skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's legitimate to call the aggregate data that the central server has "non-private." For example, it's ok to publish how many thousands of cars drive on a particular highway -- that's public data. It's not ok (broadly) to publish what route John Doe drives to work everyday -- that's private data.
250 users affected? Sounds like a targetted attack rather than a spray-and-pray. I wonder who the victims and attacker are and what the motive was.
Oh we were nice enough about it, we even tracked down what the person's "actual" email address was and tried to get them to change it. They not only were they unwilling to fix it with the places they had given it out they added more. So it wasn't like they felt compelled to be helpful. And of course it isn't really possible to "junk" emails from legitimate businesses to your email that you might want to do business with at some point.
I just swap out “gmo” for “monoculture” and it makes much more sense for resistance to the food.

Among other things, industrial produce is noticeably lower quality than farmers market produce, cf tomatoes. The whole ecosystem benefits enormously from variety in produce.

How do you interpret peoples’ fear of the food?
I agree with everything you said except "a customer database leak could kill a company".

Do we have any example of any company going under due to a data breach? Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of examples of enormous breaches that did essentially nothing. (like Experian)
There are legitimate reasons to have oversight and proceed carefully for all three.
Would grafting help?
Pixel tracking is literally everywhere, so assuming this was malicious is a stretch.

However, if they can establish the navy did it expressly in the hopes this email would be forwarded to a “leaker”, that might be a bigger deal
Men are afraid to mentor women after MeToo and it hurts us all: study
> This could be a political witch hunt for any variety of reasons, and we might never find out.

We'd only never find out what her testimony was about if Manning, who as a witness is under no secrecy requirement, never said anything.

And we'd never get an idea of the broader context of the grand jury only if no indictment was ever issued by that grand jury (or an indictment was issued under seal and never unsealed and prosecuted).
This reminds me of the LD_PRELOAD security measure [1]. However the solution there, to always set it to a sane default, appears superior. Can't you set the search path for SECURITY DEFINER to a saner default unless specified?

[1] https://manpages.debian.org/wheezy/manpages/ld-linux.so.8.en...

LD_PRELOAD
A whitespace-separated list of additional,
user-specified, ELF shared libraries to be
loaded before all others. This can be used
to selectively override functions in other
shared libraries. For setuid/setgid ELF
binaries, only libraries in the standard
search directories that are also setgid
will be loaded.
How can the data be sent in an encrypted manner that can then be useful without the server having a copy of the private keys used to encrypt the data itself?
What part of uber do you perceive they emulate? Why isn’t amazon just buying Uber if it’s so desirable?
A million people sign petition for HBO to re-write final Game of Thrones season
This is a little freaky. Like something out of Black Mirror.
To an extent I'd bet, but the base of the tree would still be vulnerable. Even then, I'd expect that it'd be a few years to a decade for the new grafts to really be able to produce anything significant.
A key part of OP's advice was to get email at your own domain. Then you can switch email providers if it comes to light that the provider you're using is doing creepy shit with your email.

And speaking of Fastmail: I sincerely doubt they're reading your emails. They make money solely by providing email services to (for the most part) businesses. If it came out that they were reading emails A) it would probably be a violation of their contractual obligation to their customers, and B) their reputation would be permanently destroyed.
of course. And both 3 need regulations, oversight and control. But what we often see is silly anti-x propaganda
Surprisingly, there are a few ways in which you can perform operations on encrypted data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

However, the best techniques we have for doing so are many orders of magnitude slower than their un-encrypted counterparts, so it's not feasible today.
I got ads for this. I don't have allergies. I got ads for erectile dysfunction, hair loss, maseratis, and ferraris. I'm not in any of the groups interested in these things. I think some of these are either zip targeted, untargeted, or lookalike targeted.
(FastMail dev here) What problems do you find with the search? We have pretty comprehensive support for more or less everything Gmail search offers and more (https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/search.html), but if we're falling short for your use case we'd love to know how, to help guide improvements for the future.
Salesforce has a feature called Event Monitoring. Event monitoring does show lots of information, like pages access, reports exported, api endpoints used, etc. but it needs to be purchased. However, Salesforce does track and retain that data for some time so you can decide to purchase it retroactively if you ever want.
I wonder how they are going to handle security/abuse? Once the training is on end user devices, can't the user give fake results?

For example back when recaptcha was introduced, trolls tried to transcribe everything as the n-word (since you only had to get one of the two words correct).

These cases can obviously be noticed and fixed but it's harder now that the training data is opaque right?
This is not the way it works at all (see Secure Aggregation). There are a number of techniques out there that permit privacy safe services and learning, like Differential Privacy, Federated Learning, and there's even Deep Neural Nets using homomorphic computing (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.05189)

How about we lay off the conspiracy theories every time any new paper is published.
Homomorphic Encryption
There are indirect arguments that are pretty strong.

