skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As more time passes I begin to fundamentally believe the modern Internet isn't compatible with the GDPR or privacy as a whole.

Simply the act of enabling JS within the browser is enough to have your privacy violated in thousands of different ways and data sucked up by everyone who wants it.

Simply by installing an app on your smart phone you invite SDK's that are happy to report back all the information the OS freely allows access to because why not? Data storage is cheap and collecting that data is free of charge.

But yes, data about children is collected in the millions, and the truth is there is no possible law that can prevent this from happening because it will happen anyway. One example: If FB detects a baby photo you upload, should it be deleted? I mean that baby cannot possibly consent, and you'd have thought the GDPR or some law meant uploading baby photos is impossible, but that's not the case, FB/Google WILL perform facial recognition on that baby.

Your data will be processed, used, sold and manipulated for as long as you generate it.

The GDPR helps, a little, in some ways, but it's really had very very little effect overall (apart from some damn annoying "we respect your privacy" pop-ups on websites).

If the GDPR was serious, it wouldn't be possible to collect this data at the OS level, like, at all, JS would return nothing, Android apps would return nothing (or fake data, at least).

But the GDPR is not serious, at least in some ways.
Exercising caution is good advice, but you can overdo it too. The kind of stuff I got up to with my chemistry set 42 years ago would probably scare the pants of you but I learned a lot and the worst that ever happened was that I lost some glassware. Safety glasses, good ventilation, gloves when you need them and patience are the most important ingredients here, as well as a good textbook or course. You can have hours of fun and learn a lot for very little money, the real dangers are usually in stuff that goes 'foom' is larger quantities than advised and stuff that poisons you, and with MSDS online that is a lot safer today than it used to be when I was a kid.
> Chances of that happening are approximately nil, in my estimation

The author has put money behind their estimation. Given Twitter's performance and Galloway's mouthpiece, I wouldn't put organizing its shareholders beyond the realm of plausibility. (Or the Board compromising to take a thorn out of their side.)

The battle is really getting the question of a part-time CEO on the agenda, which requires replacing a few Board members. Given how unusual Twitter's Board dynamics are, there's a good chance proxy advisers would recommend voting for reforms.
If I know that the angry mob can cut off my usage of $company at any time, and that I'm in an industry that could plausibly be the target of an angry mob... I'm probably going to avoid using $company in the first place if there are any alternatives.
For reference, having been in this situation before:

1. Having had ~25 servers per datacenter

2. 5 Datacenters (1 in Texas, 1 in Utah, 2 in California, 1 in Chicago)

3. 1 Server in each location connected 10gbit, the rest 1 gbit.

I got to watch first hand as DNS reflection attacks crippled our infrastructure one server at a time. Only 2 of the datacenters (1 in LA, 1 in Chicago) had the infrastructure to mitigate the DDoS without significantly effecting their operations. Even post mitigation, the 2 datacenters that didn't end-up blackhole-ing our IPs at the edge still let so much malicious traffic through that only the 2 10Gbit servers remained online and they were nearly CPU bound over 24 cores just handling all the SENDQ/RECVQ for the NIC.

I mention this because it's sometimes easy to dismiss until you're in the situation and the realities of what you have control over are vastly different from technically feasible. The size and scope of modern DDoS attacks can easily overwhelm entire uplinks to a datacenter, even after pushing mitigations upstream. The reason these reverse proxies from companies like Cloudflare have become so popular is because most will not have the raw resources required to mitigate this themselves. Even some larger datacenters don't have the resources.
Doesn't that sentence refer only to the table above, measuring "bitset decoding" with a basic decoder, comparing 1.4 to 2.1 IPC?

It would help if the blog post had some headings to separate the benchmarks and summary.
It's people like this money minded share holder that makes the world a really shitty place these days.

Jack Dorsey is an honorable, earnest man imo that wants to do the right thing overall. He has all my confidence.
Yes they've made profits, but as it stands now I can get in my car and drive 5 minutes and not be able to get AT&T Uverse but I"ll be able to get Comcast where at home I can get Uverse AND Comcast but can't get Spectrum.

To go into a market, an ISP has to be able to reasonably recover their roll-out costs from that market. If they spend xxx dollars rolling out to a town, and then if they can hope to sell service to 75% of the homes, but are only going to make 0.5x or even xx of that back each year as profit, is it reasonable for them to spend xxx amount just to deploy when it might be a decade or more before they recover their initial investment? And what about the (likely) x to xx a year to maintain the equipment from squirrels/birds/storms/drunk drivers, and then upgrading the technology etc.

It's great when you have a small country, that you can drive across in a day, but when you're talking about 1/3 of a continent everything is orders of magnitude more expensive and more difficult.

