skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, anyone who thinks they have privacy whilst carrying a mini communications computer in their pocket is dumb.

Remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WARRIOR_PRIDE, Pepperide Farms does.

There is no point trying to remain private whilst there is a phone where you have little control over private data. If you want privacy then you should look more towards using a collection of VPNs and fuzz your browser each time you use it. Change the installed fonts, randomize the browser window and destroy the user account that started it.

You can't do this reliably with a phone. All surveillance relies upon the user favouring convenience.
It would do a lot against democratization of access and one of the good parts of email.

> Ubiquitous. Approximately everyone on the Internet has email, or can get it.
I wrote a post about how to make a good, clean website on my...clean website.

TL;DR: Don’t worry about it. Just write.

For more: https://www.ft.io/blog/good-website/
I don't think there is any suggestion of using any kind of granular location data, be it GPS or cellular network location. Doing it per region could certainly work, and only reveal maybe 4 bits of information about location. I imagine for Europe and some parts of the world, per country could be too granular due to localised travel (at least as things ease back), but at region level you would be revealing more from your (even cellular) IP address than actually passing on a rough region of interest.
I think one of the problems with email is that you have one global email tied to one inbox. Fastmail has the option to create multiple emails tied to one inbox so you could potentially have a unique email per sender, then if you start to receive spam it's easy to know who leaked it and disable the affected address
It shouldn't matter what-so-ever what race someone is. It should be irrelevant. It shouldn't be a positive or negative thing. If social mobility is a problem then you means test the household based on wealth and give grants to those that satisfy the criteria.
This is really great! I never knew you can use Rust with Godot. Thanks!
I would love to see something similar done for a gothic cathedral. And I don't mean a one-man show like Justo Martínez [0] or a "modern" cathedral like the Sagrada Familia, but an actual authentic gothic cathedral like it would've been professionally built in the 14th century. These buildings are just so interesting and beautiful [1]. I remember seeing an arte documentary a few years ago in which several French gothic cathedrals were analyzed. Apart from their structural complexity, there constructions were surprisingly modern. In many of them, concealed iron rods or chains were used to ensure stability and make it look like the stones are somehow magically kept in place - or to safe the building. For example, an iron chain was tightened around Amiens cathedral [2][3] to fix structural defects which resulted from a mistake made during construction. An interesting aspect of their esthetic appeal is also their regularity, which is kind of a side effect of using a catalog of standardized building elements which were mass-produced by the stone quarries to keep the costs down. For example, if you look at this picture [4], you can actually spot a lot of these basic form elements which could be re-used for other windows or doors.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justo_Gallego_Mart%C3%ADnez

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ce/20...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiens_Cathedral

[3] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Philippe_Dillmann/publi...

[4] https://img.fotocommunity.com/rosettenfenster-8359847c-0966-...
Contact Tracing in the Real World
The lazy me wants to use this for future projects to secure my apis, but the curious me wants to reimplement this type of project in go.

Were there any gotchas in implementing this type of identity access management system?
These hand waving, overly dismissive, FUD articles need to stop. Propose an alternative or shut up and sit down. Complaining about a tactic to combat a pandemic without a solution of your own is the lowest form of civic participation.
Agree.

But to nuance, a wolf pack is generally small, but there are a lot of stories, some of them recent, most of them from Europe (I've read at least one from Northern America), about very large gatherings of wolves in the countryside, posing a real threat to villagers and travellers.
Maybe it's the case here.

These wolves could also have been feral dogs, which nowadays are omnipresent in Eastern Europe.
It's a bit sad that their active resolution is so low, with 2560x1600 being divided into 9x5 quilt frames. So that would mean 320x280 or so effective resolution for the 8.9" display
> They are trying to prevent both millions of deaths and and worst economic collapse in modern age.

Are you implying we are not already in the worst economic collapse? Is there something to prevent at this point in time?
It's a good thing I always click later on these updates.. has Apple retracted this patch?
This and the other projects by the Bootstrappable Builds project are really interesting:

https://bootstrappable.org/

I wonder how many of the upper layers have cyclic build dependencies. I know Scala and sbt do but what else?
Seems pretty standard -- expect more of the same :-) Congrats on the PLDI paper!
Wolfs are rare in Germany. They went extinct in almost the whole country and are very slowly coming back.
After reviewing the looking glass docs, yes. The paper presented here can produce depth layers. If you would then flatten those depth layers with 45 different parallax angles and concatenate the results, you'd have something similar to their quilt files.
This feature is supported by GMail as well FWIW. If your email is john@gmail.com all john+X@gmail.com addresses are aliases for your primary inbox. So you can have john+ebay@gmail.com, john+that_scammy_site@gmail.com and so on to easily track down spam.
> In Linux, wrists keep triggering touch events as you type. Screens start scrolling, focus goes to random things, and everyone swears. You end up having to hold your hands right over the keyboard in a very unnatural way to avoid accidental mouse interaction. […] Linux simply doesn’t cope with hands near the touchpad.

Enable the option to sleep the touchpad when the user starts typing.
And it won’t do CRON because reasons
Yes, but it's Enterprise only. Everyone else is forced to act as Microsofts QA department, inplace of their long since dismantled actual QA department.
>A recent paper suggested a new mathematical point of view on version control. I first found out about it from pijul, a new version control system (VCS) that is loosely inspired by that paper.

https://jneem.github.io/merging/
In The Netherlands education is cheap (compared to the US) and there's a test that you're allowed to take when you're 21. If you pass that test, then you can study any undergraduate degree that you want. I know this is the case for Dutch citizens, not sure about other nationalities.

