skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great article for bringing across the basics and I do wholeheartedly agree that just because a VPN promises to do X it doesn’t necessarily have to do that and that the advertising is sometimes deceiving, but I don’t agree with everything OP said.

> in theory, your ISP could keep a list of all domains you requested and based on that, they would have a pretty good understanding of what you were doing online

I would argue that this is not theory but reality. In the EU you have the Data Retention Directive forcing telecoms to store metadata for a period of between 6 months and 2 years for example. [1]

> With a VPN, all you end up doing is shifting the trust from one party to another. You are not gaining anything.

I know this article is about commercial VPN’s but what if I run my own VPN? Then I do gain some privacy. I’m not saying to use a self hosted VPN and you’re good to go; a VPN in my opinion is a vital part to improve privacy but it’s just that, a single part.

> what is your reasoning behind trusting an anonymous company [..] more than you trust your ISP, which is a big company with [..] something to lose?

I’d argue that a VPN, even a commercial one is more trustworthy than my ISP, who doesn’t need to care if I trust them. It’s in the interest of my VPN to protect/delete my data if they say they do so. My ISP does not make that promise, quite the contrary actually.

> if you pay for a VPN service, [..] your VPN account will be linked to your actual identity

It’s entirely possible to pay for a commercial VPN anonymously, Mullvad for example offers the option of paying via cash that you physically mail them. [2] Many offer payment with crypto currencies.

> Large commercial VPNs [..] make governmental surveillance easier.

That’s not true and it’s what bothers me the most about this article. Why wouldn’t my government just get the data from my ISP? There are far less ISP’s than there are VPN’s. In Germany for example Telekom alone had around 18 Million customers in 2017 and Vodafone had another 10 Million. I’d assume strongly that you’d have to get to a lot of VPN providers to reach nearly 20 Million people. Personally I just assume that every request I make with my ISP’s DNS is known to my government.

Another thing: a VPN can protect it’s user. In Germany for example it should be expected that when you torrent copyrighted content, like a movie, you’ll get a letter from a law agency like “Waldorf Frommer”. Those law agencies only purpose is to go after copyright infringement by connecting to the torrent swarm and logging IP’s. They then ask your ISP to hand over your address and a week later they’ll send you a letter asking for fines in the realm of €1k. [3] They sometimes go to court to collect those fines. Regardless of how you might feel about copyright infringement that is a valid use case where a VPN will protect it’s user.

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention

[2] - https://mullvad.net/en/

[3] - https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Ignorance-isn-t-Bliss-Rights...
>I fear that any savings in CO2 emissions will be useless, due to an increasing world population.

Not having kids would help, but suicide would help more.

Many things matter, but big things matter more than small things. Electricity, traffic, industrial production and heating are all big things. All linked to energy production.
Top Innovators over 70
Ideally yes. Practically I think consumers will be happy to choose between 1-3 providers. Think about it, up until now we were paying cable companies the price of all the 'all you can stream' services combined. Except in regions where selection is just not immediately available piracy will continue.
Not general purpose but Redux has forward/reverse time debug tools https://github.com/zalmoxisus/redux-devtools-extension#redux...
Famous America’s Revolutionary war general might've not been biologically male
This stuff feels like a proof of concept that isn't really integrated to the rest of the language (Kinda like OCaml's OO). For example, it's unfortunate that Type, UniqueType and BorrowedType are different kinds (in Rust, they are the same kind; stuff that isn't "unique" just implement Copy)

Rust's advantage is that its borrow system, with reborrowing rules and such, feels much more ergonomic.
The demands mentioned in your link did reference specific US legislation: FISA section 702.
While I understand where you are coming from, have you used envoy or Ambassador (based on envoy)? They are extremely well designed, especially to address the service routing issues of multi-cloud, Kubernetes, micro services etc. I was extremely happy to see AWS backing envoy. It somewhat confirmed a lot of the research we did in the space.
But do mints provide any iron?
Resources for Learning Ethical Hacking
s/NSA/DOJ.
This kinda destroys the value prop of “live” though right?

