skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The text really captured my attention. I've recently been struggling with whether or not tech and the modern internet are a force for good. I always enjoyed tinkering with hardware and software, and have been working in related jobs because it pays well and there are always interesting challenges to solve. But the societal shifts ongoing in Europe, the filter bubbles and breaking down of discourse, the xenophobia and the growing divide between large parts of society as well as the erosion of (local) media and the crisis of mental well-being among both adults and adolescents, which I feel are at least partly attributable to technological changes in the past ten years, have led me to think that maybe the most important thing for people right now may be spaces without technology, without personalization and just being confronted with the community of others. This does not seem like a problem solvable by the means of technology and makes me wonder whether I've spent my life learning about technology only to abandon it at some point.

Are there any good resources about what I call my "tech hangover" to navigate how to move on, maybe convert this education into something of societal value beyond screens? Or am I being too cynical about everything and in reality it's all much better than I'm seeing it? Open for anything here really, but struggling with the status quo.
did you actually read the article?
Excellent, will check it out, thank! Actually just looked at the wiki page, that's enough for me to order it today.

In return may I offer this absolutely bitchin' tome Safeware by Nancy Leveson https://www.amazon.co.uk/Safeware-System-Safety-Computers-19... which I can't recommend enough. It's aimed at a lower level than your book AFAICT (lower level = less about interconnectedness of large systems) but it's a must read.
Flipper – Extensible mobile app debugging
I just came to say that the VLC app for iOS is absolutely trash
What's wrong with Go?
in other words, airbnb externalizes the cost of whatever dispute to the public services, and only accepts responsibility for things like payment disputes. Just like how uber externalizes the cost of dangerous drivers to the police , or how airlines externalize pollution

When these costs become significant, regulation should make landlords responsible or taxable to recover the costs.
> That’s nonsense, the UK is right in the middle of commissioning 5-10 new nuclear reactors, ...

I'm not talking about the reactors that already have been or will be commissioned soon. I'm talking about the situation in 10 years when these reactors are supposed to be finished.

Let's see what the situation is like today:

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

Hinkley B - under construction, way over budget already

Oldbury and Wylfa Newydd - shelved

Moorside - failed

Bradwell B - Chinese venture

That leaves Sizewell C, to be completed in 2031.

That's just a not a good trend for western companies.

> ...if Areva/EDF could demonstrate an ability to build these plants on budget there’s a huge market opportunity.

If private companies need to be dragged in with tons of incentives just to get involved, that doesn't sound like a great opportunity at all.
As a counterpoint, consider Peter Duesberg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duesberg), a world expert on viruses, who denies that the virus HIV causes AIDS. The reason we can reject this claim is that (unlike his previous work) it's totally unsupported by any evidence, counter to high quality evidence from large numbers of mainstream science.
Increase Your Cellphone Security
That sounds like an argument for the regular/Air lines which already exist. I want a Pro option that isn't just the Air+. Apple hasn't yet figured out how without catastrophic hardware failure.
> You feel alienated from your computer because there has been a conscious decision to take away options and user control in modern software. And I get why that decision has been made, even if I hate it as much as you and every other computer enthusiast.

This is a weird claim here because this issue only appears if you made a conscious decision to disable a critical security of the operating system, something only possible because you have "options and user control in modern software".
> It just takes ages.

It doesn't have to be slow, sometimes it can be quick, but the precondition is that it takes the most talented engineers in the field to do it...
And this attitude convinces me to never consider move off my beefy Dell precision with its onboard CUDA GPU and Xeon processors :-)
Conditional Style-Based Logo Generation with Generative Adversarial Networks
When you say you are going to fix UX issues, do you mean you're going to address concerns, or do you mean you're really doing an overhaul.

I personally use IINA, because of its closeness to QuickTime UI, but I would imagine cutting / hiding so much usability would be difficult for VLC.

Can you tell me a little about your approach to this problem? I am super interested to hear what your thoughts on it.
> For 90% of people, they have always "felt alienated" from their computers. They didn't understand what was happening or why things changed either, and it was easy to get yourself into trouble if you didn't know what you were doing and were trying to figure out how to fix something.

I have stubbornly resisted it, but I think I will go the way of all of my friends and just accept it soon.

I now spend more time doing personal system administration than at any time in my life as a computer user. If you want to have control of your computing devices, you need to spend more time than in the age of five in floppy disks.

Most updates are a one way trip now, and they aren't keep on publishing exactly what features they have removed, so a lot of time is spent disabling updates, firewalling, researching, jailbreaking, imaging, and backing up.

