skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An interesting contrast is the story on the front page about Chinese border patrol installing spyware [1]. There, the fact that every app needs to be signed by Apple meant that the surveillance app could only be installed on Android phones. So I guess, yes, nobody can dictate what apps you can install, but also nobody can dictate what apps others can install.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342063
What is the struggle if there's no meaning? In my opinion, you struggle only, because there are actually things that mean to you. You cling to things, you yearn for things, and you don't get them. That's the struggle. If you don't want anything, where's the struggle? If you don't want life, you would just fade away, with no struggle.
It's self-deceptive to think you don't yearn for things. Maybe it's a way to protect yourself.
If you're stuck, try to see the underlying assumptions you have about life, and break them. That, in my opinion, let's you take steps forward.
It is important to say that Taiwanese investment in the Czech Republic is significantly higher than Chinese. That was basically the major argument his side has used.

> Hřib’s rise from obscurity is striking because Czech mayors, unlike their US and Polish counterparts, are not directly elected.

Actually it's not striking at all from this very reason - it's the norm due to indirect election. Not a single Prague major in the past 20 years was a well known figure before they were elected.
Or put a heat and radiation resistant usb-drive in a capsule (complete with small parachute) loaded on a sling shot directed at Earth. Would certainly take a long time but would be fun.

Seriously though: what about launching a rocket in the direction of the outer solar system that launches mini relay satellites that act as a mesh network? Put a few bigger ones in the asteroid belt and the rest in various Lagrange points around Mars, Jupiter, Saturn etc.
I get the feeling that trackers are smart enough to detect this kind of activity

And besides, I imagine most people who care enough to use tools like this have personalised ads disabled already
> If you are American or Chinese, actively try to lower your voice.

Only American and Chinese? If you're Dutch, you can still talk as loudly as you want to?
The point this article misses entirely is that the Facial recognition system is now at the gate which is ostensibly Delta’s territory.

It isn’t US Boarder Control running the facial control system, its Delta, Southwest, or anyone else, which has implications about the privacy of the biometric data, that up until this point hasn’t been collected by Airlines, only Boarder entities.

That said, in order to boot strap this system, Delta et., al. would have had to either;
1. Build their own database of biometric and facial data that they believe was reliable (unlikely)
2. Get a full and continually updated copy from CBP (Probably noisy)
3. Use an API made available by CBP that acts as a Biometric/Facial oracle.

I’ve heard rumblings that it’s 3, but I can’t cite anything to back that claim up, so grains of salt.
Sonic did the a similar thing to me in Sunnyvale. I could not order the internet without also getting VoIP which required paying $10 a month for a dongle. I asked if I could ship it back or not have it sent in the first place.

I was told I was required to keep it even if I did not want it, and I would have to return it at the end of service.
Maybe you don't want new data points on your face in a database.
Microsoft is a Trillion Dollar Company
There are browser extensions like Noiszy and AdNauseam that pollute your history and activity profile on an ongoing basis.
"The reason is it doesn't hinder savings and investments"
-Said no low income earner ever.

Sales taxes are regressive taxes. It's stealing out of the pockets of people who are too poor to find time for politics or who are too uneducated to understand that they are being mugged.

If I was an economist with a college degree, I would also support sales tax.
isn’t it mainly because of Foxconn which is slightly pro-PRC nowadays? but I don’t know the data, just assuming, honestly

(Foxconn has large factories in Czech and is Czech’s 2nd biggest exporter, after Skoda cars owned by german Volkswagen)
"to shout and add stress to an already difficult situation" now that's accuracy
How meta: the advice of getting a bit drunk to be able to write great stuff is controversial in itself ;-)
Exactly, they already have your face in the system. Opting out isn't going to change that.

Airports are likely already using facial recognition anyways. PDX had these installed not too long ago: https://www.dormakaba.com/us-en/solutions/products/entrance-...

What makes these interesting is they're getting stereoscopic imaging with multiple camera angles of video. That can potentially be used for some invasive tracking.
For $24 Podio gives you names, faces, and contact details of their premium users
Why we disagree about human nature
> I began to wonder: Will we only wake up once we no longer have the choice to opt out?

No. No ordinary people would care even when there will be no choice to opt out.
I am curious; what border did you cross? How was Xinjiang? Did you just go there for tourism?
Which has the side effect of requiring you to input a captcha every time you quickly want to google anything.
Show HN: PilotMail – HTML Email Builder and HTML Email Test Tool
US Lawmakers Join Call to Freeze Facebook’s Libra Project
Korolev – Single Page Applications running on the server side
Yes, I've visited the factories numerous times. You're probably right, but I don't think their leaning to the PRC has any influence whatsoever. They have zero influence compared to Skoda, which is still seen as "the" national company (and has 15 times more employees, which is crucial for their influence).
Regarding transportation, it's in my comment. Put an end to the individual car and promote public transportation.