Also the tone of the content could switch at any time.
If you don't know who Casimir Pulaski was, no worries, The History Guy has you covered: https://youtu.be/l1WDK_5D7kc
> Facebook has no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform

Of course they do. People report.

And in my personal experience, Facebook always(!) replies "not against community standards", even when clear-cut crimes like rape threats.
> Or you'd just need to do what the US did in the Cold War to become—for a time—the sole superpower

The US current superpower status is in no way what I would consider "conquer the world" nor the original quote I cited which was for being a "global dictator"
Let's take it to the absurd. I am NOT shifting any blame from the perpetrator.

I am placing additional blame on a medium that isn't willing to exercise adequate restraint or control.

A bank undoubtedly has security measures in place to prevent robbery, if they don't bother, they won't last long. Nonetheless, there are regulations on what may and may not be done for public spaces, how crowded they may be to pass fire regulation and so forth. Neither a mosque nor bank should be closed for a circumstance that could not reasonably have been predicted.
No it cannot be better. It can be only equally good or as bad as your ISP.
Just because they claim that they protect your privacy that's just a blind faith.

Users trusted PureVPN claims for protecting their privacy but all it took was an FBI investigation and through court documents to find out that they actually were keeping logs, despite all their claims.
As you stopped reading at that point, I assume the "big claim to make without quantitative evidence" is the part of the article you quoted.

I'd entertain some debate over the definition of publish, as well as whether or not Facebook refuses to accept any responsibility... but outside that nuance it's a fairly objective claim of Facebook's capability and behavior.

I see it as a quite reasonable position to assume that playing violent video games can ease people's inhibition to engage in IRL violence. I personally believe the liberty infringement, and ultimately, violence, that is necessary to ban them is worse than the violent behavior they can influence.
> fewer (proportionately) young men are having sex,

Thanks. That's what I meant, but I certainly should have worded it better. I've updated my comment.

> If we assume that people with homosexual orientation attempting to conform to a heteronormative society would tend to have more trouble maintaining stable relations and thus cycle through relationships more frequently...

So if I understand you correctly, your theory is that closeted lesbians were sleeping with so many men that it inflated the statistics? And now that homosexual women no longer feel constrained by societal norms, a significant number of men are left with nobody to have sex with?
Re: OkCupid: do you mean this? https://web.archive.org/web/20170330131859/https://theblog.o...
Turning the Puzzle Sideways: Sleep, Diet and the Brain-Gut Connection
"Mainframes provide the lowest cost of ownership. First the efficient mainframe power and cooling requirements are much cheaper than equivalent distributed UNIX or Windows platforms."

This makes no sense to me at all. For decades, you could have far lower $/MIPS using minis and micros. Simply needing the whole raised-floor, halon-protected environment and custom peripherals (and specialized personnel) seems cost-prohibitive if not needed from a legacy standpoint.
How do you jump from "men are having disproportionately less sex than women" to "Celibacy is being practiced?"
The government in general shouldn’t be trying to prevent people from being able to see violent or disturbing content.
> You can't refactor code without tests

See this is where the conversation goes south. You will use the phrase "unit tests" when it suits you, and then, like a magician using indirection, generalize to the word "tests" when it suits you.

Why are you listening to Uncle Bob so much?

I mean you can do as you like. However, the strong "Uncle Bob" style assertions should probably be left out of most articles in favor of a more humble "this is what worked for me/us" approach. Universal rules for any discipline are very hard to come by. Sharing what worked for you on your projects is great but it becomes somewhat obnoxious when you try to generalize it to universal rules that works in all environments for everyone.