Patented organisms let their owners extract economic rent. This covers nearly all GMO and many hybrids.

Monoculture, which you'll get when the whole industry comes to rely on a particular GMO, invites disaster. The first pest organism to defeat the GMO wipes out the entire industry.

Despite the above, I'd love to see a food company brazenly advertise products that are 100% GMO. It would be funny and might even sell really well.
Technology Is as Biased as Its Makers
> We seem to have completely lost our way at this point, I thought jail was to protect the public not persecute political prisoners to build trumped up charges against your enemies and journalists in general.

The integrity of the grand jury process, which is itself an essential protection of the integrity of the criminal justice system, is a public interest that needs protected.

> It feels like we’ll be really lucky if our rights and freedoms survive over the next little time and Chelsea Manning is at the forefront of this atrophy.

If her assault on the grand jury system were successful, yes, Manning would be at the forefront of the atrophy of key rights.

> How do we fight these things?

By vigorously defending the grand jury system, which protects people's names from being dragged through the mud attached to serious federal criminal charges without vetting of probable cause in a process in which government agents are obliged to secrecy against attacks like those Manning is making.
The unexpected challenges of remaking Fallout 2 using Fallout 4’s game engine
> That's one of the biggest differences between the US and Sweden, and probably most of Europe; access to cheap labor. Too cheap, if you ask me. You could never employ somebody as a greeter here, or to pack your groceries, or to pump your gas, or other extremely menial and near useless jobs. Can people really support themselves on those, or are they forced to work multiple jobs?

That’s what the minimum wage is for, to make it impossible to legally and profitably employ people with limited education and work experience. If people with low skills could get work experience and develop skills that way it would discourage them from getting an education and we wouldn’t want that. Everyone should get as much education as their social betters think appropriate. /s
Finetuning GPT-2 is where the real magic will happen; the demo of the 345M model (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19840758) is nothing compared to a model that is finetuned on the type of content you want to generate.
Want to let you know that I find this useful. I wish Illustrator had this kind of functionality and have been looking for something like this for a long time. I wish you luck with this project.
Mental note: Find the talk where these slides were presented.
The problem is that in many developed countries the agricultural lobby is so strong that they have much more leverage than any other type of citizen. In the end of the day, politicians are to blame for listening to them and allowing them to yield so much power.
> So then by definition, the reason Manning is in jail again, is because she violated a secret request by a secret court.

There's no secret court involved. But, yes, grand jury proceedings are secret to protect the integrity of the system as an honest probable cause filter for serious charges, which is an important public check on government and protection of the potentially accused.
Isn't Mattermost pretty close? When I moved to a company with Slack, I recognized a lot of stuff from my previous job where some of the devs used Mattermost.
All the VCs thought you had to have Sun servers running Solaris, so that was what everybody used. I remember seeing pallets of them delivered.
Since you appear to know some about UBER:

What is UBER spending money on? They don't own the cars, they skim off of drivers. I presume the only costs they should have are infrastructure maintenance, software development, and insurance (if they do it in house?)

On the surface it seems like they have a license to print money.
Effort Neglect and the Second Textbook
I can't help but read it supersonic ice but either way that is pretty cool stuff. The idea of an face centered cubic oxygen structure with hydrogen nuclei swimming around in it as charge carriers is pretty wild.

Seems the only thing left to do there is to collapse a magnetic field around it and see if you can get the hydrogen nuclei to fuse.
I am talking about short-haul flights where boarding is almost as easy as getting on the train.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/scotlands-orkney...

https://www.harbourair.com/harbour-air-and-magnix-partner-to...

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180814-norways-plan-for-a-...
Does this actually work today? I was tangentially involved in some 'zero protocol'/zcash-related projects a few years back and the lack of ability to communicate and transfer information while being able to perform computation on it was a major drawback to most of the interesting ideas in the space.

Are they actually using this in this intended federated learning plan? If so that's a truly major innovation.
I'm actually curious to try that next time it comes up, but with automount + NFSv3 if a server goes down and isn't expected to come back up I can 'umount -l' and kill the hung process.

With CIFS/SMB throughput wasn't the issue, but dealing with small files seemed to be. With NFS most places served software packages off of it and whenever this was tried with SMB it was unreasonably slow. I'm ignorant enough at the implementation that I could believe this was a configuration thing.
Fastmail not only supports custom domains, they will handle your DNS as well, and they will automatically configure the MX records if you do that. Here are their docs about that: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains.html
I actually have a different problem -- not sure it is one that I can legally solve.