Replacing ICE cars with electric cars looks like it's better than nothing, but it's only gonna promote the business-as-usual mindset.

Today, even with limited electric car adoption, our energy consumption is growing faster than the production of electricity from renewables is growing. That means more energy from fossil fuels worldwide. We need to slow down until solutions are found.
I found that one of the best advice (successfully tested on myself and others) to help during existential crisis is to remember that someday you are going to die, and work from there.
If you knew you were going to die in ten minutes, what will you do ? What will you regret ? What will you wish you had done ?

Also this : https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-fiv...
Are we incentivizing trackers to get more powerful ? This seems to be the equivalent of antibiotics overdose.
Well that's categorically untrue. Sure they don't release private symbols intentionally but they have done in the past accidentally. At that point it becomes a bit of a grey area, undoubtedly leaked/stolen source code is a no-no but reversing from private symbols when they do leak seem harder to quantify as you still need to reverse engineer the code, just structures/names etc are already known.

Private symbols are not the only way of gleaning more information, other examples I can think of are:

* Checked builds (prior to Win10). These builds shipped de-optimized kernels (e.g. no inlines) typically with copious debug strings which gave away important details. For example I gleaned a lot of knowledge of ALPC MSRPC from the checked build of rpcrt4.dll from Windows 8.

* SDK/DDK headers, especially in the brave new world of insider previews with preview SDK/DDKs there is sometimes information present which should not have been released including "private" information. Again bit of a grey area.

* The private symbols MS do ship. For example a significant proportion of the COM runtime has private symbols, intentionally. You can extract from those a surprising amount of system call structure information.

I'd recommend watching Alex Ionescu's talk at OffensiveCon about how he does reverse engineering on Windows to see many of these things in action. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D9ExVc0G10

I'm not saying any of this would make it a clean-room re-implementation but to say ReactOS cannot possibly have been reverse engineered without just up and copying source isn't true.

edit: Formatting.
Well, my paranoid 99% says that they could keep it online on purpose so that all people viewing it fall in a legal disadvantage position. Removing that code would achieve nothing in secrecy today compared to the legal leverage they can get tomorrow by keeping it online.
The common thread here seems to be

"there are bad governments in the world, and mobile phones should allow people who want to oppose their own bad governments to install apps that will help them in their opposition?"

Honestly if our goal is to rid the world of truly bad governments then phone apps are in not in anyway the first or most effective method.
This was a real eye-opener. As a software developer I've had my fair share of startup failures (and no successes - so far). Advertising and marketing have always been a closed book to me. This is the best explanation on ads I've ever read. So many takeaways but this one really appealed to me:

> Cultural imprinting = shallow emotional inception + common knowledge → inception into consensus reality

And again, I'm reminded of the fact that I would never have come across this excellent article if it wasn't for HN.
My understanding is that biometric data are contained in your passport, which is already scanned by airlines when you check in and/or board planes.

Here they are using this information to automatically check that it is in fact you instead of having a staff member look at you and check against your passport's photo.
Is it at all possible to have this feature work in a way that still protects privacy?

Say, only store a non-reversible hash derived from facial features - that can be used to verify identity but not for facial recognition itself.
Beginning of Infinity
Please don't be aggressive toward other users on HN, regardless of how strongly you disagree.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Will we only wake up once we no longer have the choice to opt out?

yes :/

Many commenters say that your data / picture is in the system already, which is fine, but your passport photo can be 10 - 15 years old and these systems record how you look now. That's the question if you are comfortable providing it.

What you can't do anything about is CCTV and I think it's a safe bet that they are already equipped with facial recognition and other ML tracking technologies. It's just a question of which database you can avoid being registered in.
VAT = Value Added Tax

Sounds like a tax on production to me.
With more resources from Microsoft I am hoping Github would help and push Ruby Rails forward. There are relatively few people working Rails / Ruby Core working in Github
>Some schools even go so far as to say that the Buddhist path is something to let go of as well at the very end of the process in order to truly reach enlightenment. It's only a tool to get there.

Interesting view (we share the same). To understand it more simply think as a big ocean. Enlightenment being an island. This is where the 4 stages are named after (stream entrer, non returner etc). Once you reached the island the boat is no longer useful (and the boat being 2500 years old as a tradition is a pretty quality one)
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of how right you are or how wrong other people are or you feel they are. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and sticking to the rules when posting here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I assume that writing about Windows internals requires knowledge of said internals? Or do you think he never had access to the source code and has never seen anything, not even ideas of algorithms?
so basically Stoicism's negative visualization?
Existential crisis are usually related with "why" questions regarding life. But "why"s are usually of very low priority as it hardly harvest any insights given limited time. It is a helpful tool for human to explore and for scientific progress as it reduces the search spaces of potential actions or models, but not quite necessary helpful for day to day life.