Also, I think that large unit test suites, where most of the tests are redundant, come about in competitive environments where if you try to make a commit without a test some other competitive coder will try to use it as a "I know better" stepping stone and call you out on the change - "Where is the test". After 3 years of this behavior what do you think your going to have. A nice clean suite of tests or a monstrous big ball of stubs, mocks, faked, copy pasta that resulted from defensive social coding.

Honestly, write a light suite of tests that get to the point, and keep your ability to code swiftly and make changes quickly. As the code matures you'll find the trouble spots and focus testing on those areas. Don't blindly follow methodologies that are going to have you writing large test suite for version pre-alpha 0.0, and now your updating a large test suite for every micro-change just to make it to beta 1.

Here is an old article by DHH where he rails against unit testing dogma. Ironically it was ideas from the Ruby community that formed a lot of the basis of the mad dog McCarthyan style unit test dogma. https://dhh.dk/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.html
Cool thanks! I'm gonna do it too :)
The protons in this device travel almost at the speed of light.
I think the issue is to make TTD work it needs to be designed in from the beginning as a hard feature. AKA if random new feature breaks TTD then random new features designers get told pound sand until they fix their code. The reverse means anyone trying to implement TDD keeps getting it broken with every release until they give up.

Also designed isn't the word I'd use for Javascript.
Pandaral·lel – Parallelize your Pandas operations on all your CPUs
Russian intelligence service:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service
Indeed, Facebook has probably been in violation of existing New Zealand privacy laws since it started, but there hasn’t been a peep out of the Privacy Commissioner, or anyone else in Government.
What's the internet version of the fire marshall? If the people that feel the club is unsafe, a simple call to the authorities will have the marshall come out and declare it unsafe and shut it down. Can we get Fire Marshall Bill to do it?
Yes they can identify themes, but not nearly with enough accuracy to make policy enforcement decisions. IIRC the preemptive video blocks were based on fingerprinting previous video uploads. They're still a long way away from being able to automate policy enforcement dynamically.
One anecdotal example of this - my sister, lives in SF, near market in a rent controlled apartment paying ~$2200 for a single bedroom. She is a director at a tech company making high 300k - 400k a year depending on bonus etc - so obviously doesn't need rent control to have a roof over her head. Recently her job moved to South Bay (Palo Alto) but she refuses to move cause she can't let go of the "great deal" in the city. Way I see it - everyone is hurting - she, cause of he horrible commute, but can't let go of the "great deal", someone who probably really deserves that apartment/rent, the landlord, the environment.

I know just one anecdotal example and I am sure there are many other examples on the other side where rent control helps. But to me, it looks like rent control really distorts the market way too much to be an effective solution to the housing crisis.
"revolt against electron" who even uses that hippy shit ?

vim for life and after

.-=-.
/ + \
| ~~~ |
| :wq!|
|_____|
They always put the glib in glibertarian.

Particularly liked their take on climate change: “sure it exists, but there’s no way governments can solve the problem - but if we give corporations trillions and trillions of dollars we can engineer a solution”
I totally disagree. I don't think the cost of sequencing is the bottleneck here, and it doesn't need to come down to $50. Even at $1k for a full genome sequence (which I think is in the range of a good high-quality sequence these days), it's totally feasible for anyone with a disease to get themselves sequenced.

The hard part is interpreting which part of the sequence is causing the problem, and developing targeted therapies to treat it. Sequencing any patient's genome has already been totally feasible for a few years now, but we still don't understand how to make the information actionable once we have it.
> The picture painted by some people that frontend applications without compile-time type-checking are ready to fall apart at the seams and have knobs and springs go flying everywhere, like something from a Looney Tunes cartoon, is patently absurd.

This is a great analogy for my experience with JS projects. Most bugs are found at runtime, which is incredibly frustrating and time-consuming.
I don't have to know C# to run a Unity game on Linux, though.

The fact that Unity has an "Export to Linux" button doesn't tell anything about the penetration of C#, as a programming language, in GNU/Linux community. People running binaries don't choose or use languages. They just run the binaries generated by the compilers of the implementation of those languages. It's the developers who use languages.

