skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting counterpoint to people who claim that turning off Javascript is just another data point. I use Firefox with a decent amount of tracking protection turned on. With Javascript, I leak about 16 bits of identifying information. Without, I leak about 7.

You want to take that with a grain of salt, because I don't think Panopticlick is a perfect tool to measure this stuff. For one thing, I suspect that Panopticlick is highly influenced by the people who visit it -- being posted on HN probably means there are more data points for me to hide in than usual.

For the other thing, there are measurements that Panopticlick doesn't include, and there's no way for Panopticlick to track disinformation and false data. For example, you could still get my screen size without Javascript via just CSS. Are most tracking sites doing that? No, it would be a massive pain to do, and it would force you to ship giant CSS blobs everywhere. But it's still possible.

But, this does still strengthen my conviction that turning off Javascript by default _probably_ helps avoid tracking on most sites, and it's surprisingly feasible to do. A lot of content-sites work without Javascript.

I recommend UMatrix if you want to go down that route, since it lets you create very precise exceptions relatively easily when you need them.
Can you please not call sodium "exotic"? Doing so adds to an irrational fear of relatively benign technology.

Molten sodium is easy to pump, non-corrosive to many metals including steel, and a good heat transfer medium. The chemical industry uses it routinely. In a nuclear reactor, it would also chemically sequester a particularly annoying fission product (I-131) in case of a fuel element leaking. Unpressurized, it is good up to 800C before it boils.

By contrast, water at 300C will corrode most steels. At higher temperature, it will corrode zircalloy, forming hydrogen. And it really wants to be a gas, hence the giant containment buildings around LWR.

What did you say? "But sodium explodes in contact with water?" That's easy to solve, just keep the water out. A sodium cooled reactor should be coupled to a supercritical CO2 turbine instead of a steam turbine. That removes the problem of leaking and exploding heat exchangers.

(Footnote: I like molten salts better than sodium. But sodium is still better that water.)
Ask HN: What are current problems or trends regarding cybersecurity?
I am asking for possible subjects and ideas for my cybersecurity bachelor thesis. I have 10+ years of experience as fullstack dev and sysadmin. I have been following HN for a long time and learned so many things. I am not expecting a thesis idea, but a discussion would definetely help me think about possibilities and widen my horizon.

I already have few items in my list, but I can't find any of these strong enough, because they are either too general or too vague: - Container (Docker, etc) security
- Media originality check (eg anti-deep fake or propaganda)
- Security of IoT data, especially in cloud
- Security of health care (don't know how)
Pentest Tools from NMAP to Subdomain Finder
In the US, Visa & Mastercard now allow a merchant to have a surcharge for card purchases (their policy changed in 2013), but whether you get hit by this will vary by state. And of course a merchant may build this surcharge into their prices so you don't see it. I have seen small restaurants (usually pizza places, for some reason) offer discounts for cash. If it's a local business you can always ask if a discount for cash is available.

https://lawpay.com/about/blog/can-you-charge-a-fee-or-surcha...

(disclosure: I used to work for a sister company of LawPay)
https://www.aresnorthamerica.com/article/8736-america%E2%80%...
Because it's an organized strike by the extremist-left wing in order to take over the goverment. They never win elections, so they organize chaos.
Ok, I'm done talking about WeWork from a business perspective. Let's move on to something more interesting. One of the things that I think we need to start thinking about is the concept of implied preference.

Until now, co-working spaces have been open-plan, with large amounts of glass and no sound-deadening. All of these features are things that we all assumed were a revolution. WeWork had all these things, WeWork was hugely successful, so we had our revealed preference. No matter what you might say, it turns out you want to work in a noisy office with no privacy and free craft beer.

I've heard no end of people who personally dislike that, yet it's the standard that every 'successful' coworking space has. I'd like to consider the idea that all of these things are actually (contrary to popular opinion) terrible and the reason people were putting up with them was because WeWork was selling office space for 50 cents on the dollar.

