skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's the mark of a good programmer, reuse!
You don't exactly have freedom of speech until you're a citizen... Since he wasn't a citizen he is not under that law.
The dislike for facial recognition technology is another one of those hard to comprehend stances for me. The article is more like a moral call to action, it doesnt contain any facts or information or even arguments against it. All I can find is that it claims "costly errors, discrimination and privacy invasions" are the problem.
How can facial recognition software possibly cause all of that? Software operation basically free, discrimination is ridiculous - if anything it helps with less discrimination, it scans everybody after all. and then privacy invasion? You mean you walk around in public spaces and you think you have a right not to be recorded? How is this different from a police officer walking by and scanning your face?
No, in reality this debate is a weird sort of antitech sentiment. It's like a symptom of a deep dissatisfaction with how fast the world is developing and people want to go back to the good old times. Well sorry, but I actually like the fact that a criminal can get caught in minutes because his face is scanned.
Sounds like the next thing for big VCs to fund. It used to be that going somewhere with strangers you met online was feared, then came Uber. Couch surfing? AirBnB. Next, getting packages around customs, tariffs, and expensive shipping by crowd sourcing? Bam! VC Unicorn.
Well sure that's a start. But is 14% abnormal?

I legit don't know. I tried to find out just now and ended up on this wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentag...

This data set has a lot of N/A in it. I end up relying on the CIA estimate for basically all of them because no other column has data. Just for the sake of fair (albeit unscientific comparison) I'm picking out the stats from random first-world countries as I scroll through the list. I am using the second list titled "Population living below national poverty line"

Canada: 9.4%
Denmark: 13.4%
France: 14.2%
Germany: 16.7%
US: 12.3%
Japan: 16.1%
Hong Kong: 19.9%

So the CIA estimate is higher than the SCMP article. Maybe they are also overestimating the other countries, or maybe its just statistical variance.

Taking the data at face value, HK does seem to be above average in poverty, but likely within a standard deviation. HK is also unique in this list because its a de facto city-state. Perhaps when we break those other countries down per city we get similar results?

I'm not satisfied with the poverty line explanation. The protestors don't look to be poor people and we don't see such a degree of protest in other places with similar amounts of poverty.
> Does this actually work cross-culturally?

With a degree of care, yes. Major marketing and advertising agencies are perfectly au fait with these challenges, because they're responsible for multinational brands. A company like Coca-Cola or Procter & Gamble is very used to selling products to consumers in radically different cultural contexts, as are the agencies they employ.

Marketing within the US is meaningfully cross-cultural - the connotations that sell a Ford F150 will fail hopelessly if you apply them to a Toyota Prius. There are very few brands and messages that will work in every cultural context, which is why marketers are acutely aware of the importance of segmentation.

Just telling people to change their behaviour is rarely successful; you need to surmount some very complex cognitive, emotional and social obstacles to change. The marketing industry has an extremely deep, sophisticated and powerful set of tools and skills in this respect. They spend all day, every day thinking about how to facilitate behavioural change. We're used to thinking of that practice as essentially amoral or evil - they persuade us to max out our credit cards, they convince us that smoking is cool, they peddle junk food - but the same skills could be used for good if only the right people decided to hire them.
I'm constantly surprised, confused, and appalled when moves, however imperfect, toward a more meritocratic system are thwarted by, possibly well meaning, progressives who have the most to benefit. So let's ditch a fantastic program based on objective measures so we can meet some racist quotas...
Depends on the colour of your skin, your class, your job, your sexuality, how you part your hair, your tattoos etc.
C++: The Invisible Engine of Everything
As seen in the Crypto Snake Oil FAQ from the 90s:
http://www.interhack.net/people/cmcurtin/snake-oil-faq.html#...
If the first 20-30 years of "please don't" didn't work, I am reluctant to think this post will help...
It can really depend on the culture of the company/team you are in. If your boss is a psychopath, stress will come no matter what.

Otherwise you are correct, stress is more self controllable.
Fascinating. I have been using the same approach to generate synthetic aperture radar images, but having a non-radar platform to test the processing algorithms with is quite useful.
You can finally directly set canonical URLs on Medium posts
Top tips for your next serverless project
Me too. I think the situation we are seeing now was very predictable and started with government ambitions to gain access to internet communication. But neither political side had any ambition to strike that down. Certainly worth remembering.
I meant curl behaving as an OAuth client. Many REST services today are OAuth protected and using curl is simply too cumbersome to access them. If curl supported password and client credentials OAuth grant types, then a vast number of folks would ditch REST clients like insomnia and postman and stick to command line curl.
A Successful Artificial Memory Has Been Created
Or... Delete your social media before you apply so there is nothing to follow?

