work this way, humans are a lot messier, and an improvement in I/O may actually lead to better compute, as you allude to. Any form of mental enhancement can improve all functions of the brain - it's a beautiful organ.
Ask HN: Tell me about your non-traditional entry into IT?
For me, it all started the day my brother purchased a computer for my mom. My family didn't have much money, and as a result, I would help my mother clean bathrooms at a fruit and produce junction for $40 on Thursdays.

At the time, my brother had received money from an accident he had as a child. A dog tore off his eyelid, and the money was supposed to be for plastic surgery. Instead of incurring any more pain, he opted not to have the operation.

I discovered AOL and immediately was chatting with strangers, one who sent me a virus that would delete my hard drive. I spent days befriending him by first re-installing my operating system and rerunning the virus. Why? The virus would put me in a private chatroom in which I could speak with him.

After spending days talking to him, he finally agreed to share what happened. All I had to do was find this piece of software called Visual Studio. It took me 7 straight days to download it over a dialup.

I started to play with Visual Studio, but I wasn't good. Since my trial account on AOL was running out, I had to find a way to stay online. This is where I uncovered the power of Hex Editors. All I had to do was locate a password stealer, use the hex editor and change the password embedded in the program. That's exactly what I did!

I was able to stay on AOL for a year by "borrowing" the accounts of other people using this password stealer. That wasn't enough for me, and I had to write my own. This leads me down the path of reading source code of others, DosFx, and eventually attending trade school to make my software better.

At this time, I had no clue that people get paid to write software. During my time attending a trade school, I graduated with a 4.0 and my teachers told me I should write software for a living.

Six months after trade school I was still working at Home Depot. One day a customer came in running their mouth about the color of the paint they ordered. This experience made me very upset, and I wanted to snap, but I kept my composure in front of the customer. I went down the aisle to find another base to remake their paint. In a moment of rage, I punched a hole through a box and expressed how I felt out loud. That's when I heard someone from a distance say my name followed by "Why are you working here?" It was the teacher at trade school who told to get a job in IT.

Words can't express how disgusted and frustrated I felt with myself. He and I talked for a few minutes about what I was doing. It calmed me down enough and encouraged me to make a change.

There are a lot of small details I left out which are equally important in my journey, but I don't want to make this post too long.
Wouldn't most of those use cases be illegal? For instance tracking license plates of cars is already illegal as far as I know.
This man... This man is dangerous. I am uncertain if he's more powerful as the head-of-the-snake of Facebook, or as a politician, the arena of which he seems to be poised to enter.
> Being able to live near your friends and family that you grew up with is a massive benefit.

On the other hand, some of us are trying to get as far away from those as possible.
Glad to see Vapor/Perfect has toned down their "we are going to change the world by releasing a new web framework" rhetoric on their sites. When they both first did announced them it was pretty cringe
There are great civilian newspapers in Hungary where this money really could have made a difference :(
Same, except I favor the Atom protocol because from previous research (performed a long time ago, to be fair) it was strictly an improvement over RSS in every regard.

There is a highly-rated extension to automate this, but I've grown to distrust extensions that require "Access your data for all websites", and scouring the page source for the relevant <link> tag is not particularly cumbersome.
Fair point and agreed. Also discussed in an earlier comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19531722
But how and when did you enter IT?
There's a nice and free secondary DNS service available at https://freedns.afraid.org - so if you trust that service, you can get away with running just one master DNS yourself.
No, mass mail receives a significant discount. At most add to economies of scale, but with significant costs.

Look at the actual numbers, and it’s not nearly as significant as the bulk would suggest. https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/revenue-pieces-...
Sony put a rootkit on my computer.

I don't feel bad when they fail again and again.
That's why they killed Outbox, which could block paper spam. They later started running that service themselves (until they decide the security challenges are not worth it):

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2015/12/08/usps-l...

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/11/u-s-secret-service-warns...
To add to this, I think making it asymmetric on how easy it is to surveil someone vs protecting themselves from it might be the right way to balance out privacy, but I don't see it being possible without putting legal limitation on the rich.

