skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The position taken by every legal team I've worked with is fairly simple: if a sensor platform allows you to incidentally detect the existence of an unidentified individual at a point in space and time, then that sensor generates "personal data". The reason for this is that it is well-known that it is possible to analytically reconstruct the identity of individuals detectable this way with sufficient data. This is consistent with e.g. how ad tech data is treated under GDPR, so it is typically used as the standard for determining if industrial sensing platform data is "personal".

What people don't immediately grok is (1) just how many industrial sensor systems there are these days operated by diverse organizations -- almost every sensor type on an autonomous car, for example, is also widely used in many other industrial contexts, (2) the scale of sensor coverage in most places people occupy indoors and outdoors, which is far beyond what they typically imagine, and (3) how many of these sensors can be used to incidentally identify the presence of a person at a place and time, sometimes in very non-obvious ways. A single sample from a single sensor may not be identifiable but multiple samples from multiple sensor modalities often is. And the sensor modalities used for industrial sensor systems are increasing in diversity and resolution very quickly, which makes it even easier.

Humans perturb the environment they move through, and we have enough environmental sensors now that we can often track those perturbations across the sensor modalities to create a fingerprint. People have a difficult time imagining how easy this can be in practice until they've seen it done.
> applying for a business license

what is it for " a web based business"?
That's been happening almost everywhere for the last half century. Plenty of places are below replacement population growth.
> Fullstack is interesting because is seems to be almost unique to the software engineering field. Other fields mostly have more division of labour, you don’t expect the dentist to cure your heart and neurosurgeon to fix your hemorrhoids.

What about GPs?

Just like the medical field, software needs both specialists (to go really deep down the rabbit holes), and generalists (to tie everything together).

Personally I love being a generalist. Sounds like the OP just isn't in quite the role for them.
Thanks for sharing! Didn't know about this website. (Which is spot on describing 90% of the HN audience)
Hanlon’s razor only applies to individual persons, never to corporations or groups.

Charity (which Hanlon’s razor is a part of) only applies to individuals.
Usenet. Fandom. CW. I was born in 1991, and there has always been a technical subculture ever since Edison.
I've had difficulty parsing the guidance from Google for Google Kubernetes Engine here: https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/security-bul...

> Note that n1-standard-1 (the GKE default), g1-small and f1-micro VMs only expose 1 vCPU to the guest environment so there is no need to disable Hyper-Threading.

I'm wondering if they've decided to just eat the loss on the single vCPU nodes, and for vCPUs >= 2, they pass the decision on to the customer.

Or is there someone else's VM running on the other hyperthread?

Here's their guidance on machine types: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-types

> For the n1 series of machine types, a vCPU is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread on one of the available CPU Platforms.
Not so much the simplicity as the idea that if someone wanted to spy on me, they actually had to work at it.
its limited, NOT absolute. If you are a single person LLC the claim can be made that the business is an alter-ego of the owner, and can then the corporate veil can be pierced.
A great attitude to have - especially in the early days of a company when it develops culture.
Ask HN: Follow the law based on server location or company location?
I have been working on the hosting industry for about a decade now, and recently started to work on an idea for my own company, a managed WordPress hosting company with a certain focus on privacy and open source.

While working on our business plan, something occurred to me that did not occurred before: as a hosting provider, do I follow the laws where my servers are located or the ones where my company is located? We are looking to keep our servers in Germany — price to performance ratio — or Iceland, while the company will be incorporated in Brazil or Panama — because moving to the EU is not an option, unfortunately —, depending on whatever my wife and I decide to move to Panama or not this year.

In Brazil we have a data retention law — the laws mention ISPs, but I am guessing a hosting provider would be on the hook too —, but Iceland does not — as far as I know. So if we were hosting our servers in Iceland, but the company itself was registered in Brazil, which law would take priority?

Right now our servers are configured to keep access logs — with anonymised IP addresses — for seven days, and no backups of those logs are kept. We also have a few VPNs for personal use and logs are disabled on those machines, so in Iceland that would not be a problem... but I think it would in Brazil? Data retention logs usually have "ISP" written here and there, but it seems to be a blanked statement that means any company with a server.

I am looking for a lawyer with a privacy and hosting focus to get everything sorted, as laws are obviously not my forte, but the search has been frustrating so far.
Don't assume you know what "for their own benefit" means. It doesn't mean not doing things that benefit society, it means not willingly hitting yourself in the face with a hammer.

