skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pour one out for the SREs who had plans they were looking forward to this evening.
> Can you provide a reference for where Amazon &/or google say that, specifically?

This very article. But since you said you don't believe them ("those companies lie constantly") why would referencing them help here? Either you believe them, and it is settled, or you don't and it is worthless.

Hook up wireshark, you can quite clearly see when Google Mini or an Echo are sending an audio stream since it is a substantial packet-load relative to normal "keep-alive" comms. The only exceptions to that, from what I've seen, are automatic software updates (but traffic is moving down, rather than up).

You could also look at the device teardowns, for example this article has a good overview of the underlying workings (inc. Wake Word detection):

https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/2a32d792-d471-...
If you look at the metrics for onion services traffic [0] and total network traffic [1] you'll see that this report is looking at the roughly 1% of tor traffic that is going to onion services. The overwhelming majority of traffic is to the regular, "clear" internet.

[0] https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-rend-relayed-cells.ht...
[1] https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth-flags.html
I think ordinary people have a vague sense of how computer memory and computation works. Because online queries happen near-instantaneously (relatively speaking), people don’t assume there’s a need for this data to ever be stored, or be accessed by anything else besides the “Google” program at the point in time of the query.
Because it's short sighted to over tax your citizens from both sides?
Second this, I've been both a nontechnical and a somewhat less nontechnical buyer on Upwork. When I was more nontechnical before working for Gigster (freelance software dev marketplace), I would have said that screen recording is brilliant. After all, how could I trust someone who is doing work I don't understand? At least I can look at their screen and make sure they weren't on HN when they were billing me :)

Somewhat less nontechnical me knows better now, but if I didn't have any idea how to hire still, there's a good chance I would be one of those bad buyers.
I would also look at the IIHS test results. Take the Model S for instance---it only gets an "acceptable" rating on the front driver side small overlap test, a test which many other cars are earning a "good" rating on.

Sure, Tesla's cars are generally very safe, but there is more than one way to measure safety, and Tesla doesn't always win.
I didn't realize how much I like using twitter between tasks until now. Hope it gets back soon.
repository: https://github.com/mbutterick/beautiful-racket
Hackett really isn't yet usable for real programming. IDK about Turnstile, but I think Typed Racket is usable.
honestly i feel unmoored without tweetdeck on my second screen ticking by. i realise this is probably a bad thing, but getting my daily news and info, i'd say 90% comes from twitter.
This is actually true of most of the modern world.

It is mostly still together because the venn diagram of those who want to see the world burn, and those who are clever enough to make it so has a very very small intersection, since the latter group is quite invested in the world not being on fire.
Which reminds me of a related quip of mine: "Like Fight Club, but for Facebook."
The Kursk sank.

This is the one, I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_submarine_Losharik
True, but one could argue that several east river neighborhoods are just extensions of the Manhattan density and culture, with the perk of having an actual view of Manhattan.

I get that some people want their own borough's identity, but LIC doesn't really represent that.
We don't have 15 year data on Tesla vehicles, period. There are theoretical arguments about how the batteries won't explode or corrode, but an apples-to-apples analysis would compare vehicles of similar maintenance and age. The citation the (unfortunately downvoted) parent was asking for was about the statistical claims.
Someone like him wouldn’t be billing by the hour, but rather as a portion of overall value created. For the kind of non-trivial jobs worth his time, six figures at least.
That's still more than you offered to the contrary.
Private Investigators.
I need to confess. I am absolutely petrified by floating point. Is there a good resource I can learn it from.
as someone else mentioned above this is a website/service that's down, not the internet. When you can't open a socket to a server in another network then the Internet is down.
http://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/ is still up. All is well.
Hermes is using the same debugging protocol as Node. So yes, debugging in Chrome actually runs Hermes code on the device.
Wait til someone hijacks the nfs driver repo on npm. That's where the real fun begins.
I had a tab open from earlier and it refused to load larger images of their thumbnail counterparts which I thought was odd, which suggests quite a few services affected (i.e. their CDN, or image hosting services)
The strawman is strong with that argument.

> But for most people, they are comfortable with this agreement. They don’t see it as a breach of freedom or liberty, but as a simple and just contract.

Having people sign away something that they are not fully aware of the implications of is not the same as people not caring.

If you presented software as "and at any time, this software you just paid $300 for, can be remotely disabled and you won't get your money back and you have no choice about it", people might be less willing to accept the status quo.

To use (yet another!) car analogy, if I buy a car and the manufacturer goes out of business, I can still get support from independent mechanics. Heck if there are enough customers, a new company may spring to life just to make replacement parts for the car! (This in fact happens super often, non-oem parts are everywhere.) Even after bankruptcy of the original manufacturer, an entire third party supply chain can exist and people can keep driving their cars.