You can as well mention how many Windows programs can run on Linux and macOS using Wine/Proton, because you're conflating the existence of Linux binaries of Windows games (or iOS/Android games) generated using a multi-platform game-engine (and most likely developed on Windows), with prevalence of C# among GNU/Linux developers.

And this is why I specifically referred to distro repos in my original post, because those are developed by the actual GNU/Linux developer population (mainly for GNU/Linux users).
This is very helpful. Your points make me think of the need for immersing in the experience and intently considering not only the 'what' but also the 'why' of actions, as well as alternative approaches to solve problems.

It also makes me think of the importance of stepping back, questioning the scope of "design choices" available, and anticipating things other "than simply the assigned task", possibly for some long-term aim, as you write. This is neat, thanks.
How would that work for the NZ attack? Apparently only 12 people were streaming the video, and nobody reported it until after the attack was streamed in its completion. Effectively nothing could have stopped this stream save for magically accurate and effective filtering mechanisms, or manual intervention.
You've researched this topic more than me. My citation is just knowing lots of people who have received the warning notices and concluded (quite reasonably IMO) that their ISP and/or government is more interested in the rights of copyright holders than those of their customers / citizens and sought solutions to that problem through VPN services.

The point of my post was not about this particular legal issue but about the general fact that ISP choice being largely limited by physical location means that it is easier to choose VPN providers that have interests more aligned with mine than ISPs. Whether ISPs are forwarding threatening letters from copyright holders or giving them contact information directly is not particularly germane to this point.
Bingo. The fact that something is available to everyone doesn't meant it affects all genders/ages the same. Availability does not equal impact.
> Keeping an apartment empty and outside the housing services supply market should be cripplingly expensive.

Jerusalem tried this. Lots of apartments owned by wealthy foreign landlords who only occupy the apartments once or twice a year, if that, on holiday, transforming large sections of the city into ghost neighborhoods.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/jerusalem-ups-ghost-apartment-...

It hasn't worked. Odds are that the tax on empty apartments simply isn't high enough. So the question is, how do you determine the tax rate to make it adequately "crippling" to absentee owners? Should it be some factor of the property's value? Won't matter, it'll be factored in as part of the cost. Should it be some kind of wealth tax? Not really possible, since as foreign owners, most of their wealth is located abroad.

It makes sense on paper but it's fairly difficult to carry out in practice.
Why would everyone have to move to Tor? It already works, and the are good solutions for securely running it, like whonix. (Much better than just Tor browser alone, which is still necessary.)

Compare that to random commercial VPN app...
ISPs and VPNs have different laws then, for example, email providers. Further, Yahoo Mail, would be storing data (thus "voluntary" logging, or in their case, there's few ways around it to deliver their services in any kind of usable way).

I repeat, after having evaluated this quite deeply, that there are no mandatory data retention laws in the US, period, for ISPs and VPNs. This is contrast to quite a few jurisdictions, and the poor actions taken by ISPs and VPNs in said areas seem to speak louder than words.

That being said, I can relate to the author. Trusting a random service without any reason to trust is definitely blind. However, trust can be earned, over time, and validated, but should never be absolute. Trust is earned, daily, forever.

That being said, at the end of the day, the best bet is to remove trust from the equation - to get closer to a zero knowledge state, thus creating zero trust.

We're working toward that, every single day, and I would love to hear from anyone that's interested in helping or has thoughts.
This is the old "paradox of choice" reflecting itself from consumerism now on to dating... I don't see any women complaining, yet, as it's been only around 7 years of this dynamic and young women seem to be getting much higher quality partners through this low upfront cost, mainly appearance based process.

However, I expect a lot of the consequences to society will reveal themselves when the female user base grows older, as it'll cause missed opportunity to raise children, childs without father and fathers uninterested in sticking around as they easily find younger partners as age generally favours men in attraction dynamics.