Given our current system its unlikely you could ever make it asymmetric enough to stop the rich unless it was as bad as needing 1 million dollars to defend against every 1 dollar used to attack. At that point the rich have enough power to influence the government and just get them to make this illegal and everyone who uses it face jail time. Given that the nodes can easily be traced back based on the physical location data they are giving out, it wouldnt be hard for the government to send police to any area with a node and destroy it and jail whosever property its on.
None of these enable ordinary D code to not be ordinary D code, which is the crucial difference.

Similarly, operator overloading is deliberately constructed in such a way as to allow new arithmetic types to be smoothly designed, but to make it clumsy to do things like C++ IOstreams.
I think giving someone a tax break or low-interest rate is basically the same thing as giving someone the dollars to pay that tax or interest. Calling that a 'supposed' benefit is silly.

Forbes' assessment is the effective value is $18 billion.
As Roger McNamee is now excellently describing, the solution might be the sort of regulation Zuck does not want: regulation that makes it illegal to even get/gather/have a huge portion of all the data they amass.

Do note: Facebook doesn't sell data directly, they use it to sell ads. They actually buy data so that they can get more insights than what they get from only their own direct tracking.
D fully embraces metaprogramming which is a very powerful part of D. But it stops short of being able to redefined the language, which is what macros do.
Do rich people have insurance companies, ex-spouses, business partners, rival colleagues, rival corporations, government agencies who'd like to know more about them yet want plausible deniability that an anonymous tracking system affords them? This is what I mean by saying that Game Theory balances everyone out. You have to consider that there is always another party and they're all motivated by their own interests. And I don't mean to be curt with you but I'm pretty sure rich people leave their houses every once in awhile. Don't you?
Even though a TPM has be tamper proof hardware, it does not have to be beholden to the single party of the manufacturer. I'd start by removing any burned in (loaded-once) asymmetric keys from the trust root. I'd pop an explicit serial header on the motherboard to communicate with the TPM in a user-friendly manner.

Any signing key could then be loaded into the TPM by holding the machine in a specific wiping mode for say a few days, essentially making the ultimate trust root "long term possession of the machine".

The actual signing key that is loaded needs to be percolated up through the UI so the user can verify whom they're actually trusting. But this doesn't actually need to be done every single boot, but really only when the machine is setup for a new user.

The banal criticism is that doing so would be work that doesn't directly benefit Google. Well you asked, and that's inherent in any constructive solution.

> You are using a feature that the OEM explicitly added at significant cost to please someone like you. Buy any other machine, and tell me how much freedom you get.

Erm okay you're taking this back to a hostile direction. Take any pre-DRM PC from 1985-2010, where the CPU simply trusts its memory. That's the longstanding basic model that Google simply added an escape hatch to revert to. I've said that it is appreciated, but don't act like it was somehow onerous.
The link in the document was https://www.facebook.com/Otago-Muslim-Association-2067782293...
It's already removed though. He said the description to that video said something like "only for muslims do not share yadda yadda"
Streams are reasonably testable; I wrote streams-heavy code for a year, and did not have issues with that.

Very long streams can be combined of shorter stages, and these stages are individually testable, when needed.
That is by the way not alternative history but where RSS started.

Ok, not directly. First it started as a proto semantic web protocol, at Netscape to syndicate links and titles for their portal.

Then Dave Winer used RSS to syndicate his weblog, scripting.com and started the marriage of blogs and feeds. But blogs at that time were more small paragraphs, less big articles. And every paragraph was syndicated. That's still visible in archives of long running blogs:

• http://scripting.com/2001/09/11.html

• https://kottke.org/98/12/

… which seems a lot twitter like. The focus on longer articles in blogging is something which started later, in 2001 or so, in my recollection.

Btw: Following those blurb-like RSS feeds in a traditional RSS reader with read markers is overwhelming, in my experience. I banned all those feeds into a "High Volume" folder where I more often than not mark all as read just to get ahead.
Yeah I think about that when I see good boss/bad boss discussions - all of the properties that people attribute to “good bosses” are ones that only people who are secure in their own jobs can exhibit. If your boss is just as worried as you are about getting the axe next time cutbacks are made, he’s going to be covering his ass, too.
> Do you?