Compare this to closed source software, where the software can literally just stop working one day, with no recourse.

People are slowly coming to realize this, especially as more and more software has a requirement to ping a server somewhere. IoT devices are helping bring this issue to public awareness.

GPL says "no matter what, YOU have the right to what is running on your computers, you can open it up and do what you want, or pay someone else to do the same."

How is it unethical that I should have control over the software running on my PC, in my house? The same PC my webcam and microphone are connected to? The same PC I use for online banking and email?

Nothing else in the world works like closed source software. Hardware manufacturers try, and there is a legal fight to try and make physical goods like software (sealed shut, unable to open, no third party parts), but traditionally anything I buy I've been able to disassemble at will.

Why should software be any different?

(Of course I say this as someone who has spent over a decade writing a closed source software... and I use Windows as my primary OS.)
Did you read the defense of boredom article that hit the homepage a couple days ago?
The Racket Manifesto
Yes.

As an Emacs programmer, I much prefer working in one 10kloc file than 20 500loc files. The later I find pretty overwhelming.
Software engineer salaries are fairly comparable between NYC and the Bay Area, although most quantitative sources I've seen have NYC coming in slightly lower. But NYC could have a large number of engineers who (1) are willing to work for Facebook (2) for $240k but (3) are unwilling to leave NYC.

Expanding their NYC office will allow Facebook to hire more of those engineers without lowering their hiring bar or further fragmenting campuses.
This is untrue. The update process was part of Xprotect, the malware definition/signature system built-into macOS that's part of Gatekeeper [1]. It dates back to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and was expanded on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (the Gatekeeper GUI was introduced in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and back ported to Mac OS X 10.7.5 Lion). Updates were historically issued via minor OS updates, but Apple started to do silent updates to the Xprotect definition list a number of years ago, as a way to target popular/growing strains of malware (which were often installed via cracked apps).

There were a few instances in the last few years where the repos or built-in update systems of legitimate programs were compromised and bundled malware (and in one case, ransomware) along with their apps. In those cases, Apple also silently updated XProtect to remove the malware.

In this case, just because this was a webserver and not something more traditional like a trojan doesn't mean that it isn't still malware. The Risky Business podcast asserted the existence of the RCE before Apple jumped into action that it says Zoom knew about for months. Given that the only way to remove the webserver is to update Zoom (something that won't help any user that has already uninstalled Zoom, which kindly left the insecure webserver behind), this type of update makes perfect sense -- especially since Zoom itself is removing the server from its own application bundle.

This was malware, pure and simple. It wasn't third party software. It was malware left behind/included with a third-party app. It's not as if Apple removed the Zoom app -- it removed the piece of malware Zoom was including alongside its app. The fact that Zoom was including this malware as a way of bypassing Apple's access control in Safari (God forbid the user have to click a button confirming they want to open a meeting) is beside the point -- this was malware.

Additionally, users can turn off the auto system updates and they can disable Gatekeeper entirely.

I understand the broader concern of an OS maker being able to remove files a user chose to install -- but this is a very unambiguous
case of malware. Just because the RCE wasn't actively exploited doesn't mean it wasn't malware.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatekeeper_(macOS)
How would you explain to an ordinary user why it's necessary for "your search will be recorded and preserved forever" in order to improve the search algorithm? As opposed to a limited timeframe?
I don't understand how this is a controversial claim that people refute when it's so easy to test with something like Wireshark. If someone is paranoid enough spread FUD on the Internet, they should be paranoid enough to actually check with freely available tools.
Cornucopian
At a mile below the surface, it's probably safer (from human malicious actors) there than pretty much anywhere in Russia.
This is typically framed as "Grow the Pie" vs "Split the Pie"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grow_the_Pie_(phrase)
Is the implication that we as a society would be horrified by a “Chinese room” voice assistant — a human responding to voice commands and performing an assistant’s tasks?

A service whereby this function is automated 100% of the time and very rarely requests are transcribed for QC by trusted partners (a failure point apparently) seems .. reasonable?
Because many of them, especially Haskell, have their roots in Mathematics which are famous for one letter variable names.

Because the syntax favours terseness for readabilities sake (to see structure and patterns rather than reading a description of the variable).

Because Python specifically favours verboseness and has many principles around using long names, underscores instead of camelcase and the like.
I have a theory Shopify does sell - however only from their own stores and with access to the data goldmine deciding what to sell, who to target in advertising, etc.
"... a piece of sponsored prose remarkable not for its content, but for being at least four layers of advertising removed from any kind of productive economic activity."