People do things to help other people because it builds goodwill and reputation, and because they're a large enough entity that doing something that costs them $5 and makes everyone including them $6 each will still result in a $1 profit, and because of Hofstadter's theory of super-rationality, and because they care what happens to their kids, and a hundred other reasons.

Nobody but an idiot does things that are purely destructive to themselves and everyone around them.
> Meh, just double the cores and crank it to 11

Too true. I'm flabbergasted everytime I think about Chris Sawyer having written everything in TTD, then TTDLX and finally RCT with Assembly (!), and yes, that also includes the window GUI system that was built into the game.

[1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-03-a-big-intervie...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/92zyo/chris_sa...

[3]: http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm
I think we are headed back that direction.

Custom hardware is coming again. It's coming because we've hit walls on sequential compute. Multi-core parallel and concurrent models are building nicely, but software lags behind, and those problems are hard.

Some problems do not benefit from either of those things too.

Enter custom silicon.

The combination of software and well realized custom silicon to enhance performance, and that's peak performance.

Always is.
Good catch, yes. :)
Through what context did you help out hundreds of creatives? Just curious. Do you do tax advisory for a living?
ooooh nice. I didn't know this was a thing. Yeah, the jquery bundle size really isn't justified for a single thing (rich multiselect). I recently ported `selectr` for use in an app at work, but I'd love to replace it as there's some wonkiness
Once science has determined something, and the steps are reproducible and the papers are published, it's hard to stop it from being weaponized, even if it takes time.

For instance, some explosives that were developed for the mining industry are now used in military applications- similarly, there's nothing really stopping someone from weaponizing almost any scientific discovery.
I don't understand why you (your comment is representative of many others I've seen) don't understand why executives get paid a lot.

People get paid a lot because other people think they can trust them. Once it turns out you were wrong about trusting someone, you don't say "well, I will stop paying people I think I can trust so much!"
> Most videos like this one are obviously attempts at demonizing innocent people

"Most"? Be honest.

What do you think of the other incidents mentioned in this very article, all of which were real? Not to mention the countless other times this has happened.

This situation is pretty clearly an anomaly - it's easy to see.
> They achieved this by gambling that vulns wouldn't be exploitable.

That's a huge leap, and seemingly without merit. You're still just arguing that Intel knew this would create huge vulns and they went ahead regardless, which is baseless.
> I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the emissions from the developing world are coming from consumption that happens in the rich countries.

That's exactly what's happening. Just look at the US China trade "imbalance".
Make has been around far longer then you think.
Only to some extent. I've tutored for the SAT and seen some improvement, but you can't get people to perfect scores. I got a perfect score with a bit of practice. Khan academy and the college board say your score can improve on average 115 pts with study, which is not nothing, but is still a long way from 1600 when the average score is ~1000.

So when someone says that people treat SAT scores as a proxy for an IQ test, they mean someone with a 1550 likely has a well-above average IQ, and a higher one than someone who got a 1250, who's still probably somewhat above average.

[0] https://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/160451329150/stu...
Add:

- Gulf war (unexpected school vacation)

- The most amazing volcanic winter ever
>is said to never even have been a zero day, i.e. before it was publicly released, Microsoft was forewarned and released a patch.

Which is nonsense. It was an exploit that was actively used for at least 5 years before Microsoft was informed about it. The "not a zeroday" is pretty close to doublespeak. There is nothing to sugarcoat here. It was a zeroday that was exploited for years and Microsoft wasnt informed until the very end. All the while millions of devices were vulnerable. I have to say I am having a hard time assuming good faith when people make such statements, here of all places.

A vulnerability is a zero day until the day the maker is informed about it. Its not an ambiguous definition.
I wouldn't go as far as that, but yeah. Adding up a column is not the same as actually coding in Excel or even using a few math functions in a cell. And considering how many people take classes just to handle the basis spreadsheet functions, much less anything complicated, the naive accessibility of Excel can be overstated.

I've never tried to make a DSL for non-technical people because every single time I've seen a client get an expensive product aimed at their industry and designed to "not need a programmer" to customize, they end up paying to have me or a coworker to not-program customizations for them in an excruciating interface.

