skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here are the top two things I consider utterly invasive.

1) shadow profiles. Facebook has profiles for everyone, regardless if they have a profile on the social network or not. You many have never visited Facebook and still they collect info on you based on a variety of identifiable information they can find online.

2) forbid ad targeting by e-mail or phone number. This allows everyone who knows my e-mail or my mobile phone number to specifically target me with tailor made ads. The ramifications of this could be really scary.
Google’s Pixel 4 rumored to support air gesture system
I have been using iOS for about 9 years now so I won't take that into it.
At certain points I had some expenses that I had to pay for (like MobileMe instead of Gmail).
But now I don't pay for anything that I could not stop paying and would loose much.

I pay for 2TB of iCloud storage for $9.99 a month (USD), but I could drop that and continue to use iCloud for Calendar, email and etc. (However you would pay google for this space anyways, but for only a TB)

I pay $10 a month for Apple News, but it is also a decent free service instead of google news.

I don't pay for Apple maps.

I don't see there being much, if any, monetary cost of transitioning unless you include the cost of moving from Android to iOS (which assuming you were going to upgrade your phone anyways may not need to be counted).

It isn't like Apple devices are that much more expensive than similar premium tier smartphones.
Training a single AI can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes
But it is still maddeningly long. Even with the plain English version, who would ever read and digest that before signing up for Twilio (other than a lawyer)?
The Location of ‘Salvator Mundi’
Thanks! Maybe an area chart could show their relative popularities over time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_chart)

I look forward to your future developments, this is really cool. I think some interactions with the diagram would be neat, for example clicking a bubble taking you to the corresponding Wikipedia article
The Periodic Table of Amazon Web Services
Netflix never put all their content out on the internet to be accessed anonymously for free.

It's almost as if the news media created this expectation in their industry.
Old ice and snow yields tracer of preindustrial ozone
Meteor, as a framework, was solid for its time. I don't think they could've envisioned how much the JavaScript ecosystem would change after its launch. It tried to solve a great deal of problems that ultimately were solved in smaller, more focused libraries.
Not sure who you're talking about when you write "their chips". Is that AMD or Intel?
Dropbox's home and landing page design language is so completely different than their actual product -- it's like they're two different companies.

Compare their disjointed design to companies that do it well, like Stripe and Apple, and it's night and day.
> It does run on ZFS though. I never realised Dropbox didn't.

It did. For years. But recently they added additional code to intentionally cripple it on non-ext4 systems.

Messing up working setups for existing users like that is just plain unprofessional.

I’m leaving, and this was the main reason: effectively no Linux-support.

Edit: after reading this announcement, I’m absolutely terrified. Setting up Nextcloud is now next on my to-do list.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a product pivot go this bad. I wonder how all the engineers at Dropbox feels about this.
Not a lawyer, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that a lot of these user agreements aren't legally binding specifically because no one reads them and most people don't understand what they're agreeing to anyway.
Working in healthcare, we have a privacy department that is adjunct to the legal department. It did an audit of all of my web sites last year and I was surprised to find out that they recommended that the privacy policies be removed from some of them.

The reason was simple: The sites in question didn't do any tracking. So if you're not gathering information, there's no need to warn.
Are you prepared to supply the appropriate servers out of your budget and provide resources for managing the server while guaranteeing acceptable uptime?
> The New York Times is as bad at privacy as anyone

...and its dot in the charts in the article reflects that. Go diagonally up to the right from the Facebook dot until you are just about to leave the "college" reading level region, and you'll find the dot for the Times.
> If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems

Seems like there's a really clear "SKU" that could be continued and refined, alongside this new initiative, to keep people like yourself happy, paying customers. Why would they be so shortsighted to think everyone would want this new thing?
I think this piece is about making people aware of privacy and pointing out that the platform you’re reading it on is one of the worst offenders is worth doing. As another commenter pointed out that the New York Times policy contains the entire Google privacy policy within it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166947
I like the Sony XPeria XA2 phone, which doesn't seem to be shipped with a weird android version, has a lot of custom ROMs and is well-supported.
“In a new paper, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, performed a life cycle assessment for training several common large AI models. They found that the process can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent—nearly five times the lifetime emissions of the average American car (and that includes manufacture of the car itself).“
I'm not exactly sure what your comment is even supposed to mean, but I'll bite. Maybe my predictions will turn out to be dead wrong, but as it stands it's unlikely that anyone is willing or prepared to stop what China is doing, and it's unlikely that Hong Kong is going to last very long because they have less and less power as time goes by. I personally am a lot more sympathetic to HK's struggle, and I encourage people to take to the streets because it is very likely to be their last stand. They certainly have more balls than I do. But life isn't like a movie and I'm pretty pessimistic about their chances.