Such a great article.
But amazon DID go around announcing plans for HQ2 and making a big deal about it, to get tax breaks etc.
Depends on how high the risk is, no? If surveillance moved the risk from 90% to 10% I think most people would consider it worth it.
This is really cool. It kinda looks like rainbow salad, but who cares? For me at least, it is much easier to visually parse.
Or getting your account banned after someone failed trying to brute force it and not being able to access it due to changes in security policies.
No, they installed an update to XProtect's signatures to say "this is malware, remove it if detected" -- something the company has done many times in the past.
This assumes a fixed definition of “good.” I would argue that the search would be better because it was done using data collected only from parties who have given consent.

You can define “good” in terms of cost, revenue, sampling bias, relevance, etc. I can define it in terms of ethical data collection and usage. Who’s to say which definition is correct?
If you're not looking to sell everything, the ESO Fund also offers cash advances against shares. Each of these firms have different structures. EquityZen and Sharespost typically require a full transfer with company approval while Forge Global has been known to do forward contracts.

The general process for a full transfer is as follows:

Find a buyer
Agree on a Stock Transfer Agreement with the buyer
Notify the company about the sale
The company has 1-3 months to exercise their Right of First Refusal (the company has the chance to purchase the shares first)
(note: some companies don't allow transfers at all)
If the company allows the transfer to occur, then you can finally close the deal.

This process takes up to 3-6 months depending on how easy it is to find a buyer, negotiate terms, get the company approval, etc.

A forward contract or a deal with ESO can close extremely quickly, usually within a few weeks or even days!

Disclaimer: I work at the ESO Fund
The documentary 'Boxes' goes in depth about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htQq3oYO5sI
Strongly disagree. Have people here actually worked with former Facebookers or Googlers (or people who left for Facebook et)?

They are very likely to be very good and very unlikely to be bad. But they are not gods walking amongst us. There are hundreds if not thousands of professionals in the Bay Area who have the talent FB is looking for AND are working at nearby, lower-paying companies. Facebook pays higher than Amazon, Uber, and all kinds of "sexy startups". So I can't buy the scarcity of talent excuse.
So storytime! I worked at Twitter as a contractor in 2008 (my job was to make internal hockey-stick graphs of usage to impress investors) during the Fail Whale era. The site would go down pretty much daily, and every time the ops team brought it back up, Twitter's VCs would send over a few bottles of really fancy imported Belgian beer (the kind with elaborate wire bottle caps that tell you it's expensive).

I would intercept these rewards and put them in my backpack for the bus ride home, in order to avoid creating perverse incentives for the operations team. But did anyone call me 'hero'?

Also at that time, I remember asking the head DB guy about a specific metric, and he ran a live query against the database in front of me. It took a while to return, so he used the time to explain how, in an ordinary setup, the query would have locked all the tables and brought down the entire site, but he was using special SQL-fu to make it run transparently.

We got so engrossed in the details of this topic that half an hour passed before we noticed that everyone had stopped working and was running around in a frenzy. Someone finally ran over and asked him if he was doing a query, he hit Control-C, and Twitter came back up.
It's scary what humankind set to achieve in next 210k.
I've got a couple conspiracy theories at the moment:

1. It's a deployment of some infrastructure change the government got the big tech companies to sign onto.

2. It's a "shot across the bow" from some external party to demonstrate their control over major infrastructure.

2.a. Also could have been a mix of 1 and 2. The government orchestrated the outages in order to add fuel to the hysteria over Chinese "spy chips". However, given the story every time seems to be "Someone goofed a configuration", this theory doesn't seem to have much life left in it.
Everyone I know who programs with single letters comes from a graduate-level math background. There seems to be a kind of belief that elegance and compactness are desirable.

Of course it’s the polar opposite of self-documenting, legible, understandable, easy-to-maintain code.
Just last week I found a setting deep in my profile config that let me disable ‘recommended tweets first’ or similar. When it’s back up I can check the exact setting
Solid state LIDAR actually coming to market is perhaps the bigger story here. A quick look, there are a couple of companies trying to bring this to market, but this is the first off the shelf solid state LIDAR. That's a really big deal. It also means that 4th gen LIDAR should be even cheaper and more performant.
I share your sentiment to a certain extent, but I believe Twitter is a necessary evil. There should be an alternative to main stream media for people.
Nah that's low level conspiracies. The new tier are in the vein "Twitter/Facebook/Google is currently being raided and forced to copy over DBs for an ongoing investigation into surveillance/censorship/pizza/Molochworship".
I'll bet you like Bloc Party :)
Hackett could really use some people who are excited about the intersection of lisp and haskell and want to build languages to join in on hacking on it :)

I think there are quite a few of those people... maybe that gives some hope for contributions
This is awesome! It will be really helpful to me while reversing or doing CTFs. Previously I'd hack shit together in python to do this stuff one-off.
Which is what "cryptographically impossible" means. Even with all the computation on the planet for a million years you can't get a glimmer of a chance.
Me too! :)
I am curious if twitterstat.us has an API... I'm thinking that automated unit testing of apps that integrate with Twitter should be checking with twitterstat.us to verify if Twitter is even up...
“Many of these companies are willing to spend big dollars renting high-end Manhattan real estate, rather than the older office stock in Queens that Amazon was prepared to lease.”