On the other hand, I think a lot of this side stems from insistent terminology in treating programmers like some tiny priesthood separate from the general public. That woman who can actually put together fairly complicated SQL queries? She has learned to program in SQL. That guy who put together a ramshackle VBA atrocity that gets the job done? He has learned to program in VBA.

All the mess comes from not accepting that. No DSL or templating interface or whatever will let people do programming without learning how to program to some little extent. Acceptance fails when the "public" doesn't want to give/can't spare the time and effort to do so. On the flip side, when it doesn't fail because the "public" does work to learn to program in some case, developers take that to mean that this can work in any case, so long as the public is approached properly with the right DSL/graphical environment/etc.
OSC is awesome but it never caught on with the mainstream because nobody standardized common music production events like noteOn/noteOff or control change.
Furthermore, the original developers never attempted to build any industry consensus.

This was probably partly intentional, as it was designed by the academic community to solve the needs of relatively esoteric music production systems (e.g. [1]), whereas MIDI was standardized by a broad consortium of manufacturers of professional-oriented music products.

[1] https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2009/03/24/slabs-touch-pa...
Yes, very much (I'm 41). The running joke with my friends is that my tag line should be "I miss the 90s".

Some things were much better then than today, for example:

* Children and adolescents had freedom that seems to have been lost today. However, I think that a young person's virtual self extends far out into the aether compared to Gen X.

* The lack of cynicism today concerns me. There are so many very.bad.things happening in the world that I find blind optimism offensive. I just read that 40% of the world's species have gone extinct in 40 years. It doesn't matter if that's precisely true - what matters is that the order of magnitude is likely accurate, and that humans only have about one more generation before Earth's wildlife can only be seen in museums.

* Politics was better. Everything since 9/11 has been a blind alley on the fractal of possibilities. Young people maybe aren't aware that the world wasn't always this... dystopic.

* One thing was worse - weed was illegal everywhere except like, Amsterdam.

* Video games were better. But the quality was partially due to suspension of disbelief and using one's imagination.

* Grunge/alternative was a revelation that can't be expressed in words or replicated. But, around 2013 I noticed a similar cultural revolution, the rise/return of the Burning Man sentiment and a reconnection with creation via psychedelic drugs which seems to be changing the world like a mix between 60s hedonism and cyperpunk. YOLO might be the only thing Gen X truly envies about today hahah.

* Basement parties, raves, skate and punk culture, underground internet geekdom. Vans. Airwalks. Corduroy jeans. All better, but somewhat make-believe.

* Web metaphors were better (declarative and data-driven programming, UNIX theology). Programming languages like C++ and platforms like Windows set us back at least 10, maybe 20 years. But they were FUN.

I knew a guy from my parents' generation when I was growing up who wore Hawaiian shirts everywhere and would never leave the year 1985. Now I am him, forever trapped between the years 1992-1999 like a character in The Matrix. So while I could go on forever, I'll stop here.

Edit: somehow I left out music. Listen to Green Day or Stone Temple Pilots or Alice in Chains chronologically and you might if you're lucky get the slightest glimpse into what it was like to watch Beavis and Butthead in your friend's trailer home before going out to ride BMX in the gravel pits and then coming home and playing Nintendo until 4 in the morning, staying up all night and then going to a party the next night and getting a ride home with random girls like on Dazed and Confused. I assume all that is even better today (what with your Uber and Tinder), but the shear bleakness and transcendental euphoria that the future was arriving before your eyes and nobody older than 30 knows it yet has perhaps diminished.
The dissatisfaction is warranted as the article is ONLY noteworthy IFF one assumes there was a complete extinction event on the atol.

Without the assumption of this extinction event, the story is simply this: "There are rails on this island. And, there are fossils of rails on this island."
On the other hand, traveling was not so simple - you couldn't just carry your mobile phone and pull up Google Maps once you got there - you had to know where you were going and either buy the maps or print out maps beforehand. Meeting up with someone also involved a lot of planning and sometimes you go to the meeting point and then go home having missed each other because you misunderstood the exact location.
Yes, let's just assume poverty is clearly due to personal incompetence and can't possibly be for any other reason, thereby proving my point about classism .

But since your prejudice is the norm, most people here will agree with you.

A. I was a homemaker who got divorced. This is such a significant issue, there are actually programs to rehabilitate former homemakers, something I didn't know until recently.

