skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’ve maintained for a long time that the only reason we have a “war on terror” is that the ability of the “war on drugs” to strip us of our civil liberties had mostly run its course by 2001. These are the political issues I care most about. I really hoped Obama would curtail the surveillance state. For 8 years I thought “soon, he will try to rollback the patriot act.” That never happened.

Instead, we got assisinated citizens.

It was just more of the same power mongering bullshit. By the time his presidency ended, I had lumped all politicians, nay, public officials into the same cauldron of corrupt blight. In my eyes, Trump, Obama and Bush are the same. When will a statesman/women/person have the metaphorical balls to put an end to this madness?

Law enforcement (and Hollywood [1]) can go fuck itself. I would rather fear a criminal/terrorist/crack pipe than my own putative government. I’m white. I can’t even imagine how minorities feel about these incessant overreaches.

[1] For some “bizarre” reason, Hollywood leans strongly toward lionizing rogue cops/gestapo agents who trample civil rights.
I would guess that surveillance gets discussed here almost daily, and most readers are probably familiar with why it’s bad and that we should oppose it and write our legislators and etc. Parent poster’s comment - a call to arms - is almost free of novel content, and we can find similar comments at the top of our newsfeeds on every other social network and forum.

The next highest post in this comments section, written by Apo about the dynamics of the falling costs of surveillance and the tendency for states to slide towards authoritarianism, is an example of the kind of insightful and thought provoking comment that I come to hacker news for. This thread that we’re all commenting on is a red blooded, knee jerk reaction fest by comparison.

Of course it’s important that we get angry about surveillance and inspire others to be activists about it, I just don’t think that it makes for an interesting or unique discussion. We can get that on any news site and social network. By contrast, hacker news’ moderated discussion can shift your worldview and provide useful points of debate, and a wide perspective that you can bring back to the world.

With that in hand we can get a lot further by fighting smarter and more strategically. I’ll take hacker news’ gentle discussion guidelines over red blooded calls to action any day, because honestly the internet is already full of those, and there aren’t enough discussion spaces like hacker news.
When it comes to seeking damages, it's standard procedure to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. "The wall" being everyone with deep pockets, such as Microsoft. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't been sued over this yet.
They learned from the Steve Dallas example of suing Nikolta Camera:

https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/1986/06/22/
Ah that's a good point! I even used to live in the LA area years ago, but I lived far enough east of there that the Angeles National Forest was much closer, so I forgot that Griffith Park exists.
It would literally reduce the trade deficit between the US and China:

"But Trump’s obsession with interest rates stems from a larger concern — boosting economic growth. He only wants the Fed to lower rates so U.S. banks will put some of their $1.4 trillion in reserves to work in the economy. A huge sale of U.S. Treasuries by China would have a similar effect: As interest rates on Treasuries began to rise, banks would use some of their reserves to buy more Treasuries. That spending would put more cash into the wider U.S. economy and stimulate growth.

There is a second, somewhat related, effect of a sale of Chinese bonds: It would drive down the value of the dollar. When China sells U.S. bonds, it receives dollars in exchange. The Chinese could use those dollars to buy other U.S. assets, but the whole point of selling Treasuries is for China to divest from all U.S. assets.

That means the Chinese would need to exchange their dollars for some other currency — euros, pounds or even the yuan. Putting so many dollars on the foreign-exchange market would weaken the value of the dollar. The effect would be to drive up the price of foreign imports for U.S. consumers and drive down the price of U.S. exports." [1]

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-13/u-s-ch...
> I hope I can repurpose them for other iot signals.

I bought one for that - it's authenticated on my wifi but doesn't know what to order on Amazon. Pushing the button will make it visible on the network but do nothing else. So I wrote some scripts to run when it associates on the network, works pretty well.
I don't see anything there about specific numbers of deletions, but I do see 2 things that worry me.

1. "I don’t think you could find a voting systems expert who would think the deletion of the server data was anything less than insidious and highly suspicious," is a clever piece of misdirection, wherein there is a hidden assumption about available information (in absence of context, of course deletion without record is suspicious, then again, according to privacy policy it may be warranted) and what a "voting systems expert" is, being left to the imagination.

2. The story tries to conflate a number of voting events as part of a larger conspiracy.

That article not only fails to address what concerned me about all the reports in Georgia, but it is not compelling that "covering their tracks" for the specific act(s) is accurate.
Yeah, well, he forgot the part about using a fake identity.
Animation only contribute for slower application when it's not applied correctly. Using it to wait for your data will not get any effect on speed
What it was like to be a scientist in Jeffrey Epstein’s circle
I started there... I was talking HST Dual Standard days and had upgraded by then ;)
hi @ahl,
I'm a member of PartiQL's steering committee and glad to see your interest to participate in PartiQL's evolution.
The language spec source will be open-sourced, as well, early next week (week of Aug 5).
Overall, we look forward to a community effort and participants that are interested in making significant investments to achieve the project's goals. Diverse opinions and viewpoints, both on the language and on the process, are very welcome.

