skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I invested a lot of time trying to publish a Gmail add-on and failed miserably [1][4] because of this lockdown. Here are some notes that may be of interest:

The lock down is for the Gmail API especially for API that allows reading user’s email.

Any App has to get OAuth 2 token to get access to the API. The user has to explicitly provide access . The approval screen will show each type of access the app is asking. See an example here [2]

In addition, Google will send an email to the user immediately after the approval, with a scary warning.

The user can withdraw the app access anytime, from Google account page.

The data access concern Google is projecting is that the APP can read user’s email (Remember, the app can read only those who explicitly gave the app the permission to read their email).
The “lockdown” is a direct reply to the media frenzy that “Gmail allows any app to read anyone's email” [5]. Gmail does not allow reading email automatically. The user has to allow explicitly.

In order to get Gmail API access, the app has to go through a Google review process where Google will ask the developer to justify each type of API access the app is requesting in addition to explaining (with videos) what the app does and how the API is used.
The first level of approval process demands you to publish a comprehensive privacy policy and in my experience, anything like “marketing” or “research” in the privacy policy will get you disapproval. [3]

Such a strict approval process is good and fine, and well appreciated till this point. The issue comes for the last part of the approval process.

Those Apps that requires read access to Gmail has to get themselves assessed, through Google appointed third party security assessors paying $75000 USD annually.

This is the main blocker.

This will kick out any app or add-on that small scale developers create. It will block new entrants. What remains will be established apps that are generating huge revenue to justify the “protection money”. They get an added advantage that there will no longer be any new competition.

It is not the restrictions, or the intention to protect the end user that is in question but the “first save my back” attitude in the process, and the bait and switch - that is the problem. In summary it happened like this:

Hey developers come, build apps using our platform, show your innovation!
Developers start investing time and effort on the platform, approval process is smooth and fare
Somewhere else, someone misuses someone’s system, huge media attention
Sorry developers, you go to Mr X , keep paying him and we will keep you here. If not, trash your product and go away.

[1] https://medium.com/@prasanthmj/lessons-learned-developing-an...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGXFQUmZTf4

[3] https://blog.gsmart.in/applying-for-g-suite-api-approvals/

[4] https://medium.com/@prasanthmj/google-restricted-api-scopes-...

[5] https://www.wsj.com/articles/techs-dirty-secret-the-app-deve...
Inspiring stuff. Thanks for sharing.
There's a bunch of cases denoted over at nmap.org [0]. Also, regardless of law, if you try to do a full probing port scan of certain military IP ranges in many countries, you might get a visit from a couple of not-so-friendly people regardless of legislation.

[0] https://nmap.org/book/legal-issues.html
Well, depends on how you define 'first world problems'. But again, you should look at other phones today, not the ones from 2007. I thank my god every day that some companies finally had the courage to do original/innovative work to get rid of that. Not all of them will be successful, but honestly, the notch is nothing more than a compromise, and an ugly one at that.
It's worse [0]. I have some fantastic recommendations from Google Now and recently from Amazon as well :-/

Here is one brilliant example of something that must be a machine learning thing that has gotten a little too much freedom: http://erik.itland.no/more-fun-with-google-mixing-images-fro...

If you are lucky you can still see them for yourself by searching Google for mat-table. (It is a component of Angular Material, which the AI/ML thing kind of realizes but not without fuzzing it to include an actual table with a mat on as well :-)

Edit: meanwhile, for the first time I can remember for years Google isn't pushing some dumb dating site front and center but rather text ads for some things that could be relevant for a software engineer with a lovely wife and small kids: mule integration, robotics stuff and holiday suggestions. Congrats to whoever managed to convince their boss (or the AI) to try some other options. I’d also be delighted if next year I’d get a well placed ad for a couple of the conferences I missed out on this year.

Edit 2: Finally got around to posting a couple of screens showing off Amazons understanding of Law books, Engineering books and Humor and Entertainment: https://erik.itland.no/fun-with-amazons-ai-machine-learning

[0]: since AI is now making things actively worse.
NPM fired staff for discussing workplace conditions
Even under assumptions of universal inherent capability, the dirty truth is that we simply don't know how to reliably teach critical thinking en masse. That's nominally what college is for, but the universalization of college admissions has exposed the fact that the difference between a degreed and non-degreed worker had more to do with the input population to colleges than any direct effect of a college education.

This is an unsolved problem, and a really important one in the modern cognitive economy, which is why theories about inherent cognitive capability have gained so much purchase recently. For my part, I think these theories are plausible, but also think that their implications are significant enough that I don't want to be too hasty and buy into them until I've been convinced that we've exhausted the possibility that thinking can be taught.
If you ever feel inclined, take some courses in any cultural or art history department at a somewhat reputable college or university.

