skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a Mac app developer, you mostly have to go out of your way to install things[1] outside of the app bundle, and you typically don't want to because that's only extra maintenance you have to do to update / version those files. Most apps don't, and that's why most apps actually are effectively removed when you drag the bundle into the trash.

There is already a concept of a "user data" directory for the app, which is determined just like on iOS. There are also other directories for things like caches that the system can clear if it's low on disk space.

Of course they could sandbox Mac apps just like on iOS, and Mac App Store apps essentially already work that way.

I can assure you, though, that any barrier they put in the way of letting non-App Store apps run however they always have will be met by strong resistance. It's easy to point to this occurrence with Zoom and call it unreasonable, but prompts like what you're describing will undoubtedly disrupt what other people see as totally valid use cases and ruining of the UX.

[1] By "things", I mean things like a separate web server process. Apps do store files in app-specific folders like "Application Support" by convention, but not for separate processes.
How do we deal with 10-12 feet of global sea level rise nearly instantaneously? There is a single glacier called in an Antarctica called Thwaites which is also known as the "cork" on an Antarctic sea that, if it melts or comes unstuck, could cause that much sea level rise that quickly.

"Thwaites is like a cork in a wine bottle—when it melts, it could trigger the collapse of a large portion of West Antarctica, equal to roughly 11 feet of global sea rise."
...
"Winds are now pushing a layer of warm ocean water up underneath part of the glacier that extends out into the sea and melting it, faster and faster. If that part breaks off, the entire glacier would destabilize."

https://www.wired.com/story/antarctica-thwaites-glacier-brea...
https://interactive.pri.org/2019/05/antarctica/thwaites-glac...
https://interactive.pri.org/2019/05/antarctica/doomed-glacie...
"How many films are released each year?"
https://stephenfollows.com/how-many-films-are-released-each-...

The graph shows "Hollywood Wide Releases" at about 100/year for 1995 to 2016. The rate is almost constant.

"All Other Releases" go from about 170/year in 1995 to 640/year in 2016. The increase is roughly linear, with a major dip during the great recession of 2008-9.

Other graphs show that theater admissions are roughly constant over the period.
> I wonder if there's any living on comets?

Wikipedia article on nematodes:

Nematode worms (C. elegans), part of an ongoing research project conducted on the Space Shuttle Columbia mission STS-107, survived the re-entry breakup. It is believed to be the first known life form to survive a virtually unprotected atmospheric descent to Earth's surface.

If we wanted to shake things up a bit, maybe we could just shoot a bunch of rocks full of nematodes in space. I’m sure some interesting things will come out of it a few billion years later!
CSS Basics (Part I, Animations)
Does Instagram broadcast a notification to your friends / followers when you like something? I don't use it, but I think it'd need something like that for a signaling theory to make sense.
Disney has a lot of preexisting deals that they are waiting to expire. But they have said that as deals expire, they will be bringing everything to Disney+.

From the CEO:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/disney-plus-tv-shows-mo...

During an investors’ meeting, Disney CEO Bob Iger claimed that every single movie in the Disney catalog will arrive on Disney Plus “at some point fairly soon after launch.” Previously, Disney only released its most popular animated films on home video on a limited-time basis in order to make them feel more special. However, the so-called Disney “vault” is going to vanish when Disney Plus arrives.

On day one.

https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/disney-plus-lineup-sho...
Diverse Agents for Ad-Hoc Cooperation in Hanabi
> Intent doesn’t matter only results.

Then you should call Chrome a malware because there were vulnerabilities with remote code execution (and there will be similar vulnerabilities), so every website could install anything. But that is absurd.

> The result is that unless you like for random websites to be able to activate your camera without your permission, it did harm users.

First of all, you need a hard data that this vulnerability was exploited in the wild. Otherwise it did not harm users, it only opened a way for malicious websites to harm users. And, again, every vulnerability could be counted as a malware by that definition which makes malware term meaningless.

> Do you really think it was a “bug” that it reinstalled itself?

It is intended behaviour. And I don't see anything drastically bad with it. If you're opening their website with corresponding link, you want to use that service. In order to use that service, you have to run additional software and they are making it easier for you to run it. Only a few years ago every browser supported Java Applets and with Java Applets every website could run arbitrary code on your machine. And that feature was actually used a lot. Does it make all services which used that feature to overcome browser weaknesses malware? I don't think so.

They probably should have communicated better about that aspect and provide proper uninstaller software for security-concerned users. And not making those vulnerabilities in the first place, of course. But world is not perfect.
> It's not ... a computer science issue.

full stop.
They worked with Zoom to kill the zombie servers which were left behind after Zoom is uninstalled. Not really flexing. Zoom accidentally created malware, and Apple killed it using the same mechanisms they would to kill other malware.
2 years ago I would have agreed with you, and to a point I still do - it seems like it would be simple to just walk in with cash and walk out with a coffee. But, it's undeniable how willing customers are to avoid friction, especially when they haven't had any caffeine yet.