My biggest liability now is not malware, but updates! I have to put all of my development toolchains in virtual machines, because they will break and I can not rely on being able to re-create them. Re-creating my modest workflow is a bi-annual affair, when it really shouldn't be.

And there has been a cultural change in software development as well. Software like Firefox will clobber your data during an update, and when you file a bug report, it will be WONTFIX, and they will say that it is your fault for not using Time Machine and rolling back their changes. They did this awhile back with bookmarks, and they certainly do it with extensions. I had to spend an entire afternoon recovering annotations and citations that were destroyed by a Firefox update, and I was told it was essentially my fault for trusting Firefox and not having hourly backups.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but there was a time when you could reasonably assume that if an update was making major changes, that it would give you the option to go back, or at least export your data if it didn't support it. I really wish the open source community would step up and be different, instead of embracing this.
>why anyone would want to spend time on tiling windows, it looks so tedious.

Weird, I always ask people the opposite. Why would you spend time manually positioning windows when the window manager can do it for you?

What is "tedious" about tiling window managers?
In my experience this is blatantly wrong.

In fact I've found that a lot of the professionals that refuse to go near the OS version are a hell of a lot less skilled than those that enjoy the benefits of the GPL'd versions.

Open Source apps are very popular in enterprise and professional circles.
Does not suggest, in any way, that nobody else can read all WhatsApp traffic, only that explicitly-Facebook employees can't.

It would be pre-2013 naive to imagine that, now that WhatsApp traffic is no longer end-to-end encrypted, no use is being made of the change.
As long as I'm confident I won't be fooled by product placement (I don't buy consumer goods I see on celebrities or in shows), I'm happy to have whoever does fall for this continue to subsidize my uninterrupted viewing as long as the placement isn't too ridiculous.
At this point, I don't want a thinner MacBook. One with a usable keyboard that doesn't force dongle hell upon me would already be fantastic progress from the status quo.
>https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf

The author dismisses CPU-level backdoors in favor of Intel ME backdoors mainly on the basis that, since CPUs can't save state, they can't protect themselves against replay-"attacks", and hence Intel would lose any sort of plausible deniability once an "activation sequence" was ever found in the wild.

But I don't really see how ME is protected against replay-"attacks" either. Sure, you might not be able to replay the sequence to the same CPU, but you can definitely replay it to a different CPU - unless every single CPU out there has a different activation sequence, which is possible, but would be vastly less efficient (if you want to hack someone you now have to know / guess some sort of unique production ID of the CPUs he's using?).

I'm really not seeing the big argument in favor of an ME backdoor here. A backdoor directly in the CPU would work just as well.

Arguably better in fact, since the CPU can just look for the activation sequence in the data it reads (if you send an e-mail or website it's very likely the plaintext string gets copied, and therefore read, by the CPU at some point), whereas the ME processor would only be able to watch specific offsets in memory.
I'm curious for more details.
Are these full-height or half-height drives?
This is an example of why I stay off the Internet (and especially Facebook) <not the article, but what the article is talking about, or is an example of>. There are now too many ideologues out there with deliberately poor reading comprehension skills willing to outright manipulate, obfuscate, and every other rhetorical trick in the book in order to "win".

So it has become pointless to even participate in all this bullshit. I guess I learned something in the email flame wars I got involved in back in the day... If the other side evinces some integrity, then one can learn from them, to see what your blind spots are - But if they have no integrity, it is a waste of time. And very few people nowadays have any integrity, certainly not the loudmouths, pundits, and a lot of journalists.

Trump and Brexit are hopefully the nadir of all this sort of thing, but I doubt it.
That would be fine, but I think it’s weird that you’re trying to make the phrase “self-taught” stretch to include also building something. I think it’s far more common for people to believe taking a self-directed online course and getting a certificate entitles them to equal consideration for a job as someone who put in 4 years of a structured university program.
Tech CEO thrown in the clink for seven years for H-1B gang-master role
Research Guide for Depth Estimation with Deep Learning
(If you don't mind me asking) how much does it cost to keep the node running, and about how many hours a week of work does it require?
One of the most interesting revelations was the security agencies apparent spying on members of Congress.

But it’s like nothing happened. No investigation, no nothing. If they can’t be bothered by that, it’s little surprise they’re not bothered by their spying on regular folk.
Would have been cool to see the original, for us !Greeks :)
Testing Microservice: Examining the Tradeoffs of Twelve Techniques – Part 2
Live stream of SpaceX Boca Chica complex construction [video]
Thank you for giving so much of your time, and for your integrity.
> WHY can you not make Chrome update like every other sane, well-behaved app?

Because that's how you end up with software that isn't updated, running old insecure versions.