The result we've seen in the market, is obviously you and I can't go out and sell office space for 50 cents on the dollar. So instead we follow the signalling- we all start companies renting out glass offices with no sound-deadening and craft beer. We're optimising for the wrong thing. We're looking at WeWork thinking they revolutionized the experience, but actually they didn't.

So what does this all mean? Well what if the companies that are trying to compete with WeWork catch on to the truth behind this. Start breaking up the spaces for more privacy, more quiet space, less craft beer and more productivity. If people take the right lesson from this we could end up with spaces that are actually optimized to what office workers want, rather than forcing everyone to work in the equivalent of a busy starbucks simply because that's what we learned from WeWork.
> I for one is not ready to have a bio-centric view if it means I can't provide my kids with all the things that fossil fuels have provided and keep providing for them.

Are you also unwilling to make those sacrifices for the sake of valuing the lives and experiences of humans in every other country as much as the lives and experiences of humans in your own country? I suspect most of us are, since we collectively buy phones made in horrible factory conditions which our own labor laws wouldn't tolerate. I agree that the "natural" thing to do is to value your own species above others, but I think that applies to subdivisions of humans as well, and it gets ugly. It's not a binary thing, human v.s. non-human, it's a set of behaviors on a continuum. We can recognise that we engage in such behavior while still using figures for pollution-related-deaths that include people who work in Foxconn factories, and I don't see why we shouldn't extend the same courtesy to whales. Whales are people too, maaaan.
Garry Kasparov on the Artificial Intelligence Podcast [video]
My favorite was a large cable carrier that stats with the letter C that managed to slide in 13 monthly bills. When confronted with it, I was given the choice to pay or cancel service...
I don't know how this is the top-rated comment right now.

Most Disney films are not based on fairy tales. Their biggest animated films are original works. Even their biggest live-action franchises are all original works created within the last 60 years.

Indeed, one of the reasons the Marvel films do so well is because Disney has given their directors a degree of artistic control that DC would not (even though DC had the far more well-known stable of heroes) and lets the directors create other types of stories within the framework of a comic book movie (i.e., espionage thriller for Captain America, coming-of-age comedy for Spiderman, heist movie for Guardians, Shakespearean drama for Thor).
Is that really erroneous? It seems quite reasonable to me: is every truck 100% loaded or do they have many trucks traveling now with whatever needed to go out to hit the promised deadlines? Extra time gives them the ability to improve utilization of each truck, better route scheduling, and the possibility of off-hours deliveries avoiding peak congestion times.
Looks like it's still kicking

https://github.com/wocommunity/wonder
The gig economy is not about freelancers but about misclassifying employees to negate their rights.

> Naturally, Uber and Lyft have already announced they have no intention of changing how they classify their drivers.

My point.

> big business will always have the resources to shield itself from harms the little guy will suffer

This is a dangerous argument to justify that big corporations are about the law. Luckily for now they still have to submit to the rule of law, even that sometimes is not easy.
The problem isn't that they're somehow oblivious to the various problems... the problem seems to be from this guy's articles that they don't have money and manpower to tackle them.
Like at a Real Job®, the day the hounding starts is precisely the day you told them you would have it done. Or maybe a day or two beforehand: "Will it be done?"

What does every boss say? Please communicate as soon as possible if you think the date is going to slip. Then everybody can recalibrate their expectations and you might get another little period of not being hounded. Though unfortunately it won't be as free of hounding as before, because your 2nd estimate will be trusted somewhat less than your first one, which turned out to be wrong.

Some bosses, not the good ones, will say "You will meet the date, end of story." But what no boss ever says is "You need to meet this date, and if you can't, I don't want to know about it. Please obfuscate."