Not since Wednesday

https://www.publicwhip.org.uk/boths.php

> Or because they actually did make a mistake.

700 MEPs managed to vote correctly.
Another factor is that there is a psychical barrier (mountain range) that effectively keeps two populations separate; one of those populations is affected, the other is not. One of the 'plan b's was that even if one population went extinct, it could be repopulated from the other.
Most people i met can not do that. They tear themselves to shreds, going back and forth over when to leap and where to leap. Sometimes you need a madmen.
They were saying: ‘We’re coming out of Europe and then we can get rid of you.’ I told them: ‘I’m a British citizen.’ I got citizenship 20 years ago after fleeing from Iraq. But they said: ‘It doesn’t matter, you’ve got dark skin.’ My 11-year-old daughter has heard this too.”
Hi Mosad!
There was nothing to "intercept" I think. Sanchez's brother copied them and forwarded them to The Enquirer in exchange for a decent sized bag of cash.
> A lot has been written about "hyperproductive teams". ... there’s one thing in common between all the stories I’ve heard and the successes experienced first hand: small teams

Funny because I don't think its small teams or a particular programming language that leads to great productivity. You don't have to look very far or far back to see teams, of various sizes, pulling off some amazing stuff with assembler and C. The key to productivity is a lot simpler, and independent of software development. Its a sense of responsibility, interest, and dedication.

In a small team that is using small talk the responsibility might come from being on a small team with a lot of lifting to do, the interest might come from having fun using a language that you like (regardless of the language), and the dedication might come from the promise of getting in early on a promising venture - hence the small team. All of these things add up to hyper-production.

If you can establish those three things, somehow, with a large team I don't see why hyper-production can't be achieved. Unfortunately modern project management for large teams seems to rely heavily on techniques that rob developers of all three qualities mentioned above in the name of so called "agile" and in pursuit of some fictitious software assembly line.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on DNS or Gmail.

> Now, Google does claim they don't track DNS requests. But consider why that is? Once upon a time they didn't scan Gmail content either, but that was before GMail dominated the webmail space.

You seem to assume that it's a singular organization with a unified agenda, but this really isn't the case. It's the same thing about when folks assume Google looks at your Drive files to recommend ads to you -- it isn't true, there's different motives there.

Drive: we want to sell you storage, your data isn't scanned (except for viruses).
Google DNS: speed up DNS, which improves load times, which improves the overall web experience.
Photos: Ditto, we want to sell you storage.

Performance is a feature, and most ISP resolvers are junk. Worse, many of those resolvers like to inject their own NXDOMAIN pages. :\

You could argue that Google DNS does positively impact Ads, but only in the respect that faster DNS resolution helps ads load faster too. Overall, I see it as one of those "long term greedy" (my own words) strategies.

As a privacy-conscious Googler myself, I've taken a look at Google DNS to convince myself that it's what it says on the tin. As far as I can tell it is, but I don't expect you to take my word for it. What logging exists is extremely temporary (short-term debugging.)

Re: Gmail, this isn't true either. Sure, there's still processing of your emails (we receive your email, scan it for spam), but it isn't used for Gmail ads. The public perception of this was so bad and the incremental improvement in ad quality so low, that now ads just use your general ad profile. No email scanning involved.

> Software stacks, configuration policies, etc will have all evolved to disfavor niche use cases and favor Google, Cloudflare, etc.

This is a different matter entirely, but this isn't _always_ a bad thing. I'm thinking of TCP here, which has almost entirely been ossified by middleboxes. Same for TLS -- TLS development has been hamstrung by these same kinds of middleboxes and "protocol accelerators." This kind of incredible technology position has allowed for the acceleration of HTTP/2 and the development of QUIC (and therefore HTTP/3). Overall, Google has been incredibly open with the development of these and worked to include everyone. I'm sure it's not always that way. Can you bring up some examples where "niche use-cases" have been locked out by Google-driven software stacks and configuration policies?
Yes there is. It’s been reported by many reporters. Citizen labs did an amazing job investigating NSO hacked phones.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/report-israel-authorized...
Then an ex mossad tried to get citizen labs to say antiemetic statement.

