skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting that security is 1 of 5 pillars and hardly gets a mention in this paper. Who wrote this and why?
I don't... understand what you're talking about. Sure there are additional costs to owning a car, but you're not really explaining how they're so commonly ruinous to a person's financial well being.

So far all you've given me is a few worst case scenarios, but what about the average scenario? What's the normal car ownership process like in your mind, and how does that average situation teeter so close to the edge of ruin, as you say?
Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT) – The Quantum Counterpart of the FFT
We already have the browser. It needs relatively few mobile extensions to support the same experience as 99% of non-gaming apps.
It would be interesting to see this breakdown in numbers. I would suspect there's some kind of power law at work, although probably not as extreme as the example you gave.

Also, keep in mind that on the flip side, landlords likely view tenants the same way - looking at aggregates and not individuals: "Yes, lots of people can't afford the rent, but as long as I can get enough to make a profit, who cares about the rest?"
Dedicated fibre, terrestrial radio, commercial and military satellite links. [0] Crypto algorithms implemented in hardware, keys managed by the signals intelligence agency.

The Department of Defense is probably one the largest and most sophisticated telecoms in the world. Cannot have dependencies on local infrastructure in countries you are bombing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Information_System_Net...
I wish there was some sort of secure protocol to allow tor clients to create their own exit nodes using cloud services. I just don't see how it would really be possible reliably.
"fines associated with cars that fall more heavily on poorer people"

Examples?

If its a case of Ferraris don't need to pay to park, where other cars get ticketed, fair enough. If its just a case of poor people being more likely to speed, in which case that doesn't seem so reasonable to call out.

I'm not even sure if fines in general should be counted as a cost of ownership. You can just pay to park, you don't have to speed, in general it seems like a cost of rule breaking to me.

I'm not from the US, so the request for examples was genuine.
I did have a class on managing money in high school. It involved a man fanning out his credit cards and explaining that if you pay off one card with another you can maximize "float." We were then quizzed on the 'best' payment methods, which required ordering a few in terms of when we'd actually have to pay. Shockingly, he was not a money-savvy wealthy man.

My point being that there are whole host of prerequisite problems to solve before we can get to a point of using public schools to effectively solve societal problems like this. I think your second paragraph begins to speak to one of the reasons these problems proliferate.
The amazing thing is that Lockheed is doing this with their own money. Not for PR; they seldom say much about the project.
Car ownership can only be financially ruinous if you value your time at no cost.

I live in a city with excellent public transport, and still, purchase of a car really improved my quality of life. Instead of 45-60 minutes using public transport, I can get to my dad's house with 13 minutes of driving. A recent example where I picked up a PC monitor from Samsung's service center and returned it to the store I bought it from for a replacement took 1 hour total instead 3 hours lugging the 27" monitor through public transport or spending two days worth of income on taxi rides.

The monthly TCO of my car amounts to around 4 times the cost of the public transports' monthly pass, and that doesn't account the money spent on taxis or ride hailing apps. I consider it worthwhile for the immense benefits I'm getting.
I think there is an order of "debt" that is acceptable:

1. Unless you go out and buy a house way out of your budget, or you buy a house that was in your budget then lose some/all of the income you previously had, being in debt to a mortgage really shouldn't cripple you under normal circumstances.

1. Having a car payment is pretty socially acceptable. Some people get the latest and greatest every 2-3 years either through leasing or trading in. Hopefully, there are not tons of people in crippling debt because they want the latest and greatest $40k-$60k SUV. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the "I have crippling debt" group who couldn't even afford a car payment.

1. Medical bills. I'd imagine nobody is going to criticize you if you are genuinely in debt because you had to pay to stay alive/keep a sane quality of life that is free from disease/ailment.

1. Student loans. You don't have to go take out $60k-$80k in loans to get a degree to get a job, but a lot of people do. Some people take out loans, then go spend the money on Amazon/vacations/cars. They get to cry they have student loan debt, but did they do the most efficient things possible with the money?

1. Credit card debt. On one hand, you have people who need to protect themselves from financial ruin. With inadequate savings, they turned to their line of credit. That's fine. Emergencies happen. But... what percentage of credit card debt holders (which I'd imagine is one of the most popular/crippling forms of debt in America) are solely in credit card debt because they only used it in an emergency? How many of those people are making day to day sacrifices to try to "get back above water"? How many people are in debt because... they just enjoy being a consumer and spending money.
Russia and the US

AP style, or Oxford and a subtle political commentary? ;-)
p.14:

"Because 99.999% availability provides for less than 5 minutes of downtime per year, every operation performed to the system in production will need to be automated and tested with the same level of care. With a 5 minute per year budget, human judgement and action is completely off the table for failure recovery"
>I suspect over the course of a lifetime car ownership could easily be the most ruinous financial baggage that a lot of people incur.