You will see professors are already tying "classics" to current cultural products. Drawimg parallels, discussing patterns and influences.

We jumped from Nietzsche to Japanese manga.

It's not either/ or, it's both.

I was at SFSU and Amsterdam uni. YMMV.
I've never been impressed by anything that man has done. He just sailed along with the ideas and changes made by Jobs. Ive seems like the typical designer who is unaware of anything hardware related. The trashcan was proof of that. The new cheese grater is probably a royal pain in his rear because it doesn't looks pretty.

Even his voice overs were tacky as hell. Easy to make fun of. Cringeworthy at best.

When Jobs dies Apple's creativity and forward-thinking also died. They started multi-touch, they made touch screens work, they made MacBooks that weren't full of stickers and big humps of plastic, they made smartphones with an OS that actually worked smoothly.

When Jobs died they stopped innovating. Maybe a few remnants of Jobs' ideas were implemented but none of them to the degree of innovativeness and quality during his time.

Jobs would have canned so much crap Apple has released over the years. He would have made certain products so much better by simply spending several billions more on research and development.

Jobs wasn't there to suck up to shareholders. He was not even there for us. I'm pretty sure he was there for himself and his legacy.

Jony Ive was never part of anything impressive. To me, he's just the talking head with a voice who they hopefully took away any control from.

Apple needs to spend some of their countless billions on innovation and setting standards that are 5 years ahead of the competition. Instead, they're twice as expensive with outdated tech. Such a shame.
That must be because of the over promotion of LGBT then.

Also look at this: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/24/lgbtq-a...

"Young people are growing less tolerant of LGBTQ individuals, ... , a survey released Monday shows."

Because the promotion and attention seeking is everywhere, people think it's everywhere. That's why we're starting to see it backfiring now. And, lots of parents just don't want that message broadcasted to their kids all the time, at least not until they're a certain age. Parents realize the whole 'having a weewee doesn't make you a boy' story can be extremely harmful to young children. And so they teach their children to ignore those influences when they encounter them. That starts to reflect now in polls and attitudes.

I bet on the LGBT community to start fighting even harder for tolerance again though, because the activists (who do all the speaking) seem to be quite incapable of self reflection and self examination.
Probably proportional the number of startups that won't be existing next year.
Yes, I know they are separate, but they are both shadows of a class system that is repugnant to modern western values. And although what you are saying is true, it is only the current practice. Notice that the UK has no written constitution.

It particularly astonishes me when Americans defend these costumes, given that their country was essentially created in opposition to such a class system.
There is a known strong relationship between risky behaviour and depression - a positive one.

If people were more depressed, we would normally expect to see MORE of these risk-taking behaviours, not less.
Java vs. Golang for Microservices
Well, they run on batteries.
The PC version of Prince of Persia will always have a special place in my heart.

The first time I saw it was when me and my brother were in a store with my mom and saw this game running on a PC in the computer section. It must've been the first game I ever saw with 256 colour VGA graphics.

That evening we told my dad about this amazing game we saw in the store with graphics that looked like real people.

I think it was also the first time I saw a 3 1/2" disk. We still had a 286 at home with 5 1/4" floppy drives.

It also later became the first game I ever heard with Sound Blaster music and sound effects at a friend's house. That evening I told my dad how the music sounded like real music.

I also remember us giving our old computer to my grandma for word processing and she telling us that she tried to play PoP but got chopped up by the blades every time because she had to close her eyes when she tried to go through because she was too afraid.
That doesn’t sound right. At 1MB for 200k domains is 5 characters per domain - the efficiency of that bloom filter is “almost” like sending the domains themselves. An online calculator suggested 230KB for a bloom filter of 200k items (1% error rate).
That's another part of the story. That part is going on, struggling with its problems, especially with the Apple ecosystem.
On the other side, there are conservatives in Iran too, that will be happy to be disconnected from the world. Taking effective steps from Google and Apple side can strengthen the peace dialogue for both sides.
I hope this helps all those people that somehow manage to lock themselves out of their instances.
It's not like this.

Google doesn't like storing files as e-mails with base64-encoded binaries because it competes with Google Drive. That solution - the Gmail Drive - existed long before Google Drive, and even had a nice tool that mounted your gmail storage as a network drive on Windows! GMail storage isn't unlimited, so I always considered it fair - they give me a couple of GB of free storage, it's up to me how I use it.

As for the unlimited offers and restaurants, people don't do that too much in meatspace because they'd get thrown out by security for obvious abuse. But they do it a little, like e.g. couples buying one cup and using it together. There are also natural limits to how much soda you can consume or use, even if you got away with taking home a whole barrel (sodas lose gas fast)...