I think people easily fall into the "well that country has it!" but they don't realize that "that" country is tiny. Let's take the country with the fastest internet [1], Taiwan, with an average speed of 85.02Mbps - it is 13,974 square miles, that's 0.44% (zero point four four) of the contiguous United States. 41 states are larger than Taiwan.

[1] https://www.swedishnomad.com/fastest-internet-in-the-world/
This is exactly the kind of discussion I was thinking of, FWIW. I tend to agree with this line of thought — responsibility is too diffuse in this case.

So... what are other options here? Cause it is definitely bad for the public if people stop vaccinating their kids. That’s not a risk, it’s a certainty. It is also fairly clear that a significant enough percentage of people will listen to anti-vaxxers no matter what, and they will move mountains to avoid vaccines.
One of the many sewers, where hundreds of millions of people enjoy swimming. Imagine if you could clean it up. What would that be worth?

That's Galloway's position.
> he isn't stopping the people from saying the things against him.

A) yes, he does. refer to the various people he has paid to stop talking about him through NDAs and catch & kill.

b) yes, he does. refer to the trump campaign's refusal to credential bloomberg most recently.

and various would-if-he-could:

c) refer to trump saying SNL is an attack on his safety, eg.

d) refer to trump referring to any non-fox media as 'the enemy of the people'

e) refer to trump recommending treason charges against NYT.

f) refer to trump recommending treason charges for people who refused to applaud at the state of the union

and on and on and on. there are endless examples of trump requesting legal action against various people "saying things" about him that he doesn't like. those people are only protected by the constitution. i have no interest in creating laws to compel companies to shut down speech i disagree with. i am a free speech absolutist. but a) he does stop people from saying things via civil legal action and b) he would stop people from saying things via criminal action if it were legal to do so.
What are your short time goals? What is most painful for you currently? What do you need to do right now in order to solve it?
Thanks for the suggestions. I do have myself a prescription for extended release Ritalin (Concerta) and I think it does provide me some benefit in low doses. If only I hadn't lost the prescription paper twice.

Volunteering for nightmare projects is also a good idea. I'm coincidentally working on Canvas as I'm writing this, which is a relatively novel and challenging topic. You're right in saying it's the hard stuff that keeps you focussed.
There certainly would be more murders if concrete deterrents were relaxed or eliminated. We definitely do not rely on the honor system to keep murder rates in check.

In any case, someone raising questions about emergent behavior in the general population shouldn't invite questions about that specific person's imminent ethical lapse.
> without the big expense of cameras, sensors and software

> People scan everything themselves

> Customers are trusted to use their phones

There certainly are cameras, sensors, and software expenses; it's just some of that burden is paid by the customers.
Things to consider.

BEVs are far simpler than regular cars. Particularly ones that aren't retrofitted on older chassis. There are simply far fewer parts to deal with.

Chemistry for batteries doesn't really matter all that much when thinking about compatibility. Do you care about the chemistry of any given AA? Probably not. Batteries and battery packs are right there in the same wheelhouse. Whether a chemistry gives you 1wH or 20wH really doesn't matter if the form factor and voltages are all the same.

Tesla packs are a good example of this. The chemistry has changed pretty drastically from 2012->today. Yet the pack form factor for Model S and X is the same. It only recently changed with the Model 3 (and they are still producing S and Xes).
Is it supposed to? It's a cost benefit analysis - do they save money by investing in all the tech? Or is it cheaper to use honor system with little to no investment to do so? Given there's always bad actors all the time, there's some minimum of loss from theft that always exists.
Yeah there's an obvious solution...
Sometimes it takes getting out of your usual box to make discoveries about what will motivate you. It might seem like a waste of time to explore something new — like film, or art — but often those explorations can spark some creativity that reinvigorates your work.

As far as personal projects go - the challenging, the better as far as I’m concerned. But what really matters is that the end result is something that excites you and keeps you going when the project goes through the inevitable dull, trying patches.
Tesla had to create the gigafactory. They had no choice. There was no where to buy the batteries otherwise.
That was rough.. Thank you for posting though.
Issue #1 is 'whether to sell it', issue #2 is the self-dealing and lack of transparency around the sale.

Where was the public information?
Where was the bidding process?
Where was the attempt to get a publicly acceptable valuation?
Why are the 'buyers' of the asset related to those on the inside?

There are serious problems here, it's entirely possible they sold an asset for a fraction of it's value, amounting to a direct transfer of wealth.
I went to a funeral home recently to discuss what to do when I die. This is in France (west of Paris) where these discussions are not that common.

I told them I want the cheapest solution and the best logistics (so that someone did all the paperwork when I die). And that nobody discusses what we agreed upon once I am not here anymore to negotiate :)

It was great. They showed me the catalog going straight for the cheapest options and suggested I come back a year later as it will be cheaper for me.