If there is tyranny, it's just that it always comes down to power in the end. Freedom and the rule of law work well because they have made it easier for a society to flourish over the long term, but if conditions change so can their effectiveness. I wouldn't be surprised if human rights disappear like a puff of smoke if the 99% lose their bargaining power because of automation.
This has happened to me multiple times because I use an external monitor mirrored with the laptop display dimmed to zero because there is no 'don't use this display' setting for it. The first time or two I hard power-cycled it, because by the time I have the laptop at another location I've forgotten the context where it was last used. Then I realized it's just the brightness.
I think you're correct on both counts. With the plugins running on separate cores, they wouldn't be trashing each other's caches or branch predictors, so they might actually run faster and offer lower latency than stacking them all onto a single core... but odds are low that the difference would be significant.

The main advantage is that you wouldn't be limited in the number of plugins you could run by the performance of a single core, since you could run each plugin on its own core, like you mentioned.

Obviously, having faster individual cores means that each plugin introduces less total latency, but the difference in single-threaded performance between Zen 2 and Intel's best is likely to be very small, and I fully expect Zen 2 to have the best single-threaded performance in certain applications.
The proposed Future Circular Collider at Cern is estimated to cost more than 10 billion USD. Should we use that money for a climate supercomputer instead? Or maybe invest a comparable amount?
That understanding is correct, according to my interpretation of this comment [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166771
Don’t utilities grow as we generally consume more and more resources?

In the Caden of dividends, wouldn’t they also need to increase over time to act in the best interest of shareholders?
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You are taking strong positions on what is right or wrong when there is no objective answer and tradeoffs both directions.

> It is a user's responsibility to insure that a symlink will work elsewhere; cloud services should just copy the file, just like any other. The users who expect a symlink to trick a cloud service into special behaviour (like syncing folders elsewhere) are also wrong. You no more want a cloud service going off and "thinking" about a symlink, than you wanting it going off and "thinking" about porn it finds on your computer. These are just files; their contents or meaning are absolutely not any cloud service's concern.

Unison seems to be more designed for personal sync'ing than collaboration. That informs decisions.

First off, Unison cannot sync symlinks to Windows (or at least WinXP since they didn't exist until Vista) (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download/releases/...).

If you take your position that symlinks should be sync'd opaquely (as a file with a symlink target), collaborative relationships that involve symlinks are broken without much warning when a collaborator uses windows XP (the most popular OS when Dropbox came out!).

At least following them (which Unison does allow with a setting) ensures Windows collaborators can see them.

Dropbox could probably make the change now (few XP users remain), but you have legacy issues of existing users relying on the "follow" behavior to sync content outside of their Dropbox.

> One can declare a directory atomic, forcing the user to choose at the directory level when there’s a conflict.

Not forcing users to make choices before upsync occurs is an explicit design decision of Dropbox. It ensures that if I power on my computer after being offline, things will quickly sync to the cloud -- I don't need to spend time making decisions.
The difference is that, while the contents of a book are covered by copyright in the same way that a website, a handwritten letter, or a photograph is, the physical artifact that is the book itself can be loaned, sold, etc. because of first sale doctrine.
The thought would be that they don't want to do any architecture shifts before they bring it all over to their own ARM chips. And AMD still doesn't really deal with laptop processors.
A 90 percent chance is still better than a 100 percent chance, especially when it comes to public evidence. 90 percent of people have probably said the N-word but I'm still not hiring somebody with public video of them doing it.
that would be lovely! How can I reach you?
I'm not sure I see the benefit of that. If the plain English version is good enough to be legally binding and fully explanatory, they could just use it. If it's not good enough, but is still presented as part of the ToS, then it has the potential to introduce ambiguity that could override the legalese version. Either way, it makes the ToS somewhere between 25% and 50% longer than the legalese version alone.
> Does this mean Meteor is dead?

Absolutely not! We depend on it internally (engine.apollographql.com is a Meteor app), and Galaxy hosting revenue is THE reason we didn't have to raise money until we felt like it, which is why we got to pick our investors in this round.

Behind the scenes, as the lead developer for both Apollo Client and Meteor, I am constantly borrowing technologies from one to benefit the other. Meteor may move more slowly these days, but that's because it's relatively mature. Apollo has to move more quickly because we're still making (and remaking) fundamental decisions.