At this point, the maintainers/committee is only Amazon members. As PartiQL grows towards a diverse community, we expect to add maintainers/committee (for code and spec) that have non-Amazon affiliations and explore more formalized methods of governance,as they will emerge from our community discussions.

Please email us at partiql-committee@amazon.com to further coordinate.
The tech here is so good I don’t believe it went away. I just think it will exist in secret and only used when they really need to. We will get a snowden style leak about it in 10 years.
You're referring to part of the process, I'm referring to the whole process -- i.e. full independent capability / self-sufficiency -- and currently China has zero capability to manufacture advanced chips independently [0] ...

Huawei would love to source its chips and other components
purely from Chinese suppliers, but as of today it is unable
to do so ... There is no production line in China that uses
only equipment made in China, so it is very difficult to make
any chipsets without U.S. equipment.

[0] https://wccftech.com/china-is-still-multiple-generations-beh...
This is so bizarrely stupid, but it does lead to some questions:

1. What did this man think was going to happen? That Amazon would never open the boxes he returned? Certainly after 370k worth I'm surprised he didn't get flagged much earlier.

2. What normally happens to Amazon returns? The article makes it sound like they are rarely opened. That seems bizarre to me. I would have thought they'd have a system for processing returns.
A related finding - a group (not Mayan, but not quite the Aztecs either) imprisoned an entire Conquistador convoy (Spaniards, Africans, and American Indians) for months and gradually sacrificed and cannibalized them. So the "anyone and everyone" at least in its later incarnations also included unusual foreigners.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/10/conquistadors-...
Checkout This - Access Jira from CLI
Or maybe they were e.g. sacrificed to spare their loved ones. --> if they were freed then maybe their family would have to provide someone else?
SetTimeout with 0 is a hack, you should have much better result with requestAnimationFrame when it comes to animate something. Also changing class in your DOM and perform the animation in CSS is the way that works best today. Hopefully this will change when the animation API will have better support from JS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/ani...
This mosque is portrayed in How Climate Changes Art: https://youtu.be/dvQocRS3RdE?t=412

The video has other examples like this mosque and asks the question of how to preserve art for future generations.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. The question as phrased is kind of nonsensical. From a bad foundation, it’s not possible to build a good UX. Correctly identifying the problem is a critical step in product development.

To take your transportation example, there is no good way to provide one product which scales from “shoes” to “airplanes” by user configuration. It makes no sense to ask if the shoe-plane is well implemented or not. It’s a terrible concept to begin with.
A related idea, for a different purpose, is a pedagogical or documentation implementation.

Production code necessarily accumulates features and efficiencies, obfuscating the basic idea.

Keeping the barest possible version around (which you probably wrote anyway, early on) documents what is basically going on.
“The report states the success of the alleged scam by Kwarteng, who has been released on bail, enabled him to create his own company.”

That’s one way to get seed funding I guess...
This is, in my opinion, a really baseless claim. There’s plenty of critical discussion on HN that runs against YC interests. There’s also plenty of intelligent political discussion on here. The modded stuff is modded because it is content-free, off topic for the discussion, trollish, or ad-hominem and other low forms of debate. I’m personally very thankful that it gets moderated.
Re amazon returns: either sent back to the third party seller or tossed into return pallets. If you watch some videos of them it becomes pretty clear amazon doesn’t check. A lot of electronics swapped out.
As my lawyer friend said, a good class action is a lawyer’s startup. Litigate one good one and you’re set for life.

In a case like this, you have to be the first to file so that everyone else gets merged with yours.

It’s sort of sad that they were so quick on this but that’s why.
Somehow I didn't think that it was OK for the US military to operate domestically. According to the Posse Comitatus Act.

But I see that there's an exception for surveillance.

Charming.
This was my favorite part of the article. It honestly reads like somehow what he did was a brilliant business idea, but incidentally was illegal
From my personal experience of working on it, it is becoming simpler every month. So from a infrastructure standpoint, it is going to be much simpler than vSphere or Openstack. This is a no-brainer.

Now, do everyone need to run their applications on Kubernetes? Say, I invested millions $$ into Kubernetes, but the very business applications that my team built were proven to be not worthy. Then I see competition happily using same old VM, lambda, api gateways, but much improved operations (logging, ML, automation). I think what is going to decide the widespread success will be the adoption of applications that run on Kubernetes. It will be 3-5 years until we know. Right now it is a honeymoon phase and let us enjoy and ride the wave.
But is the sky not falling on geological scales of time? Maybe it's not nuclear holocaust and immediate destruction of the planet and humanity but something more protracted over say 5,000 - 10,000 years?
Autopilot is a driver assistance feature. You are required to keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel while using it.