Also, Starbucks is on pace to process over 15% of their annual revenue through their mobile app this year, it's by far the most popular payments app in the U.S. and shows no signs of slowing down.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but those numbers are extremely misleading. I can tell you from close personal observation that this low divorce rate is almost certainly because divorce is extremely taboo in the kinds of societies that have a lot of arranged marriages. The kind of culture that sees an arranged marriage as OK is also very likely one that judges divorcees harshly. See also: the Hasan Minhaj bit about the "What will people say?" attitude in South Asian cultures.

Also, the super low divorce rate should make you suspicious -- it would be more believable if it was slightly lower (like 30% or whatever), but 6%? There's clearly something else going on, and if you look closely you'll realize why.
I think that case is kind of a stretch. I read the complaint and there are two arguments:

1. Lists of people who have purchased [music genre] from iTunes & listened on Pandora is for sale by data brokers, and

2. App developers (they specifically call out Pandora) who use the MediaFramework API have access to iTunes library metadata that they can then collect.

I haven’t looked at Apple’s Developer Agreement recently but I suspect Pandora (and potentially others) hasn’t complied with the terms.
any OS (and many other apps) that update have the power to do what you’re afraid of, and much more.

There's an ocean of difference between can and will.

plus i don’t really see a bright line between system level software and an app when apps can access your video cam, mic, all your files - basically your whole computer.

The setting ostensibly refers to the operating system, i.e. macOS, which I have no problems with Apple modifying if you've enabled that option, and which their EULA probably has a clause about. But from a legal perspective, modifying a third-party application which Apple does not own and did not install seems an overreach; unless their EULA explicitly grants them the right to do anything they want with the files of the system it's installed on, they could find themselves in legal trouble. (That notorious CFAA and the like.)
The only reason I put a sticker on my laptop is to identify it out of all the other identical laptops at work.

I generally don't get a tech related sticker either. Instead I buy a sticker of an animal or something. Of my current laptops, one has an owl, one has a cat, and one has a flying fish.
Mmm. This post by Matthew Garrett is good on this: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52432.html
This is excellent. The first thing I did was remove GA. It's also incredible that they backfill data.

Yes, it costs money. But this is exactly what I want, and Netlify now has a significant incentive not to do anything shady with the data (and by not using cookies or JavaScript, they hamstring any potential ability to sell the data anyway).

Good work, I'm glad to be a Netlify customer.
The problem is people buy but rarely actually use bitcoin. This means the price collapses whenever a major holder tries to cash in.

The basic math is you only get a net ROI across all users when someone derives some value from the act of using bitcoin. As a currency that’s either from efficient transactions or as a stable store of value. Otherwise it’s an inefficient pyramid scheme where case inflows = cash outflows - mining costs.

PS: By contrast bonds can retain a high percentage of their value after a massive sale because they become more appealing as the price drops as they have some underlying value.
> but Apple "flexing its arms" in this manner shows that it is willing and has the power to go beyond policing its App Store and such (which while I do not like, I feel it does have the right to) and involve itself in the affairs of third-party software which it did not originally install.

I love this. This is why I'll keep buying Apple.
Isn’t that the goal of every AR startup/project? Care to explain?
On the other hand, the first time I did 6502 assembly language programming, I was shocked.

It was so hard to do anything.

For instance, it did not have an add instruction.

You had to clear carry, then add with carry.

That said, I can see how having a microprocessor was amazingly awesome to a hardware designer like woz who could think fluidly at the transistor level.
> Having a standard installer toolkit that comes with the os and used by many os updates along with a centralized uninstall UI is nothing?

If we are talking about OS updates, OSX has the same thing.

You are not required to use Windows Installer. And even if you do, you are not guaranteed that everything will be removed, be it due to malice or incompetence.

Not even Linux can guarantee that. Something like the Nix package manager would be closer to what's required. Plus a sandbox.
This was likely a product manager decision, implemented by some hapless kid fresh out of college.
I would not be surprised at all if this episode has some concrete ramifications in 10.15. It could take the shape of something akin to iOS’ location permissions for applications that want to run a server, or even a first-party framework for accomplishing the thing Zoom was trying to do, but it’s probably safe to say what Zoom was doing won’t be possible next year.
Will someone walk me through the nightmare scenario implied by this revelation?

Random contractor overhears me saying 1 minute’s worth of speech in my home. Doesn’t know my name or where I live.