Even as community enthusiasm for Meteor has slowed, Galaxy revenue has not, and it's honestly not the worst thing for an open-source project if people who came for the hype either (a) find real reasons to stay, or (b) take their hype-thirst elsewhere.

I have some ideas for increasing Meteor contributor engagement that I'll be giving a talk about at the next Meteor Night (tentatively July 9th in SF).
One reason Apple has given in the past was they needed reliability for large quantities of supply. Intel had better fab capacity then, so Intel it was.

Now that AMD is using TSMC and/or Global Foundries, not sure if still the case.
There are cases where NAT can be used beneficially but those are probably less than 10% of NAT usage. Most NAT usage is to get around IPv4 address shortages. Symmetric NAT is just pointless.

I also still think you're not fully enlightened as to just how easy tracking can be. It's not just web browsers. Every single distinguishable characteristic of a client forms one bit in a hash that can be used to track it, and thus distinguishing precision is 2^N where N is the number of bits of information that can be gathered.

Your IPv4 /24 already provides 24 almost always unique bits, so that's a good start for any tracker. Now start correlating /24's over time using clustering algorithms. Now start TCP fingerprinting, keeping track of pinned certs, measuring anything and everything that can be measured about a client. Pretty soon you're up to something like 32 bits which is one in four billion.

I use web browsers as an example because they're just embarrassingly easy to fingerprint.
Are ideas just multipliers of execution?
> While bit flips have been demonstrated on TRR before

Yeah but when I chase down references all I can find is one saying that rowhammer was possible on a Pixel phone, in turn referencing a paper that doesn't have the word 'pixel' in it. No study about how TRR effects the difficulty, or whether TRR was set up correctly. I want a chart showing bit flip difficulty vs. TRR aggressiveness. Because you can set TRR to be very aggressive with almost no performance impact on non-malicious workloads.
That's what I strongly object to.

The difference in the amount of data that FB has on people who have an account and those who never had an account (like me) is minuscule...
You say you just started, so I will assume you mean < 30 days or so on the job. If I was your CEO I'd be watching things really close till you built up some more trust with me too. Not that I'd distrust you, and I'd want you to have some autonomy early, but not without me being in the loop overall. A mistake around some of this could be super costly to the business too, so if he stays involved for a time period it won't all fall on you.

As you prove yourself, after say 60-90 days (depending on your experience level could be longer) then if he stays this involved and over analyzing things then it is more a time to chat with him about how to pick up the speed and have him back out some. But till that, you are new, take this time to learn what he likes and what he dislikes before it is all on you.

With experience also comes an understanding that setting unrealistic paces and trying to push hard just usually leads to more mistakes being made. That doesn't mean the pace should be glacial, but just that more thought out and deliberate decisions means the pace doesn't need to be frantic. So I'd step back and appreciate that as well a little. Also, when self funded, it is more important to be deliberate and focused than it is when you have backing from a VC. Not that you should waste VC dollars, but there is an expectation of growth that is much different so running more tests and doing things faster is more critical. Self funded it is more important to focus on getting a return than racing to your next round and trying to learn as much as possible.
This isn't some hypothetical challenge. There's only a few hundred known cases in the US and most of the dismissals are recent because of the feasibility and availability of PCR and other DNA amplification techniques. Anyone could exhaustively read through every case in a few days (which seems to be only fair when you're talking about taking people's lives).

Here's a list, for example: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-cases

edit: and why would you expect differently about suicide rates? Prison is awful. It is punishment, and it the punishment doesn't end after you have left because loss of vote, inability to work in many fields, social stigma, and broken relationships. However, generally speaking, most people in prison are guilty (even if many are not). It is a distinctly different group than people than those exonerated after a death sentence, who are invariably not guilty and they know it. The two groups aren't comparable even though one is a subset of the other.
Same reasons that you can't use many edge cases of email addresses (or even common "+"-addresses) with a lot of websites, even tough they are valid according to the spec:

- Most developers don't read spec and add e.g. validations in end-user applications where they think they are being clever

- Multiple fully fledged implementations of the core protocols are usually hard to come by. This means that rarely used features are that are not supported in all implementations won't be used and so organically wither
> Nextcloud mentioned previously is the obvious choice for the privacy-conscious, but does take some further responsibility to ensure integrity and availability.

I'd recommend ownCloud over Nextcloud as Nextcloud doesn't have file checkumming during transfer.
I don't think it's really fair to compare a privacy policy to A Critique of Pure Reason. One is hard to read because it references laws and has a lot of boilerplate stuff that you can skip over, the other involves abstract philosophical questions that are difficult to consider in terms of the subject matter itself.
Didn't know about these shadow profiles, that's pretty interesting. Does anybody have an informative link handy to read more about this?
Your argument is self contradictory because you seem to make an exclusion for Troy's fallibility by pointing to my same argument about the fallibility of others. There's no reason other than you think Troy is some super human.