I think the funeral business is changing in France because more prone are like me, they plan their funerals in advance so they are much more relaxed discussing than the ones who come right after someone's death, to fall with it.
I have a fiber circuit for one of my businesses that has sub 10ms and sub 5ms latency to most large websites. I understand that certain latencies are not possible for every point to every point, but I’m using it as a proxy for the quality of the connection. Easiest way for me to discern the quality of my internet connection is to check the latency. All of my good fiber circuits are extremely low latency, and all of the terrible residential cable company connections split between 1,000 homes have terrible high latency (and upload bandwidth).
>if Gates is so committed to giving his money away, why does he keep getting richer?

>he should not be viewed as a hero. All billionaires should be viewed as sick in the head.

Is this really worth posting on HN?
Sounds like a great way to disencentivize philanthropy, reminding me yet again of https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio...
> Well, that's your problem

It looks like an activist position. The shares were acquired with the view of making them more valuable through direct action. This is a validated hedge fund strategy.
>Interestingly, he actually acknowledged this criticism in his own work, beginning his book with the following "plea to the Readers.":

This is the main tell of a snake oil salesman. If someone's selling something that works they don't need to load the pitch with their product's life story and "trust me" statements.
Same discussion from 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21680824

Same discussion from 11 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21634704

Using "vpn site:news.ycombinator.com" in Google will pop up even more prior discussions that will shed light.
The honor system doesn't work at scale. A small percentage of the population are kleptomaniacs or desperate for their next hit and there isn't an easy way to filter them out. Even with small groups you are playing the odds.

Since it hasn't been tried at scale, this is an unfounded proposition.

Shops already deal with routine pilfering. My partner's secondhand bookshop had an estimated 5%+ loss rate from petty theft. Large department stores deal with almost continuous shoplifting.

Yes, theft is ubiquitous in a small part of the population. No, this does not mean the honour system cannot work "at scale"
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I like listening to Scott Galloway but I think his perspectives on this issue are biased. He regularly advocates for progressive positions and is, for example, an outspoken fan of Elizabeth Warren. The bits about Twitter's financial performance are fair grounds for critique but the unfocused parts of this rant (for example asking Twitter to "protect journalists, especially women") seem nonsensical/alarmist in order to drum up support.

What Galloway is ultimately looking for here is for some views to be allowed and others disallowed. I do not think that is okay on a platform that is as big and pervasive as Twitter (or Facebook). They are, for all intents and purposes, a public digital square. And figuring out what is a "conspiracy" or "junk science" should ultimately be left to the reader, with algorithms otherwise ranking content as neutrally/objectively as possible. After all, we trust Twitter users with the ability to vote.
I think it can only be fixed with legislation. There is too much attack surface to the point that avoiding tracking is hard even if you take extraordinary measures.
> The GDPR helps, a little, in some ways, but it's really had very very little effect overall (apart from some damn annoying "we respect your privacy" pop-ups on websites).

That's because—as far as I can tell—the EU has not become serious about enforcing the law. At least not yet.

It is absolutely possible to pass a law that says "you can't track people", and that's what the GDPR does. It has a semi-loophole for people who explicitly provide knowing consent to be tracked, but there are several big caveats—it must be opt in, you can't trick people to opting in, and you can't punish people who don't opt in. (And really, after all of those caveats, what percentage of your userbase will agree to be tracked?)

Unless there's some aspect of GDPR which I don't understand—and please educate me if there is!—95% of the "cookie notices" currently on the web are obvious GDPR violations.
> If their expenses become higher than their earnings, the shops will close. Maybe that at least is an economic fact we can agree on?

Or they could raise their prices. That’s what normally happens in my experience when a small business faces an unavoidable and significant increase in one of its input costs.
The more novel problem solving, the more focussed you'll be. This thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10979220 goes into that more broadly, but I think we tend to gravitate towards intense novelty and risk for those reasons. Routine tasks will take way longer than for others. For me and others, it can't be arbitrary challenge like "write this basic web page in 40 min".
Problem is that nobody wants them. Two or three years ago there was regular talk about Twitter selling the company, but every potential buyer (e.g. Google) said no in the end. Twitter is just not a very good business, but it does attract a lot of scrutiny due to its size and impact. It has pretty much all the risks of Facebook with none of the cash flow.
Whatever happened to Red Envelope? I used to read that name a lot and then it just kind of vanished.
What prevents access to the Internet from a non-website ?
Why use the HyperTEXT Transfer Protocol for things completely unrelated to text - it's not like other, more appropriate protocols are not available, or cannot be designed ! (Or that URLs are limited to HTTP...)
Who gives a fuck about faster speeds when you're data capped? I'm capped at 1TB of data a month on a 250mbit/sec connection. I've actually gone over and even considered SLOWING down my connection. I definitely have no reason to upgrade to 1GBPS. My mom, who lives a kilometer away and has broadband choice is on 1TB with no caps and pays almost half of what I do. I have no choice whatsoever despite having 3 providers within 1km because only fucking Comcast has service here. Yeah, that's fucking stagnation: when people are considering LOWERING their broadband speeds because of the monopolies we've put in place just so Comcast can rake in even more money for their shitty, overpriced service. So what if the speeds exist if they're unusable?
>I'm curious: is it technically and politically possible for the operators of all internet cables receiving traffic from China to filter out malicious scripts?