(And note that the "decorum" and "fair play" doesn't apply in meatspace either, when it comes to e.g. retail chains making mistakes in their promotions, like that one famous case where (AFAIR) Lidl in Poland offered refunds for products you didn't like if you brought back the box, whether or not the product was still inside. You can imagine what happened next.)

However, ultimately, it's the company that's playing tricks on people with "unlimited" marketing, and they deserve the problems they get when people take it at face value (offering something with no intent to fulfill that offer is plainly dishonest). Reminds me of a mobile vendor that offered USB modem with free unlimited LTE for $notmuch, back when LTE was a somewhat new thing (~2012). A friend bought the subscription to test it out, and discovered that the "unlimited" LTE was actually throttled past 20th or 30th GB. Guess which company I never considered buying Internet services from since?

It's not because of customers that we can't have nice things. It's because of companies using dishonest marketing tactics and then acting surprised when some people call them on their bluff. It isn't so hard to say "no hard limits <small>but we throttle you past XX $unit, and there are following restrictions on use...</small>", except treating customers with respect is anathema to modern business.
> the only way it will be eliminated, just like it worked against homophobia and interracial marriage

Homophobia has been eliminated? Since when?
I don't think it has the detailed advance trip planning features you're looking for, but for general navigation in Japan I can't recommend NAVITIME enough.

For years after the Kumamoto earthquake, Google Maps would still try to take you down closed roads. Meanwhile NAVITIME will even warn you of road construction where traffic has been constricted to one lane with alternating stoplights. Their data is fantastically detailed.

It also has built-in rain/snow precipitation maps, and shows road closures from VICS data in realtime.
Thank you for the reference - good to know for my Windows development machines!
If you're only in for the fun, maybe (and only maybe). But this kind of limited fun is really a puny part of life.

Those stories that "anyone could have told" went through the ages through these specific people, in this specific form.

When you have knowledge of history, of old texts, your self is equipped to be free from manipulation of those that pretend that "things weren't this or that way, but my way" for their own benefit, because you know, because you have something material that holds together, that went through the trial of time, that says otherwise.

The modern counterparts, for instance, pick hugely on old stories, old arcs, and old myths.

But you only get that when you care to read and appreciate old stuff.
It seems like an extra option 'Avoid dirt roads' - an option that TomTom offers - would be useful here
That's why we need more state-sponsored news media like Pravda. A government employee subsisting on state money wouldn't have the same motivation to write clickbait articles and lie to people.

Edit: Jesus Christ, I thought I could not have made the sarcasm more obvious. Turns out I could.
My solution is to do one thing, one even very small thing a week to help the meta problems. Writing letters to reps or calling, picking up trash around my neighborhood, or making some care packs for homeless people are all things that don’t take very long, and the difference in feeling like I’m doing something about it vs not has been liberating.
Your comment would be better without the first word, it’s unnecessary.

That aside, I often think and read about the Toyota Production System, and notice how the industry I work in, structural steel fabrication and erection, a subset of the construction industry, has a tenancy to me nothing like it.

It’s interesting that software production has similar failings. Just recently another building in Sydney suffered serious structural faults[1]; the 737 Max is a disaster; the MacBook Pro keyboard is an unmitigated dumpster fire that, let’s be serious, got Jony Ive sacked; Tesla and Musk are pathologically deceptive.

I’m beginning to think we’ve lost the ability to build anything of genuine quality.

In my opinion we have reached and passed Peak Design and Manufacturing.

I could be wrong. What genuinely quality and durable things do humans make?
And pretty is subjective, i find the Win9x, Win2K, OS/2 (...to some extent), BeOS, and KDE1 icons better looking than the more recent ones which are usually monochromatic. The Win9x icons tried to be colorful but also were limited by a 4bit palette, which meant that they were both high contrast and had bright colors. Win2K icons are a softer version of those and KDE1 icons are what you'd probably get if you tried to make icons in the style of Win9x/OS/2 but without the technical limitations.

I was never a fan of WinXP and Vista/7 icons, too plasticky, often faded out and shiny.

I did like macOS icons before they decided to get rid of skeuomorphism and made everything like it was designed by a 5 year old with a vector application. They were high quality but also had high readability. As a developer i hated them though because they were very hard to make something decent.

I also like the GNOME 2/Tango style and the elementaryOS style which seems to me to be based on Tango. Tango is a bit WinXP-ish but i think they did a better job with making the icons less plasticky and more readable.

But my favorite is the Win9x and KDE1 styles because of both how they look and how easy (relatively speaking) is to make them (which is important, otherwise it is hard to get a consistent look).
Whilst I understand where the author is coming from, I'm not sure the companies are to blame here.

> Two years ago, under the guise of complying with American sanctions against Iran — sanctions that have existed for decades — Apple started removing Iranian apps from its platform.