What do you want more, your 30 followers who you can get back or entry into the US?
This story agains underscores that you should only enter the US carrying a clean burner phone, and either not use any social media at all, or block your own access to it until you're safe again.
Bitcoin's Missing Link to the World
> The researchers Joy Buolamwini at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Timnit Gebru, then at Microsoft Research in New York City, showed that some of the most advanced facial-recognition software failed to accurately identify dark-skinned women 35% of the time, compared to a 1% error rate for white men. Separate work showed that these technologies mismatched 28 US members of Congress to a database of mugshots, with a nearly 40% error rate for members of colour. Researchers at the University of Essex in Colchester, UK, tested a facial-recognition technology used by London’s Metropolitan Police, and found it made just 8 correct matches out of a series of 42, an error rate they suspect would not be found lawful in court.
Mini WiFi Projectors
Yes, you can be denied a visa for misrepresentation, however it will be up to the Consular officer. Thus far, the Consulates don't seem that concerned with social media and haven't appeared to be fans of this addition, but CBP likes it clearly.
Not necessarily just the universities. For fun and to make a point I decided to scroll down the list of US's richest and go through their wiki pages until I found a link to an immigrant.

> Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the son of Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen and Ted Jorgensen.[7] At the time of his birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high school student, and his father was a bike shop owner.[8] After Jacklyn divorced Ted, she married Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos in April 1968.

That didn't take me very long.
Gdpr and cookie notifications are different things though. You can still run Pikmin or something similar on your own infra, set cookies from it, and be gdpr compliant as long as you don't collect pii. (And comply with other parts)
I think the point is that Google has been burning goodwill for a decade now.

It might not be visible yet, just like the ice cube who has been heated from -100°C to -5°C and still doesn't melt, but at this point it would take very little energy to thaw Googles goodwill reserves.

Anything they can do to return to former status as "defender of the Internet" might be worth huge investments for that alone.
Yeah, I'm sure that will go over well.

"No, I don't have a Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account, but I do have an account on this site called Hacker News."

"Oh, so are you a hacker?"

Good luck.
The Peace Corps is most emphatically NOT a spying or any other clandestine operation.

There are legal restrictions that between the Peace Corps and both civilian and military intelligence agencies. Since it’s founding in the 1960s, this has been a founding principle that ensures the safety of the Peace Corps volunteers.
List of words that can be written in hexadecimal
Abandoned macOS privileged helper tools can be exploited
He mentioned that Cambridge switched to four digit phone numbers in 1939. Where can one find out such things like that, where did they record and document it as a fact? I wonder if they still had manual operators or was that automatic switching?

the link: [1] the first automatic switch was introduced in 1922; so they had the fascinating problem of interoperation between manual switched regions and automatic ones. So that Oxford might have had it either way.

[1] https://www.btplc.com/Thegroup/BTsHistory/1912to1968/1922.ht...
The fact that we regulate credit card usage via PCI compliance and not biometrics is bizarre to me.
You mean, whether they would actually believe you or whether they would use the issue as a pretext for denying a visa irrespective of whether they believe you?

The immigration services (and law enforcement more generally) are widely known (the FBI even issued a report a few years back on the issue on law enforcement generally) to be extensively infiltrated by organized white supremacists, and that was true even before we had an Administration that stopped bothering with dog whistles and used openly racist appeals to justify immigration policy, setting the tone for those underneath.

Not a great time to be a non-(White European) immigrant. Or even citizen of non-(White European) descent, as the casual disregard for due process in immigration related matters has seen several of them get extended stays in immigration detention despite ready ability to demonstrate citizenship.
If we ignore prepaid options it really is identical to your current bundle of phone contract plus smartphone loan - minus the loan. You sign the contract, get sent a SIM card and pop it in the phone you bought elsewhere and off you go.
This is literally a growth industry in Canada right now. Toronto is building a big tech sector just taking up people who can't get into the US. The government and establishment are all on board with population growth as a source of economic strength right now.
In Europe, definitly not while applying for a visum (they don't want your online-handles and passwords for example). You'll probably get "background-checked" from the interior intelligence agencies (e.g. Verfassungsschutz) while completing the formal immigration process, but that is a completely different story than a mere visum.
Yes, but it's an unavoidable slippery slope forced on us by nature, that we can affect with technology and that won't be going away until we can eliminate death and suffering. It's not a new slippery slope, doctors/parents/bureaucrats have to make decisions like this every day already and have for most of human history.