Also, a certain mass of single young men will end up broken in the exercice. They'll either urged to compete in dishonest ways or give up entirely.
Not sure what immature or ergonomic means in this context, but I'm pretty sure handling of "private" variables (self._foo) is abysmal.
> Your vision for society is one in which private companies moderate civic discourse?

> None of what you wrote is a response to what I said

My post was that there are alternatives to Facebook and Twitter having the monopoly on public discourse, proved it by demonstrating alternative methods by which no one (or two) entities have any such monopoly.

You spoke about a "vision for society". Typically when people talk about a vision, they're talking about the future. I gave a vision of the future.

> You admit that in the current market, those companies are vastly important in a way that can't change quickly and their acting as censors could turn so bad, it would force a change to the very way we communicate

I didn't say any of that. I mean, I agree with you. But you were talking about a vision for society. I gave mine.

I think you've decided I said something quite different from what I actually said.
The Dystopian Reality of China’s Livestreaming Craze
Good catch, although... I looked it up, and apparently in Lavabit’s case the demand (under the Stored Communication Act) was actually issued by the FBI?
Then what is the FSB?
Thanks for the link. I dug a bit into the site, and failed to fully grok the "why" behind even the first example. From https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/facets#declarative:

list_length([], 0).
list_length([_|Ls], N) :-
N #> 0,
N #= N0 + 1,
list_length(Ls, N0).

All makes sense, except for the subclause "N #> 0". Why is this necessary, is there any way to generate a negative N?!
> and in fact how forums have worked for ages.

What forums are those? Because this isn't the case with the forums I frequent. The boards I read / participate in tend to operate on the principle of "don't make me come over there", and everything is reactive, not proactive. I'm not sure how you'd get things like "user was banned for this post" etc otherwise...
Generally speaking, Org Mode is the only thing that's really missing in Vim in comparison I think. I've been using Vim Wiki but have been told it's not really comparable.
>Prayers were almost always for healing. Repentence almost never came into it as the subject of the prayers was usually "saved". Nor were the prayers for being reunited in heaven because that was assumed to be a given.

I didn't mean the focus of prayers. I meant the overall focus--sermons, Sunday school etc...

>Feeding into all of this were the half-baked stories from the pulpit of healing. Of some miraculous last minute renewal of health. Always the result of praying, fasting, etc.

I've heard thousands of hours of sermons in multiple SBC churches from dozens of pastors, and I've been to multiple conventions as a delegate. While I have heard stories about miraculous recoveries from the pulpit, they were fairly rare and not an important focus.

The focus on miraculous healing sounds more like a charismatic church than an average SBC church.

Now as you said, there is a lot of variation among SBC churches. It sounds like the churches you were involved in had a much more of a charismatic bent than was common.
I think the bigger chilling effects (ie deplatforming of controversial figures) have been consequences of:

1. Depending on advertiser-model corporations for public commons during the analog to digital transition that should be nonprofit, independent and speech tolerant.

2. Fascist culture of safe spaces and coddled individuals enabled by academic faculties and admin who haven't lead by example and explained what civil debate entails: civilized disagreement and honest debate, not banning people and only inviting those we already agree with.

2b. A loss of decency, academic and civic rigor perpetuated by extended infantilism.

3. Cyberdisinhibitionism - combined with the previous, manufactured outrage/drama, out-of-line behavior, quips, ephemeral nonsense and anonymous popularity become the primary motivations for online discussion, rather than extending the physical world.
Big-Data Management Course
Are You Overdosing on Caffeine?
No, and I haven't driven a car with that behavior. Most US market cars have a sequence of lock, off, accessory power, on, start as the key is turned farther clockwise. Some cars require manipulation of a lever near the key to reach the lock position.

Very new cars with an entirely radio-based "key" might behave something like that.
Huh? I didn't ask about the FSB (the first initialism). I asked about FSM (the last).