What happens?
I have googly eyes on mine. Not only can I definitely find my computer in a sea of identical MacBooks, people across from me at meetings seem to enjoy them.
Certainly a low barrier of entry, but there are two things we keep in mind -

1) we don't think this is a winner take all market
2) but if it were, the strongest network will win

At this stage, it's about building the largest network as quickly as possible.
CSS Basics (Part II, Typographie)
Any details about --include-config-data? Doesn't seem to be documented in the help message.
> Newspapers like NYT are one of the few institutions where workers enjoy a level of freedom from management in doing their work.

Then why do these articles not also criticize the NYT for these practices? Google is an easy target for newspapers because they are competitors for traffic and ads. Show me NYT reporters calling out their own practices and I will believe they enjoy this level of freedom from management.
Banks can borrow reserves from other banks or the lender or last resort. They usually do keep some reserves around for liquidity, but as little as possible because reserves don't make as much return just sitting in an exchange settlement account as they do if they lend them to other banks or buy Government bonds with them.

Fractional reserve in general isn't really a thing in modern banking. The US still does have a reserve requirement but pretty much the rest of the world relies on capital adequacy ratios (some capital is usually stored as reserves in exchange settlement accounts but it doesn't have to be).
Wrt webcam I use a sliding webcam cover to block it on a hardware level.
I think any thorough investigation will conclude that there is, in fact, no way to securely authenticate a web user over unencrypted http.
I'm sorry, but can you be more specific about your point? Is it that companies should always be held just as complicit as the third parties they use? And how absolutist are you on that? e.g. does the NYT have no moral right to report on climate change, because the NYT depends on energy suppliers, which produce the CO2 emissions the NYT complains about? Sure, that's a principle, but not one that leaves much room for actual discussion.
Seems like a very broad conclusion for such a narrow study. I’d question whether it is as successful when it comes to concepts that are more fluid, such as those found in the humanities.

I also don’t really see the advantage of this kind of examination. One still needs to develop tests to trigger the students thinking on the concepts—it seems we merely trade one potential form of error on the part of graders (checking students answers) for another (misinterpretations of results or bugs or in the algorithm or unanticipated changes in the model).

Just because certain practices are historically prior does not mean they’re necessarily worse. Certainty is a slippery beast. The results here still depend entirely on the assumptions of the developers of this ML algorithm, their notions of what it means to “understand something” etc.

Our era’s obsession with throwing technology at literally everything will bite us in the bum at some point (if it hasn’t already).
Academia is a patrilineal network. It has nothing to do with conferences or journals (which exist outside of academia). It’s a simple matter of whether you can convince a committee of past PhDs to declare that you too have earned a PhD. That earns you the right to be on a PhD committee for someone else, and to be hired as “an academic”.

Then repeat the whole process except instead of a PhD, it’s tenure.

It’s purely a membership based organization. It’s a federation of treehouses with a rope ladders.
Some ideas:

Different SSL configuration.

Avoid DNS entries getting bloated?

Avoid a single point of failure?
There is no broadcast, but when you are scrolling your feed you will see a selection of friends who have liked each post.

Also if you view the activity feed (in a different corner of the app) you can see what your friends have been up to. This is where you will see more explicitly "Sally, Sue, John and Dave liked a post by Mr. Famous" (and similar activity).
> They provide the Chinese government backdoor access to iMessage

No. What gave you this idea? iMessage is end-to-end encrypted. The keys are managed by the devices themselves. There is no facility to backdoor or intercept the messages.

Apple acts as a registration server, notifying your devices when a new device signed in as you joins the pool but the devices themselves tell you when this has happened. That’s all client-side. If the server didn’t tell the client about a new peer it would never encrypt a copy of the message for that peer and that peer wouldn’t get the messages.
This makes a ton of sense of for Netlify, and I hope they keep improving on it. If this existed 5 months ago I might not have rolled my own analytics using Netlify functions and Google Spreadsheets^. As it is, $9 per site, and an inability to log client-side routing make it not worth switching from my own, super customizable event-based solution (would have to come up with a new API schema for calling URLs to log specific events / goals).

^I wrote about it here: https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics
They evaded taxes with their out-of-court settlements, so unless they changed their settlement practices, they'd still be running afoul of the law.
Right. Movies don’t come out of thin air. They all need inspiration whether a book, a story, news item, etc. Its not writers making movie scripts ala SNL sketches.
So users who want crapware can get it, and users who want a clean secure system can get it, and app developers are pressured to build apps correctly. And App Store/GateKeeper can prevent misbehavior for apps distributiled through Apple's friendly marketplace. Win-win-win.
> Unpopular opinion, but I always try to buy Apps from the Mac App Store.

I have no idea if my approach is more or less common, much less more or less popular that preferring the App Store..

And in fact your experience says you are happy that part of your purchase improves the OOBE.