It's where we draw the lines on this slippery slope that constantly evolve.
Apple Vandalised a Mural for an iPhone Ad
Not intending to tow the libertarian line here, but I find it concerning when regulation is proposed for a technology in a vacuum. We should see how facial recognition develops and how the powers that be utilize it first. Only then can we see if it is being used in a way which offends societal values, and only then should we create laws and regulations to curb such behavior which are specific in nature and not overly broad. Right now this is somewhat speculative.

I think much of the fear around facial recognition is that it could be (or is being) used for mass surveillance. The Supreme Court has already deemed mass surveillance unconstitutional under the 4th amendment [1]. Perhaps the solution to curb the misuse of facial recognition is to ban mass surveillance itself, and not ban the tool.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-supreme-court-ju...
> On the other hand, my immediate thought on reading this is that I wouldn't let my phone, and definitely not my accounts, get searched on visiting a foreign country.

You frequently don't have a choice.
So improve the software and fix the bugs? How is this a valid response?
Honestly, he should know better. Not going to lie, I've got friends that post questionable stuff (drunken antics, random rants) and when I was in school, looking for internships and whatnot I shut down those social media accounts and scrubbed my online life.

Based on the fact he's Palestinian, I'm going to guess there were posts that were anti-US. Guilt by association is a thing and since he's not a citizen, the US doesn't have to let him in. Maybe it's a tad unfair, but he chose to continue to follow those friends online, he could have disengaged...
> You mean you walk around in public spaces and you think you have a right not to be recorded?

The right? Maybe not. But I surely don’t want Big Brother always watching. I gotta ask, have you read 1984?
Go is probably pretty safe, but even internally at Google Flutter is still sort of flying under the radar and nobody knows (or cares) about it too much. But if leadership decides to take a look at what the heck is going on in that corner of the organization... that would be a hard one to explain.
Ask HN: How to Improve Retention Rate?
My app is an e-learning website linked to a freelancing website. Users take courses in the e-learning part of the website and complete tasks for companies in the freelancing part of the website. But you can only apply for a task if you have completed its required courses.

The problem is that a lot of people have enrolled in a course but nobody has completed it yet. And since they have not completed a course, they cannot apply for a task. And hence, companies are hesitant to post tasks on our site as there is nobody to complete them.

So, how do I incentivise people to actually complete courses on my site without any tasks on my site yet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20816774

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20809435
BitDefender wrongly detects Winds as malware
On and on we slide towards fascism.
That other party is really happy with demonizing what people write online and is far more active in banning dissent. Not that the alternative isn't worse, but the inability to name bad policy decisions almost makes that difference trivial.
Also on from which country your passport is.
Cannibalism is common in the animal Kingdom
An interesting thing about XML namespaces is that they are basically a way to autonomously create globally unique names that are still human-readable and writable. (As opposed to GUIDs, for example.) Like `foo:bar`, where `foo` is a local alias for a long and unique string, often an URN. (Of course, this wasn't an original idea of XML.)
I have a few instances of bit bar monitoring services / logs / up time.

https://github.com/matryer/bitbar

This has completely stopped me from stressing/anxiety over potential issues as I can just look to the top of my screen.
I think we need to make peace with "achieving" later in life than our renaissance
ancestors. The same holds for the Fields Medal (with an age limit of 40): many gre
at mathematicians will only achieve much later than that.
Said in another way, other phone companies may be able to lower prices by negatively impacting the environment and exploiting workers.
Welcome to the No-Code Software Revolution
I would like to thank you for your replies throughout this thread in general though. It's actually ironic that you got called out for this one, since I was just thinking that you were doing a great job responding to various misconceptions in a positive, informative, and non-judgemental manner. Really enjoyed reading your comments.
The fact that he's probably the only non-Chinese in the vicinity helps.
Autoscaling would only work well if it could react quick enough. Since there are peaks in each second, that means a very rapid startup is needed. You would also want to stop rapidly, but some of the ssh sessions are going to be lengthy, so you can't kill instances early.

We don't even have any indication that the load on the system is particularly affected, there's just an arbitrary connection cap. Average load in the cpu graph [1] looks pretty flat, and around 50%; so it's probably already over provisioned depending on their disaster recovery plans and their normal load patterns (didn't see a daily/weekly graph to armchair that)

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/infrastructure/upload...
There are some things one knows, and a lot one could guess at, but in the case of things like Peace Corps, I know legitimate well-intentioned non-spy new grads volunteer for that, so let's not get them tortured and killed by some paranoid warlord.
What companies are creating “no code” development tools?
Beside the news item itself; I wonder how often this happens and how people manage to get their software removed from this false positive detection lists.

Any help with making a stronger case is also appreciated!
It's just like most things in life: It's good if you consume the right amount.
It sure helps not to hand the tools directly to the oppressors.