So you can remind yourself that in hour mind it always seems that "why" matters a lot, but facts matter more than models and models can always be improved. "why"s are supposed to be a friend to guide us, but if they created problems, just be skeptic from and reevaluate the value of question itself.

If your crisis is a "what" crisis rather than "why". It is often easier to cope with, as you only need to open up yourself and remind that all "what" questions are just nomenclature build on immature social/scientific models and never complete. Every "what" question can be altered by a different definition.

People often relate existential crisis with nihilist view, but my opinion is that they are not nihilist enough to think through that the existential questions are meaningless or of low priority themselves.

[edit] typo
The creatures you listed were necessary for the development of a human. They are also a part of the fragile balance of nature which keeps the living conditions on Earth. I am not saying everything has a meaning (I do not know). But I disagree that this is "an ill posed question".
Indeed I use an open-source stripped down Android variant. It only required an hour of fiddling one time (to learn how to, flash it and set everything up the way you do on a new phone), works as breeze since then.
He says there that the US is one of the few countries which doesn't do exit checks for immigration.

Is that true? I hadn't thought about this.

I know the Schengen zone does, as well as China and much of Latin America, but in my experience the UK doesn't. Does Australia/New Zealand/Canada (my feeling is that Australia doesn't)? What about Asian and African countries?
Difficult to Tell What's Real
Tobacco is very good at clearing things from the body, like drugs or caffeine. Smokers clear caffeine faster from the brain than non smokers.

Check out the P450 group of enzymes to find out how this works, part of the clearance rate is controlled by the liver becoming more efficient and altering your food and drink cravings.

Other foods/chemicals like grapefruit juice slow the metabolism of some drugs, so 2litres of grapefruit juice combined with 50Mg of viagra will see you visiting A&E with a 5hr priaprism, that has to be let down with andrenaline injections into the corpus spongiosum.

Generally if you want your illegal drugs to last longer dont smoke.
So, what you're saying is... there's no problem because people have already given up anyway? At the very least opting out gives them a data point that their theatric procedures aren't readily accepted by everybody.
> PSP had a "Create new from clipboard" option

Since forever (probably since PS 2.4 or so) choosing "New Document" in Photoshop defaults to the size of the document on the clipboard. My workflow is: Copy in one app > Switch to PS > CMD + N > Hit Enter > CMD + V
> gambling investigations

I hope they mean court orders than just some investigation.

I think the american investigation term is more broad than in other places where investigation just refers to police investigation.
I would rather pay for google and have no surveillance & ads.
Less THC in the leaves, more CBD in the leaves.
> rid the world of truly bad governments

and who makes the judgement on what a "truly" bad gov't is?

I say if you own the hardware, you should be allowed to install any app you wish on it.

Apple can claim that this voids your warranty, but they (or any other actor (including the gov't)) cannot be allowed to _prevent_ you from doing it. .
US House Representatives Requests Facebook to Pause Work on Libra
English more sophisticated than Latin? At nuance?
SOP isn't relevant here - it relates generally to _reading_ content from another origin.

What is relevant here is whether the cookies are SameSite and/or whether a token is required.
If ... opening 100 tabs doesn't crash your browser or freeze your computer first.
Yeah. On the other hand probably most of us had a chance to work with code that needed some reverse engineering to be understood ;)
What airport is this? At Adelaide airport arrivals I always choose to go through the manual processing queue, i.e. the one non-Australian citizens have to use. Half the time it's faster than the smart-gate system queue, and even if it's not an extra 10 minutes after 26hrs + of traveling isn't going to kill me.

As for departures, it wasn't obvious to me - like with you - that I could opt-out. I'll give it a shot next time and see what happens. Am expecting some annoyed and suspicious glances! :)
Duckduckgo is free, has no surveillance and ads, and its just as good or better than google.
Casinos are using AI for even greater advantage
> clearly a dark pattern.

It's not clear to me at all. Explain please.
I guess on reflection the blatancy of the Christian dogma destroyed my willing suspension of disbelief. This was never an issue for me in the Narnia series, which I enjoyed. Nor even in the Screwtape letters which are pretty much a collection of sermons!

Maybe it's the way it breaks genre rules, starts out as straight sci-fi then busts out the dogma part way through. Whereas Screwtape starts with a premise that Satan is personified so I accepted that from the beginning.