Not everyone in America needs or wants a car (NYC, etc). But everyone needs a roof over their head, and so I would vouch that the most ruinous financial baggage is....rent.

In my area minimum rent starts around $700/mo, but I have friends in the Bay paying $2000+/mo. $2000 a month! You could buy 2 beaters every month with that! Your first car broke down because it cost $900? Don't worry, just buy another for $900 and still have $200 left over...

I recognize repairs are expensive for cars that are $30k or even $20k, but there is nothing mandating you to keep that car or to not trade it in for a sub-$5k beater. The only counterargument here would be safety, and if you have kids, I guess that justifies the price tag.

Kids or not, though, you still need to pay rent, and if you're lucky enough to own a house, you still need to pay a mortgage.
Yeah, psychologists have managed worse than techies, because psychology have a more complex object to explore. They even cannot find a good methodology for 150+ years.

There is an alternative explanation: psychologists are less intelligent than techies, but I do not believe in that. There are a lot of tech people in psychology research.
Our society is becoming increasingly cashless and even wealthy people for the most part seem to regard contingency plans as unimportant. It’s a bit of a tangent, but still related in an emergency planning sort of way.

I have an essay pending about how the burden of proof of innocence is passed onto the account holder wrt access to funds in the bank; the money in your accounts isn’t really yours and the fail-closed nature of it is more dangerous than most people realize.
I'm not surprised and the problem starts with buying a car.

I've always purchased fairly low cost used cars but I recently went to a dealership for the first with someone who was getting a new car (for themselves).

It boggles my mind how reluctant the salesman was to give the "real" price of the car. He also made it sound like it was a nearly impossible task just to get the actual amount the payments would be. He explained how it would take days, require making a charge and would have to get permission from his manager to even start the process. It was a total joke.

They also did everything in their power never to mention the real price of the car with interest applied on the payments, but it's such a non-ignorable amount. It could easily end up being 20-25% on top of what the listed price is from interest.

It really striked me as a situation where if you weren't detail oriented and let the salesman convince you into the purchase without running the numbers yourself you could easily get yourself in a lot of financial trouble.
> Go back to school if necessary.

Does anybody ever need to take on copious amounts of student debt? I feel like I have some friends who have bachelors and were able to do it debt/scot free, and then I have friends who have $80k in debt with little to show for it because that's what they chose.
The Crystal Palace
I sometimes wonder how easy it is for the average person to practice prudent financial management when the entire economy is geared towards getting you to spend what you can? The advertising sector and one-click buying works out how to isolate you from your herd and then hunt you down like a lion hunts down a sick gazelle, and you have little to no chance of hitting your monthly saving targets, with the big beasts of the digital economy after your last cent.

If this hypothesis is correct, is there a business here? Financial sergeant major - helping you hit your saving targets. Imagine: “GET THE FUCK OFF AMAZON, YOU SHAMBOLIC EXAMPLE OF AN OVERGROWN MAN BOY! AT THIS RATE YOU’LL DIE A POOR VIRGIN”. Business model: pay my automated system a % of the money it saves you every month. “NOW DOWN AND GIVE ME TEN”.
From the news reports I’ve read, including Ulbricht's, it's enough for law enforcement to just find out who you are.

They can then set up a sting operation where the target inadvertently leaves their laptop exposed with the keys to the castle available while being arrested.
How do you calculate the cost of the risk associated with not having the latest safety tech? Especially subtle things like generous crumple zones which make a car less durable but pay off in the worst case?
I ran Nix for about six months. The language was one of the factors that really bugged me at the time. That and the hoops you had to jump through to do basic things like installing npm packages...
The randomness is generated by the tear of the dollar itself, isn't it?
I like to take a stab at Google as much as the next man but Tinder is by no mean reliable on the privacy front :
https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/20/problem-in-tinder-dating-a...
I'm left-handed and depend on lefty vim nav, but otherwise I agree
Minimal Sufficient Pandas or the New Excel
> "Sellers" (riders) don't set their own prices

They kinda do, by not accepting rides under a certain price and forcing a raise, like it has been reported.

> Furthermore, prices are driven down artificially by investors who are willing to take a loss until other "markets" are forced out of business, at which point Uber will presumably raise its prices to actual taxi market rates.

This will never happen. Anyone can start a ride-sharing service with a tiny investment. There's no way bankrupting current companies will give Uber an unassailable market.
> Does this kind of action actually absolve them of GDPR responsibilities?