Thanks for writing that up.
As far as panspermia goes, I have long held that I really wouldn't be that surprised either way, recently however, I have been coming around to thinking that it seems more likely than not.
A tangent, but YouTube actually does not require login to verify age on embedded videos.
The google privacy policy affects more people than the NYT's?
The RCE is a given for anything that has automatic updates enabled, and IMHO isn't really the focus of this issue; the main concern is with the scope of what they are allowed to "update", and the legal ramifications thereof.

Yes, Apple does have the power to change every bit on your hard disk if you let it. Things like EULAs are supposed to govern to what extent they can use that power.
I used one years ago (2011 MBP 13), it made the top case top heavy for the screen hinge to support which made the screen a bit floppy.
There is no real sandbox model on Macs if you don’t go through the Mac App Store, only code signing to detect that the app hasn’t been tampered with and to validate the author.
Would you happen to have any examples outside of this particular update where an OS security update goes and changes something that the OS didn't itself create? Genuinely curious if this is a thing. The word "system" can be scoped any which way (see system of systems) but typically means "part of the OS" in this context.
Maybe I haven’t been looking in the right places but I’ve downloaded most of the AR apps and games that have come out for iOS thus far and they’re almost all gimmicky.

Simply plopping a 3D model into the room isn’t particularly compelling or useful. But that seems to be the bar for “AR apps” today.
my bad - it's resume.pdf
> In my case, at least, I have no such functionality enabled

How do you know? Is your device _incapable_ of performing that task, or did you just click a checkbox somewhere? Because if you just politely _asked_ the OS to disable it, it doesn't really matter, does it? We are back to the matter of trusting the vendor.

> (in fact, they likely couldn't, because I don't have automatic updates turned on)

So you say. The software may or may not agree with your statement.

> the theoretical ability of MegaCorp to spy on me as opposed to actual known spying.

There's no "actual known spying". Spying implies intent, none has been demonstrated so far.

Where your argument falls apart (yeap, I can use that line too) is this: you are interacting with other people also carrying powerful listening devices of their own. They may or may not have disabled a "ok google" functionality, and they may or may not have disabled updates. Again, where do you draw the line? Do you ask everyone to leave their devices behind before interacting with them?
University of Farmington
Honestly, I think the real issue is being able to see exactly what the machines are doing when they talk to each other. And I don't mean diagrams either.

I just went through this when setting up an nginx reverse proxy to a gunicorn web server. Once I was able to see all the X- headers and how wsgi was setting up its environment against that, it all became very clear to me what was happening and why each piece was necessary.

I think the same would apply to being able to see exactly what happens with preflight requests. PS: non-interactive diagrams don't fill that gap.
>Python has gotten sufficiently weapons grade that we don’t descend into R anymore.

>Hadoop is definitely happening but it’s Google’s problem because now after building our own Hadoop on iron solution, after dealing with Redshift for a while, we now just gave it all to BigQuery.

A tidy simplification of the technology stack.
Yes, and all of those are decisions you can go along with or reject. Deciding how big an organization you will join is one of many ways you apply your ethics.
Twas down today for brief while, but Stripe API usually is rock-solid

I'd also check out a new trend in APIs that is sort of "visual editors for non-coders". Slack's Block Builder is a terrific example
It is perfectly supported to leave daemons in your app’s bundle. There was no requirement to install the executable to a different directory. They appear to have done it to ensure the web server could silently reinstall the app after the user deleted it.
Hey thanks!!
That's so terrible. Ugh.
Wow?! An API should be treated as a contract.. I hope you dropped them
As far as I can see this is correct. Even if devices are enrolled In Apple's Enterprise MDM program, the administration staff are the ones who get to see which applications are installed on the iDevice, not Apple. And I really do not think they are so preoccupied with this that they want to actively scan IP addresses for suspicious behavior (of which there probably isn't any to begin with).

Anyway I wholehartedly agree with you here and I think Apple genuinely had no knowledge of this activity until news outlets reported on it. Or if they did, it did not make its way to the higher-ups that revoke developer certs.
I understand your point, but I think they can/do build upon one another. Agriculture is more productive than gathering, oxen are more productive than human farm labor, tractors moreso than oxen, and GPS controlled combines more than a tractor. But im not sure if we've quantified how much productivity is directly attributable to software
If you keep harvesting trees and store them in a way that they won't rot or burn, there is no practical limit on the total amount of carbon that can be sequestered that way. There is still a limit on the rate at which carbon can be sequestered that way. To stabilize concentrations of atmospheric CO2, the sequestration rate must match current rates of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. If significant feedbacks kick in, the sequestration rate needs to be higher than current anthropogenic emission rates.

Here's one of the more optimistic studies I have seen about forestry-based approaches to curbing CO2:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/co%e2%82%82-benefits...

The authors estimate that afforestation and other positive land use changes could provide up to 37% of the CO2 reductions needed through the year 2030 in order to stay under 2 degrees of warming. The other 63% has to come from elsewhere.