As a user, I like it when my apps automatically update without me having to worry about it. The frustrating part about the Mac App Store is how it still makes you worry about updating apps.
Incident Report for Balena.io – Issue with Device Pinning
Does anyone know if there's an easy way to buy such information? I'd like to buy my information just to see what this cancerous industry has on me and where I need to improve my privacy efforts.
Well this kind of anecdata if shared really has to come with details. Even if I knew and trusted you well I would need to hear about where the information comes from. There are huge gaps of detail to be filled in.

I am not saying that false accusations do not happen. I'm saying these kind of hearsay stories are not even evidence for the people that tell them.
> “Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”

I find this sentence interesting because it is very specific to the American public. I am European and personally I care a lot more about privacy than free speech, and America's obsession with free speech boggles my mind.

It might have to do with the last time we in Europe experimented with unadulterated free speech, and got Hitler and WW2 as a result. We might have dialed it back a bit after that. But what do I know ?

There seems to be some a profound divide between America and Europe on this front and I haven't quite put my finger on why yet.
Site works fine here using default settings/lists and up to date lists. Did you customized uBO by adding more filter lists or rules?
Disappears how ? Working fine for me.
Terms such as 'deep state' and 'dad joke' added to dictionary
Facebook Open-Sources RoBERTa: An Improved Natural Language Processing Model
https://github.com/videolan/vlc-ios/pulls : Here you go, be useful.
In the old days, there was broad demographic targeting such as "daytime TV viewers are likely of demographic X, hence, marketing to them is offered at this fee and for these time slots".

This is different. This is about showing your household different personalized ads than my household, based on data that they don't tell us how they've collected somehow.

Essentially, TV has been watching you (albeit probably via third-party collaborating companies), and you're now being personally identified and marketed to.

Have fun explaining to your spouse why your household's TV is showing more dating site ads than that of their friends.
Outrageous! I only order pizza from places that requires a minimum of 16 chars passwords and 2FA.
Bollox. I don't think I could disagree more with practically everything you have written.
Yes occasionally I need a reminder that sarcasm is not appreciated on HN.
Does it? I've read that one of the goals of dragonfly was to allow the government to look up the full search history of every user, which seems to go far beyond Bing's complicity in censorship.

On the other hand, Microsoft was the first external partner of the PRISM program, and gave away backdoors before it was mandatory, so definitely in the "big brother knows best" camp :(
5 Reasons I Love Bootstrapping
Foursquare's CEO Knows Where You've Been
I guess Lithuania has he same problem as all the Nordics, dark gloomy weather year round.

I wanted to emigrate to Sweden due to the high quality of life but the dark, drizzly, windy weather really put me off and some locals I talked to said they were really depressed by it and were either trying to emigrate or work remotely from Southern Europe.

In the Blatics it's probably worse as the economic situational is not positive for some people.
Don't have the transcript - did he say that 'he' couldn't or that Facebook couldn't? Or that other agencies, facilitated by Facebook couldn't?
Hi Jean-Baptiste,
I remember we met in Munich about 10 years ago, at a Qt conference, and had a little chat. Was nice meeting you there, "l'eau a coulé sous les ponts depuis" like we say, I'm glad you stayed true with your values since.
This is some mean shit on so many levels.
Apparently anilgulecha is, like many, unaware that WhatsApp is no longer end-to-end encrypted. It technically trivial to tap the traffic between decrypting and re-encrypting stages, and the only plausible reason for the very expensive change was to enable such access.
It probably also gives you ample time to cancel the call.
There was a lovely quote from that era that said "A city with a navy become democracy, with an army a tyranny". I can't find a reference, but what I can find is this choice quote from Wikipedia [0]:

"Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens."

I was a bit vague in my original comment, but the point I'm going for is that this looks lot like the army being in charge. The criteria wasn't "men because we like men". The criteria was questions like "are you going to be lining up to fight the Persians with me?" and "Can you build ships?". And a hint of nationalism/classism. If it were feasible to field women on the battlefield in 404BC they would have been voting too.

And indeed, as soon as we reach a level of technology where it is feasible for women to be policepersons and military contributors they start getting suffrage. It was still a battle, but the timing is highly suspicious.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Participati...
Do Pretrained Language Models Make Better Storytellers?
>TV has been doing this for ages

The main change is that now ads will be targeted to the individual, or at least the household, level based on personal information they've collected about you from other sources.
"ο γέρος πάει ή από πέσιμο ή από χέσιμο"
Absolutely. My point is that "I'm an atheist so I'll take the option that agrees with my personal beliefs" isn't a valid line of reasoning. You could symmetrically argue "I'm a catholic so I'll take the option that suggests there is an effect, albeit a small one". Now we're just arguing whose personal beliefs are right.