Of course stopping all facial recognition doesn't suddenly make a totalitarian regime disappear. But having it makes some things way easier than it used to be.

For what? automatic tagging of faces in your photo library?
I agree: If you are taking a class in python, then its really better to first ground yourself in python. Python is also a great first language to learn. But some people find good books really useful. Here are two:

https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-python-2e/

https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

> So I'm apprehensive about diving into Python and not grounding myself or exposing myself to functional disciplines.

I wouldn’t be. You can learn FP at the start of 2020.
Thanks. Yes, disingenuous has become an extremely overused word lately and is basically a way of saying someone is lying. I will reply above.
You can create new social media accounts that only follow your mom, dad and the president. Switch back to the real accounts once you're safe.
Ironically I do the same, work provide a laptop for us that you're free to choose within reason and comes with a mandatory MDM (enforce encryption, remote wiping) and an anti-virus and that's it. Besides that you can use the laptop pretty close to a BYOD model.

I sold my Dell XPS 13 and now I use my work provided MacBook Pro for nearly all other purposes besides Gaming. It's my first Mac and I've found developing on it to be a dream after 10~ years of Windows use.

I'd love to run MacOS on my gaming PC for when I'm not gaming. Unfortunately, Hackintosh' is possible but seems like a time sink and I'd rather spend that time you know, playing games, or working on my homelab (e.g. breaking it).
Ah, so not all men are created equal - only U.S.A. citizens.

Yes, that goes in line with the way the U.S.A. treats the rest of the world.
Ideas That’ll Help You Write a Great Speech for Public Presentation
I certainly doubt that 300m/day number. For me the real reason is clear. MS Cloud login is the worst in the industry. I'd like from time to time use some of their free services, like Azure CI. But it's impossible to login there. Even with autosaved passwords I cannot manage to login 99% of the time. No other web site's login is that bad.

It might be that I have no Windows. I remember when I developed on Windows I implemented the company login via NTLM and Internet Explorer login was transparent and automatic then. Good times. Only with Chrome or Firefox you needed to login.
Did you have to give you password or your device? I am just wondering how they got access to your skype account.
The protests did start because of the extradition bill, but the bill has been dead for more than a month[0], yet the protests have not stopped. Can you see that the protestors are protesting about something else now? If the bill were the protesters' goal, they had already succeeded.

The situation is so much more complicated than just an ill-conceived bill. It doesn't help things when media (or other people) try to simplify things and frame it as something as clear cut as David vs Goliath.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-48918096/carrie...
Kinda? Maybe?

I think its a mistake to think of a spin bike as a bike. There is peddling, and you can get most of the same experience out of a turbo, HR, PowerMeter, but then you are also putting the frame and peddles through really weird force profiles as you spend time bouncing between the front and back of the bike.

I mostly ride PowerZone, for which a turbo, hr and power meter would be perfect, but if you like the ‘dance’ classes you might want to look for a more ridged machine, you really have to be able to trust that its not going to break on you.
If the best time has passed, the next best time is now!
I know exactly what you mean. I have a friend on wechat from my time living in China. It is remarkable for me to talk with this person. He's not at all the belligerent nationalist type nor the insufficiently critical news-bubble type. Yet even he finds the narrative pushed by the news to be compelling. It's been a stimulating exercise talking with him without falling down the rabbit hole of dismissing each others facts by dismissing the others news sources as propaganda.

The 3 narratives I see are

1. the organizers are sell-outs to the US and the followers are just stupid. Western imperialists want to split China again.
2. the protestors are rioters, violent mobs, essentially a zombie horde not a movement with demands that can be met.
3. the stated reasons for the protests aren't the real reason. the real cause is economic. (subtext: freedoms and democracy is intrinsically a Western thing and Chinese people asking for it are denying they're Chinese)

Part of why I asked for data is because I'm being lazy and want to use the response in my other conversation. Engaging in debate as one person, when the other side has entire media outlets working for them, is kinda hard. Help me.
Some members have been individually asked by the local CIA station to enter a military base and try to report on the names and grades of people there. Not as an order from the peace corps.
Obviously, the US of A don't want any visitors anymore.

Duly noted.
Although Methane is far less abundant than carbon dioxide and stays in the air for only a decade or so, molecule for molecule its warming effect (calculated over 100 years) is 25 times higher

https://archive.is/vThtr
Is that true? I thought the 14th Amendment's text "...nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws", coupled with the First Amendment, which have been upheld in court, would provide freedom of speech for non-citizens.
Please omit swipes like "disingenuous" from comments on HN. It's basically a way of saying someone is lying. If another comment is wrong, it suffices to correct it with accurate information.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html