Undercover agents target cybersecurity watchdog
https://www.apnews.com/9f31fa2aa72946c694555a5074fc9f42

I had to edit my comment to add these two very important links from CNN and khashoggi twitter.
khashoggi funded a Saudi group (they called themselves the Bees) who were working to counterattack Saudi bots and trend manipulation. His conversation and planning with them was all intercepted by the Saudi using NSO software.

The group with khashoggi were able to push their hashtag and had it trending just 12 days before his murder

Khashoggi tweet with the hashtag #what_do_you_know_about_the_bees.
https://twitter.com/jkhashoggi/status/1043028035455221760?s=...

CNN: WhatsApp conversation with the bee group intercepted by Saudi using NSO

https://www-m.cnn.com/2018/12/02/middleeast/jamal-khashoggi-...

QUOTING GAVIN DE BECKER
“Bezos to sign would have required that I make a public statement, composed by them and then widely disseminated, saying that my investigation had concluded they hadn’t relied upon “any form of electronic eavesdropping or hacking in their news-gathering process.”

Note here that I’d never publicly said anything about electronic eavesdropping or hacking—and they wanted to be sure I couldn’t”
——-
Looks like NSO doesn’t want us to know think it’s their software..
Great idea, Mark!

1. Nobody listens to anything Zuckerberg says.

2. Regulate social media platforms with >1M users. Require that they support federation through open standards with published, open-source reference implementations of all required software.

3. Enact EU-style privacy protections, with the explicit goal of destroying the tracking/surveillance industry, both on the net and off.

4. Require that service providers, regardless of size(1), keep hate speech off their platforms. This includes calls for the establishment of ethnostates and other speech that stops short of literal calls for genocide but that has an obvious, well-established trajectory in that direction.

(1) This may not be entirely practical, but it's a place to start. Also, the definition of "service provider" may be tricky to establish.
> you'll have to throw away this veneration of privacy to grasp what this is really about

I cannot disagree more strongly. Every day our need to fight for privacy increases.

All it takes is someone to take my actions and skew them in a political light. From there on it's tiny policy shift that could end up with me in jail for some fascist political crime that isn't a crime at all. Every day our governments take more and more: we really shouldn't be doing their work for them!

Look at what's happening in China: a whole religious cleanse is taking place: Muslim, Buddhist, and even simple meditation groups (Falun Gong) are being persecuted and imprisoned.

Russia has outlawed Jehovah's Witnesses for similar purpose, citing "extremist activities".

And this is before we even get to more "political" style actions, such as white hacking and security research. We need to be exceedingly carefully with public spyware!
In a thread about Japan, with a reply from a Japanese national talking only about Japan.

Hmm, I wonder which country it could possibly be.
Good, it's democratizing surveillance. Anyway, society need to evolve from privacy focused to almost everything transparent. Information want to be free, it's not practical to fight it.
I do the same thing. I picked up 79300-400T ($18) a couple years ago. It still runs like a champ, just keep them oiled properly!
>I've configured vim to my liking once…

I’m amazed. I’ve been using Vim for, oh I don’t even want to count how many, years. My .vimrc is constantly improving. To the point where I ask myself how healthy the obsession/addiction is.

I don’t think I’ll ever make up in efficiency for the time I’ve spent tinkering. But it sure is fun. Mostly.

I’m still quite good at stock Vim though. Specially since recent distros have been shipping a much saner default .vimrc
Horseshit, if I've ever seen it. Both sides used Apple Messages, which is encrypted end to end. Not even Apple can "intercept" anything.
You'd have to do this repeatedly. Many times a second. And you could have to always have a different one each time. And you'd still have to hash the hidden layer so you're still spending money. And you'd still have to make sure your objects didn't behave on the map in a funny way. They couldn't walk through walls or fly off into space. Or walk into the ground. Because other nodes will see that. It'd too difficult to maintain over time.