Everybody knows a completely open phone is a hard job, but that ironically is the reason nobody believes the happy-face blog posts saying "Hi, everything's great!" I backed this project and I smelled something fishy as soon as they announced the "iterative shipping schedule." Not because I'm a crybaby who wants his phone now (in fact I opted for the latest possible shipment knowing the earlier ones would have "issues"), but because of how they tried to cloak the obvious and expected ("We're not ready") in terms of something straight out of Animal Farm ("We always planned it this way.") You tryin' to say you ain't ready dawg? Just say that.

As usual the missing ingredient is leadership. You need somebody who's a compass needle, not a weathervane. You need somebody who's confident enough to tell the truth, warts and all, and who knows how to get everybody to love the warts. People will dump even more money and manpower in to help you if you do that.
I explicitly said that async I/O is the right decision for Rust. And C has no I/O concurrency features at all, so that's completely irrelevant.
The Wrong of Displacement: The Home as Extended Mind
Trump administration may blacklist Chinese firms that routinely copy tech
Running to the store... which also got its inventory delivered by truck! So the urgency argument is even less apt.
This kind of dirtbags

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/19/the-u-n-helps-syria-bom...

and this

https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/4030-unicef-lends-itself-to-d...

and also this

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/united-nat...
Wasn't that exactly the point?
Well, if you can just keep a part of the house that is only for work that also solves a lot of the issues.

Yes, remote work has pitfalls and is not perfect. But, when I visit HQ and go into the office every day, I am well reminded why remote is the right choice for me.

So, let’s be honest with ourselves about the pitfalls both of remote work and our wonderful open-plan offices with the fancy decor and cafeterias.
We went from php_mod to php-fpm but we started moving back to php_mod after php 7 came out showing the benchmarks.
While not always considered a hobby, I think social groups are forming around group exercise more often now. It's healthy, you get a little shared suffering in, and you meet a whole cross section of your community you may not meet otherwise.
My solution to getting out of the house and into the World is to go to the gym four days a week, in the middle of the day. So I effectively work a split shift. With my team dispersed globally and me being in the "middle" time zone, it's actually a benefit to the work itself. Plus it keeps me sane and somewhat healthy and guarantees at least a tiny bit of social interaction.

(I realize this has its own logistical challenges, but ten years into my current remote-work job it's making all the difference for me.)

[Edit] Also the gym is less crowded in the middle of the day, in case that part wasn't obvious.
Projects are using AI to fight misinformation
It's pretty obvious and well known that if you disassociate the cost of something from the actual monetary value, people find it harder to conflate the two.

This is the reason that you didn't buy a $20 XBox game, you brought a game with 1,700 Microsoft points.

You don't buy this skin for a game for $14, that's way too expensive! Who would pay that! However when it's on sale for 3,200 Riot points? That's a great deal!

If you wanted to strike a death blow to the micropayments industry you'd just need to force them to put the actual monetary price against each loot box/gem bundle/whatever rather than obscuring it with a made up currency that nobody can evaluate cost against.
Why are you asking this? Just wondering why think it would not be doable.

Sql and stored procedures are just a textual source code. You can put it into version control, do code reviews, or build CICD pipelines for sql and stored procedures just like for any other language...

The only challenge is the deployment environment, as databases offer a stateful runtime engine, so you'll want to consider it's state. But state can also be managed in CICD pipelines, with scripting, sql-loader, backups, or similar.
People can already free use their existing copies under the first sale doctrine which has been around for several decades.

Copyright simply means you can't copy your DVDs of Disney films onto other DVDs and sell them for a profit without getting permission (aka a license) from Disney first.
Yes, when I'm in the mood. It's a great game for unwinding after a hard day. I play on a solo server and build my own things.
It is... underneath all that shiny logical digital it's analogue all the way down in any real implementation.
By way of an excellent LSE lecture podcast episode:

A Right to a Home? [Audio]
LSE: Public lectures and events
Duration: 1:31:14
Published: Tue, 15 Oct 2019 18:30:00 GMT
Episode: http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/pub...