Considering that the halting problem is undecidable, it's impossible to filter out the malicious scripts with complete certainty. The best you can do is use blacklists/heuristics which lead to an arms race.

>So in case of known malware like this being served from within a geographic region... is there any way to filter this out at scale? Or is that computationally infeasible at scale, so it would have to be built into the browser or something?

foreign ISPs can block port80 or http requests from coming into china. sure, it's going to break a lot of sites, but it's relatively simple for any site to get unblocked - all they need to do is set up letsencrypt.
> The US has an entire additional infrastructure that offers much faster speeds than DSL.

Maybe download speeds, and even then, probably subject to a temporary boost while the ISPs slows down other people in the neighborhood.

The fact that no upload speeds are ever advertised means to me that the ISP hasn’t made any hardware or capacity improvements or, they’re just reallocating what they already have.

Either way, who cares what other countries have and don’t have. It’s pitiful what the “greatest” country on earth can’t manage to offer due to monopolies having a disincentive to offer it, since they also sell TV and phone service, which they would lose revenue from if people had decent internet connections.
Scientists find mysterious galaxies that don't have any dark matter
That...I might really consider.
Yes, it will complain and for good reason: it has no way of knowing whether the kid next door is spoofing your router's IP or Mac address and presenting their own self-signed certificate.

I wouldn't go as far as calling it «capricious constraints imposed by the system of "certificate authorities"» but at the same time, I agree that it's not a fundamental limitation of the technology.

Better protocols could be developed to allow a browser to trust a server without (all) the limitations of the current system.
Rich people get rich (outside of criminals) by enriching the lives of others through voluntary trade. Get over it.
En masse

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/en-masse
They are literally rebuilding Google by tracking how users use Google and rebuilding the SERPs.

If that’s not a Google clone I don’t know what is.
I think the marginal cost of tobacco companies is clearly negative a negative sum, which is the strongest form of their argument. It’s also clear they are not suggesting the entire economy is zero sum.

Do you feel the Tobacco industry is a net benefit to society? If not then it’s just a question of which industries make the list of net positives vs net negatives.
Much obliged, thank you.
I am a physician and you may have hit on something with those “dirt related disorders.” I’m thinking of doing a meta-analysis.

Just kidding. Good comment overall and the phone thingy happens to me all the time: “Phone thingy disorders.” ;-)
My employer quite deliberately publishes source maps alongside our javascript, so people who want to tinker and learn don't lose the ability to see what we're doing, but end users (our press pack says we serve pages to around 1% of people in any given month) don't have to pay the cost of downloading unminified JS for every page load. I suspect that if we ever start using WASM, we'll do the same thing.

Just because you _can_ use the compliation step to (go some way to) hide your source doesn't mean you _have_ to. And relying on your secret sauce being private while you publish it in obfuscated form for all the world to decypher feels like a losing strategy.
I do know it preloads on Chrome on Android on mobile networks, but it's a little surprising that it doesn't on Safari on iOS.
Ha, I’m not referencing _your_ comments here, and I am curious about how you couldn’t reproduce his results; he’s quick to publish and seems happy to correct so we’ll see. I’m referencing more the other comments here saying things about the benchmarks not being realistic because good benchmarks need to have a mix of tasks, like memory and I/O—this ain’t a Phoronix post, folks.

I started reading through your blog last night. I’m slowly trying to learn how to go from being a programmer who doesn’t write slow code, to one who writes fast code, so absorbing a lot about vectorization and ILW, etc.
And yet...

I use "ESP" all the time, for trivial things: leaving the house so as to arrive at the bus stop just before my bus does.

AFAIK, the PEAR lab came closest to formally establishing "psi" (or whatever it is) but never in such a way as to be absolutely incontrovertible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalie...

It's almost as if the phenomenon is coy.

It's a cultural "blockage": overcome the cultural conditioning against it and suddenly "woo-woo" is easy, even trivial. Conversely, you can float like a cloud over the Nobel Prize committee and they won't look up.
Facebook: https://privacyinternational.org/report/2647/how-apps-androi...

news.yc discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19595478

And some techscience.org classics: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This map is really hit and miss for me. As a Missourian, I agree with the way Missouri is split up, right down the counties.

But the Upper Midwest (sans Chicago) is way closer to the rest of the Midwest than it is to New England. It has its own distinct flavor compared to the Lower Midwest. But not in "Yankee" way--more like "pre-Canada."
https://www.kansascityfed.org/publications/research/er/artic...