I have 10 years of lovingly curated YouTube videos playlists, which, now when I look into the older ones, are a barren wasteland of "Video removed" or "Video not available". It is heartbreaking. Is there any way I can prevent this from happening?
She can't plead the fifth because her testimony is already immunized (and, in any case, by all accounts—notably, her own—the mattress her testimony of sight on covers transactions for which she has already been criminally convicted and for which she is thus protected from further charges by the prohibition on double jeopardy.)
Reasons for anti-nuclear and anti-GMO? You must be kidding. GMOs enable crops to grow in areas with much less water and reduce the use of pesticides and insecticides. Nuclear (even more so the newer form of it) is the safest form of energy production despite the complete paranoia about it in the public. And if you care about climate change, nuclear is certain a strong option to consider to reduce CO2 emissions drastically.
I kind of feel like Omni has seen better days. OmniGraffle just doesn't feel like the must have tool like it used to be.
The ones near me do have scales, in two places

* Analog spring-based scales in the produce section, for customers to check weights before they buy

* Precise scales at checkout, built into the scanner / register.

However, most things are sold by package — only a few are sold by weight.
LuvAsian Gold Coast Brothels
Well, think about it. Safeway makes less money when the product is on sale. And people are used to the popular flavors selling out when the product goes on sale. (The exact same thing happens with ice cream, especially Ben and Jerrys).

Safeway's job is to maximize profit, not maximize number of units sold at sale price.
BSDCan 2019, in Ottawa happening this week!

https://www.bsdcan.org/2019/schedule/events/1055.en.html

Recordings tends to show up YouTube.. later. This talk was also live-streamed earlier today.

Video from previous years: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuQhwHMJ0yK2zlfyRr1XZ_Q/vid...

I'm always surprised this conference isn't larger, it always has a wide breadth of low-level technical C/systems talks, with a mix of Unix/networking sysadmin content.
Knowledgable, in-the-weeds, yet accessible discussion of a domain I have no connection to might be my favorite thing about HN comments.
It sounds like a chemical to me, probably because there are many other compounds with a -dine suffix, e.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acridine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyridine
I’m actually trying to get reestablished as a glassblower. It’s low pressure and I can take days off as I see fit. I don’t feel right taking on the responsibility of doing tech jobs for anyone. Unfortunately it’s very difficult for me to share spaces with anyone, but at the same time, getting my own place could be a bad choice. If my health goes wrong again, moving out is a lot of effort and expense.

I have had a couple promising tech projects over the past few years, but lost momentum and had to abandon them at various times.
Am! I chose C++ in 1986, and it has just got better and better. C++11 was way more fun than C++98, and C++17 is more fun than C++11. C++20 will be more fun than 17.

I feel sorry for the rest. Coding Java or Javascript would be a chore.
Let my rephrase it in a better way I hope.

I'm not trying to say that once we introduce methods to fully detect some types of law infractions it will inevitably lead to a totalitarian regime.

But I believe some leeway is necessary for people to feel comfortable and somewhat free. I don't want to be punished every time I make a mistake. I think you can find some sweet spot between zero and total detection. And yeah, probably leaning towards the latter, in correlation with seriousness of a violation (optimal discoverability reaching zero rather means the law should be revoked, like jaywalking being penalized in my country imho).

Also, how would you even know some law is optimal when no one violates it? I mean, we could put radars on every road and set the limit on 30 kph. The studies discussed in the article wouldn't be possible then.

> I'm not arguing about every single law, only those that have impact on the leading cause of death beyond health issues in the civilized world

Definitely speed is the factor. But what about other variables at play like road quality, intersections planning, lights, other traffic regulations? And if tweaking them actually lowered casualties equally well with better economical outcome?

> only the fear of enforcement keep people honest

As for a slippery slope. You vastly generalized your statement yourself tbh.
This is fantastic, but another approach would be to use the things that are already small and learn how they work, and then maybe reprogram them (i.e. bacteria).

Also, as Richard Feynman pointed out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c) at small scales water is thick like honey so it's probably more efficient to use a rotating turbine mechanism (i.e. flagella) for propulsion rather than trying to shrink paddles down to micron sizes.

And almost foreign material that you put in your body will eventually be covered in bacterial biofilms. So might as well learn how to program and control the bacteria in the first place.
Yup, but science and clinical trials show that there is x % of people who will get side effects from vaccines, while the political propaganda gives a perception that it's all 100% safe and dandy.