All the rest of our laws travel with jurisdictions, not with individuals' citizenship status. The GDPR doesn't really have any standing to impose obligations on companies that refuse to do business inside EU jurisdictions. We won't know until it's tested in court, but demonstrating a best effort to keep your product out of EU jurisdiction seems like a pretty good first defense.
Apart from the millennium tower, what else is having trouble? Is it possible that, if it’s only the millennium tower, it could just be related to the way that one was constructed?

Salesforce tower is fine, for instance, and it’s much taller.

Also, if you don’t mind sharing, are you a civil engineer? Just asking because my friends who work as engineers in construction do not share your opinions.
Related from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14690329

2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5883443
The choice is to use the in app payment system (and pay Apple a cut) or to set up your own payment website and pay Apple nothing.

Of course, even if you set up your own payment infrastructure you are going to be paying somebody a cut.

Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Stripe et al. are going to take a cut of any transactions they process.

You have to decide if the fee they charge is worth the additional sales accepting that method of payment might bring in.
Reminds me of DNS tunneling. But this approach is probably faster.
Trading your audience for a better medium is a hard bargain to accept.
He accepted a plea bargain and still won’t be out for 9 years; had he gone to trial he likely would have been in prison his entire life.

> Mr. Martin was never charged with leaking information, only illegally retaining national defense information.

These sentences are insane.

They are building a culture of fear, from Manning to Assange to Winner to Snowden: they want everyone to be so afraid of them that the concept of doing the right thing seems equivalent to death.
Understanding Big Data the Programmer Way
If Martin had released these files somehow, wouldn't there likely have been stenographic measures in place to trace the source of the leak? Or like, ANY corroborating accounting for the transfer of ~50 TB of data? I guess the important lesson of the story is that NSA contractors can lose track of terabytes of data being exfiltrated over the course of decades. /Decades/.

Who knows, maybe there are 10 more Martins out there who are just better at covering up their tracks. Then again, maybe not. Maybe anything.

I guess there's always the "you can't stop someone from taking a photo of your computer monitor" problem (forgetting the name rn), but even then you can use little things like spacing words slightly differently per presentation of the file, etc.
Unfortunately we have many ways to do format strings now :P
This is a must read thread, full of so many fun facts: e.g.

> Fun fact: Gravity creates most of the sense of urgency for peeing, so in microgravity, astronauts can't always tell when they need to go.

> It's such a complicated process that they pee on a schedule.
I would struggle to pay an unexpected 400 bill and would definitely put it on my credit card. This seems like a smart decision to me.
When I put that bill on my credit card it affords me an extra 30-60 days to come up with the money.
I am in the process of paying off debt, acquiring money generating assets. I would eventually like to be in situation to pay a bill like this, but it seems better pay off as much debt as possible. I guess if I lost my job I would be in bad situation, it is hard to start making money without taking some risks.
What is Uber doing that you consider illegal?
For official operations, they would not be using the internet in any way, but their own parallel enterprise networks. Tor could be useful for covert operatives, and for generally weakening the grip of governments where we are inducing "popular" uprisings.
I don't think asteroids would actually be a good source of Beryllium. IIRC they have approximately the same overall elemental distribution as the earth does, just more evenly distributed - which is great for finding dense materials like gold or rare-earth metals that have sunk towards the earth's core, but not so great for one of the lightest metals in existence.
The definition of "couldn't handle" is wrong. Most people could handle it, it just would mean extra debt - but so what? Average US credit card debit is over $5000. Who cares about savings when you can just get more debt?

The fact that credit card debt is at 18% during a historically low interest rate environment also implies that a lot of people simply don't pay back their debt.

The flip side of it is that people are willing to work for lower wages, because a steady income - even if it is low - means you can get more debt!

Finally, of this money that shouldn't even exist in the economy drives up prices for everything, the best example for this of course is student loans versus the cost of education.
Freedom Hosting is a good example of using alternative attacks to sidestep Tor:

> News reports linked a Firefox browser vulnerability to a United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) operation targeting Freedom Hosting's owner, Eric Eoin Marques. In August 2013, it was discovered that the Firefox browsers in many older versions of the Tor Browser Bundle were vulnerable to a JavaScript attack, as NoScript was not enabled by default. This attack was being exploited to send users' MAC and IP addresses and Windows computer names to the attackers. The FBI acknowledged they were responsible for the attack in a September 12, 2013 court filing in Dublin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Hosting
Ask HN: Has anyone used www.saasresearch.com as a lead generation service?
Looking for any feedback from anyone that has used them or knows someone that has.
It looks like it may be https://mattstoller.substack.com/feed/

(via "view source" on the page)
I imagine the person you're asking was talking about fines being regressive in the sense that if a wealthy person receives a $100 fine for speeding or parking violations, it's basically nothing, but the same $100 represents a day or 2 of labor for the working poor and could be ruinous if they are already barely able to pay their bills.
I have been developing another mental model of this. I think that we naturally measure our own lifestyles by looking at the people around us. We want to feel like we're beating the average or at least not too far below average. People we encounter in our lives will try to present themselves as positively as possible, so we end up thinking that their lives are a bit more prosperous than they really are. I think this is where most of the pressure to increase our standard of living comes from.