Troy has basically said nothing about his manual verification process and he says its the worst part of the architecture. There seems to be no mechanism of removing your email from the list once it's added so he'll just keep adding/merging data I guess until it starts giving false positives. He doesn't have the infrastructure to make this scale into a reasonable utility. Even if he did hire employs, he's now delegating responsibility which will introduce new potential judgement holes into the process.

Simply put, it's too big for him. And it has nothing to do with trust. Venture capital is a crap excuse because now there's a profit motive for the service for something that should arguably be non-profit. Venture capital has a track record for producing several, high profile companies that make no profit for years and are compromised in themselves.

The best thing he could do is pass it to Mozilla or some other tech non-profit. It would be even better if it was a government service.

Remember, the founder of Facebook still runs the company. It got big, and look what happened.
New York Times also abuses advertising, paywalls and page size. But the fact that they write about issues should signal that they still have some journalism integrity.
I have similar mistrusts and my only acceptable solution has been to copy the actual files off my phone onto my computer (largely manual; some scripts), and to treat cloud hosts as backups of last resort. Even Dropbox (which is otherwise great) doesn’t upload Live Photos, (or preserve the file name of the photo).

I’m writing from an iPhone/Ubuntu perspective.
I'm not convinced it's a temporary bump, though. Space is at a premium in large cities, especially pedestrian/cycling space. As long as bikeshare companies are allowed to use this space for free and wash themselves of responsibility for the negative externalities, I don't see the nuisance and clutter going away anytime.

Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely on Team Ban Cars. But I think that recent unregulated dockless schemes have demonstrated that access to street/sidewalk space is the limiting factor for these companies, and it's sensible to restrict this access somewhat.
I haven’t thought at using the privacy export! Thanks for pointing out. I’ll try adding the data source, so we’ll have incremental.
"I agree" is the biggest lie of the information age.
Hmm, the info I'm sourcing now also makes it look extremely hard to do. I knew someone who said they were opting out to get a few thousand dollars cash, and said that they got it, but maybe I misunderstood or they weren't explaining it well.

I think the rest of the points stand though. It's not just random tax allocations being distributed to people, Social Security has it's own fund that is paid into through it's own specific taxes.[1] The amount you get out is based on the you put in (even if it's not necessarily a simple formula). You can see this here.[2] I wouldn't consider a separately funded and administered fund specifically designed for retirement an "entitlement", as that term is generally used in politics.

It is true that employers match the amount employees put in (both to a taxable maximum amount), but that's not all that different than many retirement plans where there exist 401k matching. Social security is just a codified legal requirement that people have some form of saving account if they work, and split the burden between the employee and business (all businesses, which means it doesn't disadvantage the business since it's a level playing field)

1: https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/HowAreSocialSecuri...

2: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/quickcalc/
This wasn't published on Kevinlitmannavarro.com, and it's not his name on the big top-of-the-page header: it's an opinion column written by him but published by the New York Times under their banner. It's a pretty basic expectation for journalistic entities to address potential conflicts or hypocrisy. It's not a requirement, but is a reasonable complaint, and dismissals like asking if the opinion author wrote the privacy policy are beyond nonsensical.

Apart from that, addressing seeming hypocrisies in things that newspapers complain about but engage in is often illuminating: I recall an Atlantic(?) article complaining about deceptive ads that went out of their way to talk about their own likely serving of deceptive ads, describing the difficulty in knowing which ads you'll be serving given the byzantine web of sellers, resellers, exchanges, etc etc that Web publishers deal with.
Cut rates while the market is at all time highs means they will never raise rates again.
So let them argue and let this go to court and be clarified there.

Rather than cynically dismiss this, imagine a less shitty world for a moment and imagine how we get there.
Time Machine. My Synology NAS backs up (including Time Machine data for all of our family MacOS devices stored on the NAS) to Backblaze B2.

“Lock down” is hyperbole. You can mount Apple filesystems (including the one storing your photo library) from a Linux workstation or server over the network.

I admit that if you’re looking for an open API for photo management, iCloud is not for you. But it works for most people.
Are there any ICO-backed projects that didn't overpromise and underdeliver (or not deliver at all)?
Ozone Mystery Laid to Rest
If you have photos app installed and enable syncing, there is no change, it will continue to upload your photos.
The change is (AFAIK) that they will only show up in photos in the future, not in drive (if you enabled that).