Naturally, not everyone does that, although they definitely should. If they do choose to break those requirements, they should only do it for long enough that safety can be assured.

If you use Autopilot for a bit, you get a feel for how it handles different situations, and adjust your attention accordingly. If the road is wide, clear and well marked then I can look far ahead and don’t have to focus too much. If I’m in a construction zone driving right next to a barrier, I need to keep a firm grip to ensure it stays away from that barrier and within the lines. If there’s stopped traffic ahead, I need to start watching to ensure it brakes, and take over to do it myself if it doesn’t.

This guy never should have taken his attention away from the road. If he did, he never should have done it for so long. If he did, he never should have done it in a situation where a threat could turn into danger within that time.
> You all deserve the tyranny that is coming.

That's the bit that feels insulting. I don't want this mass surveillance, but I also don't really have anything at the top level to comment about it that hasn't been hashed and rehashed.

> so it's reasonable that the mods try not to let content exist that might agitate investors.

Having read the discussions, I feel like there are often many commentators — and articles — that point out and criticize the surveillance state, to the extent that if there is censoring being attempted, it's not really very good.

I'm not sure everyone who reads here is convinced, so maybe, IDK, it is still worthwhile to try to change some minds. I do feel like I see back and forth to bad arguments like "But I have nothing to hide!", so I don't think everyone here is on the same page, though HN is orders of magnitude more aware of it than the public. If we are ever to effect real change, either we need to convince the public that this matters and that they should care or maybe the ACLU/EFF can pull something off for us. (So, you know, donate to them if you believe they would help do good.)

Tech stuff often gets lost though behind other issues like gay rights, abortion, climate change, guns&terrorism. (Which, honestly, might be more important, so can we please get those settled and move on to the tech stuff maybe?)
> It is often tempting to shortcut this by passing in some kind of option flag to existing code, rather than enabling a full parallel implementation.

I've fallen into this trap, with a horrible mess of conditions.

But you still need some kind of flag, right? To switch which implementation to run. He's talking about modules, not entirely separate standalone programs, so I guess he means the flag is outside the implementations chosen between (and never passed into any of them).

EDIT He's using console/environment flags, so it just needs a little code to read flags, and switch implementations.

> The difference between changing a console variable to get a different behavior versus running an old exe, let alone reverting code changes and rebuilding, is significant.
So essentially a loan from Amazon? Why would I believe they can do better than my bank or credit union? Or if they can, why is it tied to mandatory purchasing?

I thought we invented money so we wouldn’t have to trade this for that.
They really should stop calling it "auto pilot." Because it isn't fit to be used as autopilot in its environment, yet people use it as such.
From what I understand psychiatrists are one of the highest paying professions
Maybe, but the advice to have two containers of stuff like that seems like a good idea. The only issue I have with that is that I misplace the backup and then I buy another and accidentally have 3.
> Where many rich people compete with many other rich people to live, evidenced by higher than average home prices and higher than average increases in home prices.

That's just a proxy for good wages but you can find good wages in tons of other cities. I earn a 10% lower salary in chicago then I did in the bay area or seattle but I make up for that many times over by being able to afford a 5000 square foot house in chicago in one of the best public school districts compared to a 1000 square foot house in the bay area in a mediocre school district.

The difference: Chicago and most other cities geography allow them to sprawl and there is still plenty of undeveloped land keeping land prices low whereas the bay area basically has 2 5 mile wide strips of land for single family homes and there is none left to develop which is why your housing prices are exploding.

So while you consider tier 1 cities to be ones in which everyone lives in tiny homes spending all of their money on home mortgage interest rates because land is scarce, I consider tier 1 cities to be ones which pay well and also have affordable housing allowing me to invest money I would be spending on mortgage interest rates in your tier 1 cities.
> for his Bernese mountain dog, Ruby, who is named after the coding language Ruby on Rails

/facepalm
https://github.com/option8/8BITCOIN

Also https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1157302995169796096, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20595014
The law firm seems to claim the compromised data was hosted on github, but in the article it seems like it was only the hacking tools?
FB may deserve credit for growing Instagram.

But WhatsApp growth was entirely on WhatsApp. It had become THE de facto chat app outside the US well before FB acquired it. And this was despite it being a paid app at the time (I remember paying a few dollars for lifetime access).

I suspect WhatsApp would have penetrated the US market much like it has now anyways, because it’s not like FB Has advertised WhatsApp at all. It’s growth has been nearly entirely organic.
My Amazon app has a section of "virtual dash buttons" down the bottom with only consumable items and they all purchase directly with one tap
I already do this with the cameras that are in an increasing number of airplane seat backs.
Isn't a transcript transformative content and therefore fair use? There are still hundreds of variations for every piece of content.
So many QWK packets!