I'm for vaccines but there needs to be a lot more transparency and education to the public in terms of benefits/risks for each vaccine out there, because such ratio is very different from one vaccine to another (and what they are supposed to protect from). Plus, we also have to admit that all clinical trials for vaccines are done independently of each other's, and we don't really know the impact of doing 20 vaccines on the same individual versus doing only 1 in a controlled trial.
Popular culture is a tool for the education of the masses. Even for people who may be technically inclined, its not always evident what certain technologies really do.

I am a software engineer but mostly work on DevOps-y stuff. This was a very accessible, low-investment way for me to understand exactly what "Federated Learning" really meant.

Some of the best teachers at Univ had a way of explaining things in simple terms. This comic strip has captured that experience in a more permanent form a lot better than a textbook would.
I get your point, but there is an inherent contradiction in your statement:

You simultaneously point out that low skilled jobs are being lost to automation, and advocate for bringing in more low skilled workers for this dwindling pool of jobs. Seems cruel.
I got superironic ice. I wasn't sure what that was. Extra edgy?
I do this with FastMail and find it indispensable. However, most email applications don't seem to support sending via wildcard email addresses (i.e., if I receive an email at hackernews@mydomain.com, I want to be able to respond as hackernews@mydomain.com, not my personal email address).

FastMail's web interface lets me do this (as does its iOS client), but has anyone found any other (preferably macOS/iOS) apps that support this natively? I generally prefer native apps over web-based, and FastMail's iOS app leaves something to be desired.
Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [video]
I’d download and store the videos locally with youtube-dl.
> Many states do not even use them because of it.

Many states do not use them because they prefer to subject people to public accusation of crime without the filtering process of a grand jury up front, but instead with a preliminary hearing after the fact (and therefore after the harm of the public accusation is realized.)

> Grand juries get special privileges, like compelling people to testify without lawyers, or through double jeopardy as is the case here.

That's not a special privilege, regular courts do the same thing, whether when conducting a preliminary hearing instead of grand jury indictment or at other points in the process: witnesses, unlike defendants, have no right to representation by counsel.
Here's a refresher of the definition:

"intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself"

None of the scenarios described in your tirade fits the definition.

And back to the original article, it's highly likely that the audience understood "Arabic" numerals to mean actual numerals in Arabic script. The only definitive way to deduce bigotry is from a follow up question that has amongst other choices, one for "because I dislike XYZ people". Everything else is speculation - if you don't believe me, submit this for publication in any peer reviewed academic journal.

"Never Attribute To Malice What You Can Attribute To Stupidity" - the respondants (likely) didn't know Arabic Numerals referred to what they already use, and the question is setup to exploit the general lack of knowledge on the matter, and spin a native on bigotry. Because, a story on bigotry is a LOT more click baitey than simple ignorance.

BTW - you seem intent on pushing a "bigotry" narrative, and FUD-ing in general. Are you the author? Or the person cited in the article tweeting an obvious non sequitur, claiming this unscientific, non-conclusive data to be evidence of bigotry?
This is very interesting for many reasons. First we have the privacy stance, which is a tremendous step for big G. Whoever managed to push this through in the "machine" of internal office politics deserves applause. The very fact of acknowledging that users might want to control their data locally rather than rsync everything all the time is a big step—it takes us off the "give me all your data" train that we have been on for some time.

Talking about specific applications of your users' data makes a lot more sense: "If you share X with us, you're helping to build a better model Y that helps you with Z." Then the prompt "Do you want to share X?" makes a lot more sense than the current generic prompts "App V wants to access all your data W?" which doesn't tell you anything.

The anonymisation-by-aggregation aspect is interesting on it's own since it provides a practical approach we can use today and not have to wait for homomorphic encryption. There will probably still be "data leakage" but I can see how aggregation can be fundamentally better than trying to shared anonymized data by fuzzing identifiers, randomization, and binning, which are notoriously hard to pull off and suffer from de-anonymisation attacks by cross linking with other datasets.

Research-wise this could be a whole new field. Let's revisit all the ML algorithms and look at the ones that lend themselves to federated updates. Perhaps certain ML algorithms have been overlooked historically because they are not "cutting edge" but lend themselves better to distributed model updates? (I bet this is already a thing...)

The communication complexity aspects are also very interesting since it forces us to think about bandwidth needed to communicate model updates and training batching. For high-bandwidth settings we could consider training a model from scratch, for medium bandwidth you can send model updates regularly, but what would be particularly interesting to see async and VERY low bandwidth updates—like just a few MB every, exchanged once in a while when connectivity is available.
Trader Joe's has a yellow line beyond which you are not supposed to take your cart. I was always wondering how this works so I pushed a cart behind the line. It immediately
locked its wheels so it got stuck there. I guess some employee knows how to unlock these carts.