Then you bring in competition for resources. If everyone makes similar amounts of money and everyone is trying to have a similar quality of life, we will tend to spend 100% of our incomes on our cost of living. Just like how perfectly competitive companies will naturally compete away all profits, competition for housing, education, healthcare, etc. will naturally compete away all personal savings until the average savings rate is near zero.

The only way out of this competition trap is to find some way to escape the average. Either find a way to make much more money than normal, be much more frugal than normal, or be much luckier than normal.
GDPR regulations are not black and white. They are demonstrating intent, and that’s usually enough; especially if you are using VPN.
As David Runciman has pointed out in his book How Democracy Ends and on the Talking Politics podcast - https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2017/71-how-demo... - if you could only ask one question of someone you'd never met before, which would give you the best possibility of guessing whether they'd voted for Brexit, it would be whether they went to university (Remain) or not (Leave). He argues that, in the UK at least, there's a bubble of professional politicians who all went to university and were completely blindsided by the result of the Brexit referendum because they knew almost no-one who'd consider (or admit to) voting Leave.

Also John Lanchester's compelling (to me) argument that the bailing out of the banks after the crash (which was, on balance, right) followed quickly by austerity (where everyone else unfairly picked up the cheque for the bailout) lead directly to Brexit and Trump, because people were (to paraphrase the film Network) "mad as hell, and not going to take this anymore!" https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n13/john-lanchester/after-the-fall

It really does feel that the university crowd (which I'm a part of) have completely detached from the lives of large chunks of the rest of the country. I get that this account of Amazon workplaces may be rose-tinted. Perhaps this facility is run by a good manager, and others aren't. But as it says, for this to be a specific kind of evil it needs to be compared to all other jobs in a similar environment. There are things that can be made better, sure, as there always are. But I find quite a bit of this middle-class hand-wringing tricky because it always seems to be well-paid journalists going "undercover". They'd probably find any manual labour degrading when compared to their comfortable Aeron chairs and plate-glass offices.
I think this is true to a point, if you are making <40k or so saving money requires almost a monastic lifestyle. My income has ranged from 20k -almost 200k and it’s ludicrously easy to save at one end, and almost impossible on the other.
It is not super fair to tell people eating out is a luxury they cannot afford.
Running the numbers on an insane scheme to save Antarctic ice
I'm surprised you're being downvoted for such a reasonable statement. If schools teach essential life skills classes such as driver's ed, they really should teach personal finance and home economics (especially cooking) too.
It kind of sounds like you're getting your history backwards here.

Piracy has existed for almost 2 decades at this point. Back then, people were making the argument that the industry needs to adjust, needs to make things as simple and cheap as piracy is, etc.
That's a distinction without a difference. There's only so many car models, what alternative would you suggest to a whitelist of acceptable cars for UberBlack?
Yes but why would you use a single hop VPN instead of Tor? Wouldn't both leak that?

(Also it's my understanding Tor uses the exit node's DNS server)
Yep. Amazon (GCP, Azure) are making bank off the idea that you can just pay opex to run in multiple regions and lay off your SREs, but if you really wanted high availability (and not just some service credits when things go wrong) you would spend the engineering effort to go multi-provider. At that point on-prem looks better, but at least with multi-provider you’re no longer in the business of ordering hardware and power.

The idea that failures between different systems are uncorrelated doesn’t even work at a hardware level (e.g. two different sticks of RAM), it’s pure fantasy when you’re talking about software stacks, especially when you have things like the blow-up-the-world button called “BGP.” I’m deeply uncomfortable reading formulas for availability that add or subtract nines, if there’s real money on the line, you can afford to do some better math.

Disclosure: Work at a cloud provider, opinions are my own.
I have to mention this (linked from the OP) https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/surprise-...

Not to spoil it but there's a rotating organelle(?)! (Among other things.)

And these rocket-propelled harpoons:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/marine-mi...

Just wow.
But the IAP rule for Apple only applies to purely digital goods. If Tinder also sends you a condom with your profile upgrade, they don’t have to pay Apple anything. (This is why Amazon’s main app lets you buy real-world goods)
Yes but logging is logging

To be very honest even if you keep the logs it is extremely unlikely just logging, even with full IPs is a "material" violation of GDPR unless your static page/file is extremely specific

(You can also expire or fully anonymize the logs before keeping them)
https://youtu.be/3o-r1-AsmRU