Media: https://media.rawvoice.com/lse_publiclecturesandevents/richm...

Podcast: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/279428154

Speaker(s): Dr Cara Nine, Yousif M Qasmiyeh, Dr Beth Watts | ‘Home’ means more than a roof over our heads. It can be crucial to our sense of ourselves and our well-being. So what might it mean to have...

Paper is also available via Sci-Hub / LibGen:

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/?q=The+Wrong+of+Displacement%3A...
I've been working remotely for some time already. Currently, I'm the only remote worker at my client's company as I'm living in another country. Kind of nomad style, but I'm living with my wife's family.

As I'm more of a consultant than an employee, I see it a bit differently. What do I mean? Well, I'm trying to turn my side projects into something profitable and hopefully one day, into a company, where I'd be able to hire other people. I choose to work remotely to save time and to skip commute and so on to be as productive as possible not only for my client but also for the time when I'm building (with my SO) products.

I think, as far as it's your choice and you know what are the possible problems on the way, you should be fine. Treat yourself better. Go outside more (not only shopping), visit some parks. Do some hobbies and spend more time with your family.

So far I haven't known anyone to be forced into remote work. If you start working remotely, be serious about it, otherwise you're gonna face issues.

One more thing, don't listen to people that nomadlife/travelinglife/remotework is some silver bullet to whatever problems you have. It's not. It's hard and it's not pretty.
In fact I’d argue it means they have to track you. And telling them your preference gives them another data point on you.
Counterpoint: you can have a million subscribers on YouTube, or be the most popular writer of web serials (Wildbow), and not make much money at all.
I love that not only does it work with emoji, but it gets the colors of the emoji correct.
>I never witnessed sexism but that could be a problem too

That's pretty slippery.

Why not go full Toon-Town 'SpeedChat' , parse all the voice to text, equivocate the naughty phrase that was actually uttered to an acceptable alternative, and give the player a TTS voice that says something roughly equivalent publicly.

"Eat shit, dickhead" -> "Boy, I sure am frustrated!"
"I wrecked you, you're terrible." -> "Good game, everyone!"

these censorship lengths absurd. at what point in all this cat-and-mouse game is it going to be obviously harmful towards human expression?

or, in other words, if The Machine dictates what of which was said is heard by the flock everywhere , at what point do we lose our voices?
We have had a vacation planned to go there late November. Do you feel this is still a safe place to travel? We are mainly looking at Valparaiso and Santiago. It seems most of the protests are in these two places.
Are most restaurants and stores still open?
Are ATM machines still accessible?
its not really avoiding its just more convenient as the private sector itself has made it more difficult since they don't want the compliance burden of opening accounts for American signers

we'll comply with any applicable regulation. if we have to start filing FBAR's for on-chain or off-chain custodial cryptocurrency holdings we'll do it, while also seeing if there is an applicable exemption, while also having our lawyers write to the Treasury during the comment period to suggest they not pursue this route
Human rights, just as countries, are a human invention. These inventions are extremely useful, because they allow some rules for conflict resolution — without them, it's just rule of power and violence.
I'd personally say this doesn't just apply to creators or media franchises, but businesses in general. Especially in the days of the internet.

Because for good or bad, there are a lot of companies who don't really have a loyal 'fanbase'. People use them merely because they're cheap, conveniently located or out of necessity.

Which in turn makes them very liable to get disrupted and driven out of business by ecommerce giants and other large competitors. See many department stores like Sears and Macys who got obliterated by Amazon and online shopping. Or generic supermarkets who ended up destroyed by much larger competitors (like Walmart in the US, and the the 'big four' in the UK).

And the same pattern applies with creators on sites like YouTube. There are numerous channels which don't really add anything 'unique' to the videos they upload, and merely coast along on trends. They're at risk of being made irrelevant near instantly, as their 'viewers' go off to a nearly identical channel offering the same stuff even more quickly.