In other words, development in Queens/LIC isn’t attractive and needed government subsidies to make Amazon consider going there.

In general it seems like tech companies are willing to pay top dollar for locations in the most expensive areas like SF and manhattan rather than try to find cheaper areas.
These are the best and worst states for retirement
I'm willing to bet my Hurst spreaders will get the frunk open sans battery. If you're cutting the car, it's already totaled and limiting damage to the frunk would be the last concern on my mind.
Oddly enough- The Mastadon (Open-source decentralized Twitter clone) instance that I use is also down for maintenance.
Agreed! Their little amputated robot looks too much like the reddit Snoo.
> From my personal experience my first ever eng job was at 50k/year.

You think that's messed up? In 1992, I got my first dev job at 19 years old. Prior to that, I had worked as a cashier at Osco, being paid minimum wage ($4.25/hr back then, IIRC).

When I got the dev job, my hourly salary was bumped to...$7.50/hr! WooHoo! Rolling in money! Seriously, I thought it was great, almost doubling what I made before.

However, I never wanted to be a software engineer - in fact, at the time, I didn't even know it was a "job" (I honestly don't know why - but that's what I thought at the time). I just kinda fell into it. I didn't know what such a job paid, I certainly didn't know what junior devs were paid at that time - but today, knowing better - I'm pretty sure I got conned on that deal.

Sadly, I think it has colored my earnings (lifetime) to an extent ever since. I'm not at the top of my earning potential here where I live - but I believe I am doing well enough, considering my smaller employer; in order to get at or near the top for this area - which is not SV levels by any means - but COL is nothing like that, either - I would need to work for a much larger employer, and I can't stand the politics of such a workplace. So I "trade" a bit of my salary for piece of mind and working with a smaller company closer to home.

So while my lifetime earnings may be smaller due to what happened at that first employer and my ignorance, I also bear some of that blame due to my own choices. So I can't complain too much.
Previous discussion with comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15543404
I work for a small shop so we have to use a lot of bubble gum too!
>>> artists that emphasize almost exclusively the philosophical aspects of their art

Like writers? Poets? There are many types of art that are almost entirely philosophical. What else can they emphasize?
There seems to be a lot of hate on Sapiens every time it's posted here in HN. From what I gather, the criticism of his book comes from getting a lot of things wrong, or pushing some incorrect narrative. I assume that those who critique his book have read far more than myself and so have a stronger foundation to assert this critique, because as someone who just hasn't read that much nor has the appetite for digging through more dry tomes related to these subjects, Sapiens was very readable and reshaped my perspective a lot. Many people cite it as one of the best books of 2015(?). So is the criticism here just incessant nitpicking without respect for a palatable narrative, or are there books that provide another perspective that I'm seriously missing out on?
Nerves 1.5.0 Released
You don't understand it because it is strictly a philosophical difference of yours. You operate in the paradigm of taxation == fees or penalties imposed on people and corporations by the goverment. It is seen as strictly a negative thing. The opposite idea is that taxation is an /investment/ by corporations and individuals, directed and designed by the government, to allow society to keep running smoothly. You may not always see the effects as they often are indirect, but they are important.

The difficulty for most Americans is seeing taxation as a long term benefit rather than as a penalty, as no one is able to look past the fact that they feel forced into paying them.
To this extent, countries compete on taxation and value-add for services. Perhaps country A charges more in taxes, but offers more education to its people, and a more educated workforce to hire from, while country B offers fewer of those amenities in exchange for lower taxes.

Inter-country competition helps to keep them honest, and corporations get to choose the luxury of where they operate from and do business out of.
Those are not the people that pay VAT, especially not if they're not located in the country that charges the VAT.
Yesterday, Stripe went down for a half hour, and the later yesterday, Google's Android Payment Validation API went down for more than 2 hours.

Stripe at least acknowledged their downtime. Google was oblivious, made no update to any of their status pages. Really horrendous awareness and support from Google per usual.
> Mark Zuckerberg might have an unrealized gain of $1 billion, but he can't out-compete someone else for access to scarce resources unless he realizes that gain.

When 99.99% of people don't even have 0.1% of Zuck's net worth he doesn't need to realize anywhere close to $1 billion of gain to out-compete them. The distribution is so lopsided that he could realize gains encompassing most other people's entire net worth and it would be a rounding error in his accounting. That's without even getting in to the fact that at that level your brokerage will happily give you a low-interest loan to do things like buy a house or whatever you want so realizing gains is not at all necessary to have access to funds for consumption. "Realized capital gains" does not even begin to tell the story of the disparity in access to consumption.