A more properly scientific line of reasoning would be to instead say that you'll assume the small-to-nonexistent effect is nonexistent until somebody produces a model capable of predicting the proposed small effect, or a myriad other arguments along the same general lines.
Amazon Will Regret Building Private Label Brands
It's the consumer upload pipe that's the issue, and it's very likely there's no higher upload available. I've literally tried to throw money at the local ISPs and the best I can get is ~35mbs/up despite having about a half gig down.
Pretty much this.

In addition to that, the responsibility to decide what should be taken down/delisted is also moved from the publisher/courts of law to the indexer, so there is no due process.
I liked this part but couldnt this be problematic? : You can also look at the senders that most other users unsubscribe from.
I've both actually studied the topic so know what this is all about, and watched dozens of hours of content from Peterson. His 101-like lectures (e.g. his 2014 personality lectures in his YT channel) are pretty good, both content-wise and from an educational standpoint. He certainly is a really good orator. I whish I had more psychology professors like him.

But just listen carefully to his more political talks. I sadly can't find it right now, but there was a mythical lecture about different cultures all having a variant of a tree of life. He simply lists a few cultures and then states that this list obviously can't be coincidence, ergo god exists.

He also routinely phrases things like "people high on consciencousness tend to be more conservative" in his public appearences. Which is true! The problem is in the context and the way he says it implies causation where there is no proof of any. Same thing for the gender differences.

Unrelated, but I personally really dislike his strawman arguments like his stance that postmodernism equals leftism, then criticising postmodernist theory. Practically all leftist/materialist theorists are directly opposed to postmodernists. There have been decades of bitter ivory tower battles between both factions.

Mind you I have no axe to grind here. I actually feel really sorry for the things the social media mob did to him. Just from watching his videos you can really see how bitter that experience made him in just a few months. The tragic thing is that in that original 2016 incidence, he actually was right! It really is futile to try to fight human tendency to categorize by changing the language for the categories. And there there is abundent evidence for that. (Amusingly the idea of changing reality trough language is actually a conservative one, represented by e.g. Heidegger.)
"I don’t think indigenous people are backward or inherently inferior."

Weird that you drop this bizarre and incredibly offensive statement.

Countless indigenous people are simply Canadians. They live in cities, have jobs, and are enjoying lives as normal Canadians. Many Canadians have often significant aboriginal ancestry in their blood. People just living as a mixed bag of peoples in one of the richer countries on the Earth, enjoying life.

What I'm talking about are very remote settlements and reservations. This is situational, not about genetics. The situation of reservations and those far flung settlements just isn't conducive to happiness. No amount of government spending will change that.
Agreed. I believe this is the context for the original quote: https://books.google.com/books?id=rxE8FQzjpYMC&pg=PA82&lpg=P...

MacKinnon writes right after that quote:

> I think it's fairly common, and is increasingly known to be common, for men to seek sexual access to women in ways that we find coercive and unwanted. On those occasions the amount and kind of force are only matters of degree. The problem is that rapes do not tend to be reported or prosecuted or sanctioned based on the force that was used; not based on how coercive it was and not based on how violated the woman feels; instead they are based on how intimate she is with the person who did it. This is why most women think we won't be believed in reporting the most common rapes, that is, rapes by people we know.
You guys (I mean people who write free open software in general) are inspiration for me! Not only for me, I feel like many people appreciate FOSS but don't speak up about it often..
Boston Dynamics shows off Atlas humanoid robot performing gymnastics
Do manufacturers even offer consumer-grade tape backup solutions nowadays? Do tape drives even use USB, or is the tech still using SCSI? I can't seem to get a straight answer from Google, but I doubt it.
Were you able to make a decent living with related works?
> now that WhatsApp traffic is no longer end-to-end encrypted

I'm sorry, what?
Thanks a lot for VLC.
I still have my CIS userid (76344, 2701) number burned into my brain, 25 years since my last login.
Magento Development Services
Keyword Research Strategy
This is a very eloquent explanation, thank you.
How is that not equally true of anyone who makes the opposite determination?

We have no information besides a third party report of an accusation and a retraction.

My understanding of the world is that false accusations are rarer than many people think and false retractions are more common.

There's negative ramifications that are hard to overstate to that as well.
Juul CEO Steps Down
> It's a shame because it would not take much to address all of the nitpick issues I have with it, but there seems to be no interest.

Comments like these never fail to bring a smile to my face. Someone who doesn't understand the project / issue decides it is easy and people should care about their personal grievances for a program they have not paid a single cent for