Developing that true fan following adds an extra 'moat' around your business to protect it from being disrupted by new technological innovations or social changes. An audience that will stick by you regardless of how much cheaper or quicker or more 'efficient' your competition might be.
I can't wrap my head around beer at work. Zero productivity for the most part, though I have rarely experienced the Ballmer peak in the domain of bug fixing.
I had to clear my NY Times cookies to read the article. The irony.
well, we can't blame it on their head of cyber security.
It's hardware:) At that level, "digital" electronics... aren't.
Countries with significant lake hydroelectricity can "store" the solar power (no batteries needed) by reducing flow during the daytime (and increasing flow at nighttime if required).

This is because hydroelectric dams are essentially stores of electricity. No need for pumping or other expensive storage schemes, if you already have one!

This isn't mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the duck curve: I'm not sure why as it is a legitimate storage technology (just an existing one).
I watched a lot of initiatives for community developed hardware, starting with FIC 1973.

The community people are repeating the same issue as the industry: too much time spent on drama and talks, to little on doing stuff; 40+ years old men with attention span of an infant; people being too absent minded.

It require some willpower to forcefully kick detractors from opensource projects, as much as kicking out bad managers in a commercial enterprise.

The Silicon Valley and the culture there does not teach people any good entrepreneurship. VCs and allegedly competent mentors do not really know how to run business properly, which in my understanding means running them profitably.

I had a talk with Tapabrata (Vathys) about the case of MP3 codec chip companies still making many megabucks of pure profit on relatively simple stuff. It was very good demonstration how most of "tech" industry looses out to plain, sound entrepreneurship:

The few remaining standalone MP3 decoder chips are a very good business for whomever is making them (chips sold at $10,) and it's an easy grab for just any fabless outfit, but not many people can pull even something this simple.

It is for the simple reason that "people who will screw up running a billion dollar tech startup are equally capable of screwing up a $10M a year business." Even simple, and easy business require solid executions.
While true, Disney has nothing compared to European authors, who lobbied the EU to create significantly stronger copyright protections than even Disney was able to lobby for in the US.

So stop blaming Disney for the state of copyright, and start blaming all the European auteurs who tried (and nearly succeeded) in getting indefinite copyrights that passed down from the creator to his estate in perpetuity.
This.

I quit several years after being on the platform for nearly a decade, which I mainly used to communicate with classmates.

Over time, I realized the platform was only good for pushing false information and giving a platform to people who shouldn't be sharing their thoughts. I also became more aware that I was a product, and it infuriated me to no end.

I'm glad to not be on it anymore. What a waste of time.
Thank you for the compliment! I'm very happy someone finds it awesome.

1. Rendering quality is low because it is just an image, for browser isolation security, and the image is lossy compressed to keep bandwidth low. I made this as a MVP to focus on security.

2. Regarding illegal usage, what makes you ask?

3. In this demo, each browser is completely scrubbed every 30 minutes. So all the history, cache, cookies disappears. For that 30 minute session, your cookies are preserved. You can also right-click to get a context menu to scrub history, or everything manually. And you can also use the context menu to open incognito tabs that have their own blank slate.

4. The source code is unavailable.

I'm glad you're excited. Why did you get excited and want to know more?
The article basically discusses the OLTP side. You can always export from the DB to a more analysis-friendly OLAP system or just write a new set of views on the same DB that are geared for reporting.
So you can tell the difference between 256kbps AAC and FLAC?
It may be useful to read Part 0, as it lays out the way the lessons are approached.
... if you didn’t work there, and Softbank isn’t spending your money, why would you get outraged?
i wouldn't want a shared kitchen or bathroom - besides why would anyone want to live in such cramped conditions if they work remotely. But i d like it if my building had a shared coworking space a cafeteria and perhaps other commercial perks (such as gym) to use frequently - preferably with other remote workers. I know it's possible to share each of these individually, but this happens effortlessly when many people in similar situations are in physical proximity with them.