Still interesting to see another side of Lewis's mind though. Maybe I'll give it another go one day.
Corel also used to officially support and allow sales of earlier versions of CorelDRAW i.e. If you didn't need the latest version of the programme, you could buy the cheaper, discounted earlier version.
Not sure if this happens in smaller airports, but if the passport scanner is automated, they already take a picture of you.
Although I have nothing illegal there, I would rather travel without a phone than handle my real phone to anybody.
Developing 10x faster with a cheap laptop using VS Code Remote Development
Are Incubators Only for Big Law? Austrian Firms Show Collaboration Is the Answer
OpenGL is in maintenance state on all platforms basically. The only alternative they had was Vulkan. And Vulkan is not perfect either. Personally I prefer Metal to Vulkan. It's very easy to transition from OpenGL to Metal, it feels like an improved API without global state and packing stuff into structs. Meanwhile Vulkan opens the whole low-level can of worms on you and you suddenly have to worry about memory barriers, image transitions, semaphores/synchronization, even in the simplest of applications.
Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283382

(Links to the blog post about this - https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/hey-advertisers-track-this/)
I vividly remember my first "existential crisis". Well, perhaps that's not the right term for my experience.

The first time I had a feeling that once it's over, it's really game over and.. that's it. Very unsettling, cold, indifferent. Who'd care about some carbon remains on some big stone orbiting somewhere in the galaxy? Nobody, no one, and it doesn't mean anything.

I was 6 years old. I remember where I was, who was in the room, what were they wearing - it's all etched in my memory. That's one of the strongest feelings I've felt.

From time to time, I think about this topic and it's still difficult to accept that we are finite. But, we are and it is what it is. We didn't choose this world; we are here, might as well make the best of it.
It's built into the cost, and has been for a long time. It was 15% before its most recent increase.

The thing about it is, because it has been there for so long our economy has adjusted to it.

It's completely different to up tax from say 10% to 20% in one fell swoop as it puts a huge burden on anybody not wealthy.

I guess the issue is not so much the rate of tax, but the rate at which it is increased. Wages and living costs need to even out.
> A lot of economists consider sales tax to be the best way to tax

“Best” is always specific to a value system. An economist who pretends “best” is an objective question has confused their subjective value system with universal truth.

> The reason is it doesn't hinder savings and investments

That's only true if you only consider first-order effects, just like saying taxes on corporate income are best because they don't effect consumers ability to afford goods and services would be. Consumption taxes negatively impact investment returns (and thereby also the incentive to invest) by depressing quantity traded of consumer goods at any price level.
DuckDuckGo might be a cure to this problem. I set up it as default search engine on home main pc a few weeks ago and although I still have sometimes to resort to Google for a few searches, it got remarkably better compared to the past.
Why not both.

I don't want to return to the old slothful release schedules of the 2000s, where features and bug fixes was mostly stagnant.

You can have staging, scheduled QA signed off releases, that happen every day. I have worked on some fairly large significant services and we still released several times a day, just that you did not trigger the final prod release yourself but the QAs pressed the button instead. Though usually just once a day per microservice.

I have also worked with several clients lately without QA where devs could themselves push to prod many times a day. I am not sure these systems were that much less stable, though they were all mostly greenfield and not critical public government systems. They were off course a lot smaller changes, and quick to undo. Which is the core element of "release straight to prod" ethos.

I am sure Cloudflare have a significant QA process whilst using todays fast moving release schedules.

What is always a grey-zone is configuration changes. Even if properly versioned and on a release schedule train with several staging environments, configuration is often very environment sensitive. So maybe they could not test it properly in any staging environments but had to hope prod worked...

However Cloudflare will hopefully implement some way to make sure this particular configuration and subsequent future changes are not as bottle-necked that instead can be be gradually released to a subset and region-by-region instead of a big bang to all. Though canary/blue-green/etc releases of core routing configurations is hard.
https://honestmarijuana.com/cbd-vs-cbn/
Gaming is becoming a core for children nowadays
so is it going to be a must for children at school to learn technology from primary level?
Note that Apple's Books app works with books that were not purchased from Apple. You can simply send an epub file to Books app via the standard sharing functionality, from any other app.

I assume it is allowed because it does not pose a security threat to the device, nor user, as opposed to allowing apps from outside the Apple Store.

Edit:
You can try it with Peter Watts' Blindsight ;). EPub download link is in the header:

https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
They do have ads[1], but they don't use (or have) tracking data for it.

1: https://help.duckduckgo.com/company/advertising-and-affiliat...
I am sure the chinese government can twist Apple's arm to sign their malware. So it is not any better.
Let’s Make: Dangerous Dave
So was the transistor [necessary] for the development of the CPU. It's also a part of fragile timing nature of electric signals. What's the point?

By ill-posed I simply mean it assumes something under the hood. Like when someone says "how do you catch X criminals" without first establishing that X is a crime. It's kind of a trick of language.
That compiles because with gcc extensions or sufficiently recent standards, variable size arrays are now a thing. The compiler doesn't insist on a static array size. What about something like this:

#define ASSERT_BUILD(x) extern int STATIC_ASSERT_FAILED[(x)?1:-1]