B. In the US, most poor people are women (and their children) who were solidly middle class until they got divorced, widowed or unexpectedly pregnant.

C. I have a serious medical condition. This is a frequent cause of financial ruin in the US.

I actually chose to go sleep in a tent to get healthier and I vastly underestimated how much classism and sexism would be a barrier to readily returning to a middle class lifestyle. Sleeping in a tent to get healthier was very successful, which reinforces my self perception that I'm very competent since the world tells me "people like you don't get well."
> You happen to be speaking to someone who has studied astrology in earnest and believes it has some merit.

I wouldn't say that too loudly to people you want to impress with your competence.
> How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?

Because size matters, and in this case social media is a lot more pervasive (I'd say at least an order of magnitude more) compared to TV news of the 1980s or to newspapers. I knew of lots and lots of people who to didn't read newspapers 30 years ago, also the majority of the people around me didn't give that much thought on what was presented as "news" on TV because we knew they were mostly lies anyway (I grew in an Eastern-European country located on the wrong side of the Wall), but nowadays even the remotest shepherd has a cheap Android phone with an Internet connection which he mostly uses for Facebook and Whatsapp.

In other words social media is a quantitative change (billions of people are using it) which has transformed into a qualitative one (because billions of people are using social media things are different this time).
He later relativizes that with:

> So that means that access to that kind of higher-quality view of the world becomes a class-based situation where people who've got the money to pay for or partially pay for human editors and curators are getting higher-quality info, which I think is just a slight kind of magnification or intensification of the way things are now anyway.

I repeat:

> …intensification of the way things are now anyway.

Now, here I disagree with Mr. Stephenson, these things were much more intense in prior times.

What he observes seems to be the development in the U.S. in terms of tonality of political discussions.

If you look at Asian countries as a counterexample, there is no such "intensification" happen because of SN at all. To the contrary, even the house of suckage, FB, is contributing positively, because a lot of people would not go online without FB or other easy ways. Operating keyword here is easy. For many people, who just made the jump into being alphabetised, or being the first in their family to be so, many SN outlets are a somewhat more comprehensible access point to info, then "Google Fu".
It's not "gone out the window in the cyber realm" - as you say, the major powers were able to set informal international standards for intelligence, espionage and data collection, for themselves and for their allies, and those standards definitely, absolutely permit all such actions of SIGINT, industrial espionage and even sabotage. If a weaponised exploit could affect something in 1980s, then it would get used by intelligence agencies with no qualms, there wasn't any "gentleman's agreement" or the like that would make them think twice about that. E.g. there's description of supposed events in 1982 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Abyss that may or may not be true, but noone on USSR or USA side would claim that this action (if it happened) would have broken some Cold War taboo.

The basic observation is false - the standards haven't disappeared because (unlike major assasinations) there never were any informal standards that would prohibit this; and (unlike nuclear and missile arms) there have never been any formal treaties restricting this, nor are such standards or treaties likely to happen in the coming decades because multiple major powers believe that lack of such standards is beneficial to them.
Much like many late model intel cpu features x2apic was buggy at launch and so people disabled it by default.
I don't know about Fujitsu but Sun's SPARC designs were free from speculative execution until Oracle bought them.
I agree, but going back to your analogy, I would rather spend the $1000 and not have a car payment for another few years (assuming a $200 for a year, that's $2400 I'm not paying).

My bigger worry is if I get into an accident, the value of the car is so low that the insurance will total it, and now I'm stuck with buying a new car.
Human beings have always been mythological beings. It's just that the myths that they now believe are amplifications of their own beliefs, or what they want to believe, rather than the collective beliefs of their societies, elites, thought leaders, and media masters. So yeah that's doomsday for society, in that there are no longer any shared myths holding everyone together. Those myths were never really true... they were just a tool of control, maybe even self-control of society. Without them the chaos amplifies.

Heck even without social media it seems like there was a progression in politics where things were becoming unhinged. Things were becoming more and more polarized and what is/was considered progress was more further and further from many people's ideas of progress. So there is a series of issues that are coalescing together in our time with a background in the century of self, identity politics, etc.
The commitment to "no comments deleted ever" was great 'til racist trash became the most common theme in comments. Nowadays their moderation system just doesn't scale, and IMO the page would be significantly improved by a filter on the n-word