I loved the BBS and "underground" scene. I really wish I'd been able to keep in contact w/ the odd acquaintences and friends I had back then. It all didn't seem so fleeting in the moment. Connecting people to old handles from 25+ years ago isn't easy (which, I suppose, is good for a lot of people too).
The first article that reported this [1] has way more info on what he did with the money and how he fenced it and how he was caught (this is auto-translated so I have no idea how accurate it is since I don't speak spanish):

>The scam didn't end there. So many times they repeated the scam, which were made with a huge amount of electronics. They could keep them ... or they could further stretch the deception. And that's what they did. James set up an online sales company. A kind of Wallapop to which he named Kwartech, a fusion of his surname Kwarteng and the word tech (technology in English). They founded a Limited Company that served to sell the merchandise online. They offered unused products, but without a package (which was back in Amazon full of land, a fact that they did not tell their customers) and at a very reduced price.

>The Barcelona police began the investigation, which immediately passed to the Group of Technological Crimes of the Upper Balearic Headquarters. Agents arrested them both last week. They have passed to judicial disposition and have left free with a deposit of 3,000 euros. They are on the street, waiting for the final trial ... and with their Amazon accounts closed. And is that between James and Juan have hit the biggest stick that has ever been given to Amazon in Europe.

[1] https://www.elespanol.com/reportajes/20190723/estafo-james-a...
"Bloodlust" is a common phrase that refers to a desire to kill.
> Hollywood leans strongly toward lionizing rogue cops/gestapo agents who trample civil rights.

Hollywood, like Legislatures, are giving the majority of the public what they want.
I will be in touch when I hear back!
You can buy SNAP. That would be the best play to short IG.

But SNAP is already heavily overpriced because it showed modest growth after many quarters of declines, thanks to the Baby lens. It’s still continuing to lose increasing sums of money, so I wouldn’t advise this play at all.
I hate stories about science written by non-scientists.

See http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_09.html
See:

- Any thread about rust

- Any thread about an exploit in a c variant
Oh, charming: airplanes now have cameras installed against the will of the airlines operating the planes.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/3022742002
As can etcd.

Edit: Oh right, the fact that etcd is golang might make that an issue for Kafka...
The new balloon cameras have much higher resolution.
Google's problem is that if they enter existing industries, they attract the ire of competition regulators. Google could eat entire industries if they wanted to, but there would be hell to pay from the EU and US regulators. So they are stuck trying to innovate.
People who eat dark chocolate less likely to be depressed
The FBI and state governments are allowed to conduct domesticated surveillance, and they inherit military tech.
lol, suggesting that people are worthy of tyranny based on comment ratios is about as quintessential HN filter-bubble as I can imagine. Comment ratios mean absolutely nothing, especially a single cherry-picked example in a swamp of front-page posts.
This is incredible: they're suggesting that, in the same way that YouTube has content moderators, GitHub should moderate every repository that has a 9-digit sequence. They also say that GitHub "promotes hacking" without any nuance regarding modern usage of the word, and they claim that GitHub had a "duty" to put processes in place to monitor submitted content, and that by not having such processes they were in violation of their own terms of service.

I hope that this gets thrown out. If not, it could have severe consequences for any site hosting user-generated content.
But Why to sue Amazon?
Not really. The FAA might have something to say about what floats around the sky. At least in the USA.
The demo bot keeps repeating: "You do not currently have access to this page".
If anyone has access and can paste a few examples of conversation, it would be useful to understand if results are good for production bots.
Apartments already have similar deals with cable companies in areas with multiple providers, including the Tv/Internet/Phone fee as mandatory on top of rent
In Canada it looks equally expensive if you don't have insurance (e.g. a non resident).

http://www.david-cummings.com/documents/canadian_hospital_ra...

You pay CAD750-800 for an ER visit if they just take a look at you.
The three making $350k are the folks running the pension funds, a job that'd be easily earning them a million plus on Wall Street.

The public sector's pensions have always been a bit of compensation for the sub-market salaries. This bears that out.
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-6.ht... makes plenty of references to dispatching based on class.
Hey the good news for us is the ones in the US don't have self-guided missiles attached, right?
This is a great article but that ven diagram is really distractingly off. "Seems like" and "doesn't seem like" really shouldn't have an intersection. If you must use a ven diagram for this juxtaposition, make it "things that have network effects" and "things that don't seem to have network effects". (Still want that ven diagram?)
Great video, though the team Razor 1911 really deserve more coverage. They were the prolific game crackers of their day.
Google investors won't be able to invest in high-risk biotech startups if they aren't accredited. Everyday investors are only allowed to access weird investments through the left-field bets of big companies.