Sanctions aren't always clear-cut, and if a buck is to be made, companies often try to stretch interpretations, try to fly under the radar or rely on the administration on being lenient in some aspects. So I'm not sure it's as simple as "sanctions existed before, so this must be the companies fault".

I'd much rather see sanctions in this space limited/removed - but I hold no hopes for enabling moves in this geopolitical game of power.
How AI Interviewing Is Redefining the Way We Hire
It can be mitigated but it isn't being mitigated.

At some point those changes will need to happen, as you say, but it would be better if we didn't reach the point of needing a revolution to get there.
It's pretty straight forward: scarcity implies value. It works on all levels of human relationships. FWIIW the inverse is also true: after doubling my consulting rate a couple of times, I found I was treated much better.
The article mentions the kind of dependency on the Android and iOS platforms. I believe this is the right time for Iranian entrepreneurs to start porting or start installing Google free Android as a service on customers’ phones and then have their apps running on them. Some of the smarter ones can even exploit the political scene and say they’re giving a big middle finger to Western companies in favour of something they built locally. I’m assuming that the local politicians are at best indifferent to these measures.
Wow, that's great. The examples section is extensive and answers my question very well. I'll be sure to read the book.
I'll note again the snowball effect that the Google Cloud block has (Google Cloud totally blocks Iran on a network level).

Now, your services that you host on Google Cloud are not available. Say you are Gitlab, and you host there (they do!). Now, if you put your Open Source project on Gitlab, that project is not accessible to Iranians either (as well as other sanctioned countries).

As someone you spends a couple of weeks every year in Iran, I can tell you that arbitrary websites breaking because of blocks on the US side have a far worse effect on my ability to work then the fact that Facebook and Twitter is blocked.

Why doesn't the documentation for date-fns work? Oh, they load the data from Firebase.

Why can't I compile by Android app? Oh, the Android repository is hosted on Google Cloud.

Etc.
A sociopath would be someone expecting OTHER people to work up to burnout, for his own sake.
They aren't modernizing because they don't want to and fuck you for asking. They have the power and corporate neuroticism wins every time.
> Look at GNU/Linux: there are only 2 or 3 variations for everything.

Mostly false.

For package management on Linux I can think of 4 just off the top of my head:

* apt

* rpm

* apk

* pacman

There are bound to be more and this is not counting other approaches like AppImage and Snap.
It's not even about being in Iran, you can be anywhere and they will hunt you down and will try everything in their power to make you suffer more.

I've written about my own experience at https://alireza.gonevis.com/how-i-didnt-get-my-first-paying-...
Oh, No. That's a different issue.

If GitHub is unavailable, the repository itself is unreachable. A lot verify hashes from the repo.

If the latest release of one package is broken and your ci breaks, then you really have a problem... You'd have to disregard lock files and go out of your way to reinstall everything to latest
One makes a more clickable article title.
High Volume Transaction Processing (1997) [pdf]
Whenever I read one of these HBR things on "optimal employee engagement" I feel like I'm reading some modern version of an ancient roman treatise on the care and feeding of agricultural slaves. Everyone who reads this and is trying to optimize their personal employee engagement should reconsider their life choices.
What you've written is extremely interesting. Not sure how much of it I truly understand, but I wanted to add that your explanation for everything as a wave function reminded me of oscilloscope music, ie. depicting images with waveforms.
A tutorial I watched demonstrates the drawing of a mushroom, then animates it by modulating with a larger wave. In my laymen's head model, Spacetime is like a very large wave that everything else is being modulated by.

Here's the relevant video: https://youtu.be/rtR63-ecUNo
Why are trucks running across the
US instead of high-capacity trains?

Imagine a country where every company and family follows the rule "Make the investments that, without anyone else changing anything, will pay back my investment fastest"

To use the jargon of game theory they are unable to coordinate; when faced with a stag hunt [1] they will always choose to pursue hares alone instead of pursuing a stag as a team.

In this country, 50 families will buy £10,000 SUVs to deal with a potholed road, as any family resurfacing it alone would spend £100,000, and pooling £2,000 each isn't an option.

Likewise, a trucking company can buy an battery electric truck or a self-driving truck without anyone else changing anything - it can run on the roads that already exist.

Do you suppose such a country would ever end up with trains, or busses, or overhead power cables for electric vehicles?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt
That's precisely why the EU gave us GDPR. With it, the app has to provide you with that knowledge.
There are alternative app stores available, for example: https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/10-alternative-android-ap...

Does anyone know enough about the legal angle to talk about what it would take to develop an alternative platform not impacted by US sanctions?
Under GDPR, Google can only use your data for the uses you have given permission for. This includes not handing it to other companies (via their API or otherwise) for any other uses.
Boden Cross-Platform Framework v0.2 Released