The reason I'm writing about this is because this test is not well-known at all. I found it by Googling when I was a student, for fun. A family member (much later) actually took it and she is now done with masters in fiscal law.

So before people say it's impossible in Germany, might it have something similar? I mean, our high school systems seem quite alike (I went to a pre-university high school and they make you believe that your faith is sealed at the age of 12, good times). So they might also have this rule of exception.
Yet, still there is a conscious effort on the part of these companies/orgs/governments to slang the "we're protecting your privacy™" narrative because it's always easier to these leverage tools against others when they don't see it as a threat and aren't willing to mitigate against it to any degree.
Exactly, we want to pay 40% and have no healthcare, no free higher education, and no decent mass transit.
His argument No. 1 is self-defeating. If you have rapid exponential growth and would have to publish hundreds of megabytes of keys per day (and phones only need to download the delta to the previous day), this approach of contact tracing is useless and you must instead get the entire population under lockdown. If everybody is sheltering at home, nobody needs notifications of possible contacts, because everybody is doing what would be the response to such a notification already. So you can simply disable the app in a certain country or don't accept submissions to the diagnosis server during that time.

This approach, just like the manual approach of tracking potential contacts via paper and phone, is only of use in a scenario with a very limited number of transmissions and an R (reproduction rate) of around or below 1. Its purpose is not to reach such a situation, but to aid in keeping that situation in effect without severe measures. But severe lockdowns must first suppress the infection counts to such levels before any contact tracing may work at all.
> This guy says, yeah, but the gubment could abuse the tracing mechanism for things besides an epidemic..

> ...except, if a government can pull those off, they don’t need this new contact tracing platform. These assume the government already has deep, control of the details of the operating system.

It doesn't have to be about the security services having root on your phone - they can use legislation, forcing Apple/Google to hand over location data so they can hoover it up. Alternatively, they can use legal loopholes - as we've seen before after Snowden.

Honestly, it's naive to think they wouldn't try to get this data.
I’m not sure why you think that SGX shows hardware enclaves “don’t work”. I also don’t see why you think enclaves “protect the malware from you”. Enclaves are created and started from host code, which can interrupt or terminate them at any time.

The scheme you suggest, which isn’t typically how TrustZone is used, gives zero integrity and confidentiality guarantees for applications. I don’t know if it’s “the right way” for some threat model, but for the most typical TEE use cases which are trying to establish strong integrity and confidentiality guarantees in the presence of an untrusted host, it’s absolutely not right nor useful.
Why do we need apple and google to do this and not support an open project like https://www.pepp-pt.org/ ?
Improving healthcare outcomes is crucially important at the moment, and technology can help with that.

That said, there's risk in globally deploying platform-level technology changes which could be difficult to roll back and are not held democratically accountable.

It may be worth considering time-limits on rapidly-introduced technology changes like this. We cannot always anticipate all the side-effects of technology, and if we do need to introduce them suddenly, we should be thoughtful and deliberate about evaluating their effect as we do.

It seems apparent that Apple and Google are the entities holding the reins on this particular implementation. Yes the technology is opt-in; but that could be seen as a way to make a potentially bitter pill palatable for both citizens and their governments.

After a global recovery, imagine what the world might be like if nearly all daily interactions between people with Android or Apple smart devices have to be assumed known to their local authorities (including in locations with repressive regimes).

Perhaps that would appear acceptable, under some circumstances, to some people in some cultures. I think it'd be hard for almost anyone to quantify.

I'd suspect that an environment like this would lead to a significant loss of privacy and a resulting chilling effect in the types of activities and relationships that people build.

Even if that's a pessimistic outlook, it may be worth questioning whether two corporations from a single country should have the power to effect such large changes without at least constraining their effect to the duration of the COVID-19 crisis.
Your example sites a simple and basic in design, so some simple html and css would be fine. You can host this simply on Netlify for free.
If you want those articles to come from a database than your python knowledge can be helpful. Use django or flask to create a server.
> This was one of the best articles I've read lately, it's not filled with empty prose as is the style today.

Agreed! Why is that the style today?

I've heard it has something to do with SEO but I'm unsure how, or if there are other reasons.

This trend makes my skimming habit so much worse, because it actually justifies skipping ahead to meaningful words.
Sadly not, it's still an unsolved problem in the general case. Yes, it works tolerably well for some images, but converting RGB to RGBD is anything but easy. That's why the 3D-ification of cinema movies still requires thousands of people and millions in budget.
It's most likely not setting up your SPF record. Most email servers reject email that do not contain an SPF DNS record.

Then there's also general reputation, and blocking non US TLD's.

It depends, you really need to have the other party check their email server logs or do a mail trace to find out WHY but then comes the chicken and egg - how can you contact someone via email if their server is automatically purging your communications.
Maybe the best thing to come out of this crisis is a chip in the armor for the privacy-over-everything crowd.

This is a particular problem in the US where in the name of "freedom" people feel entitled to do whatever they want. I've come around to thinking that this is little more than a mass rationalization for selfishness and cruelty.

I think back to things like the Trump administration separating children from parents in detention facilities, a measure so cruel that it was one of the few times such a policy of this government has been reversed. This has long term harm on children (seriously, google it) but yet it's justified by some out of a sense of fear that somehow these immigrants are criminals or just "stealing their jobs" or "jumping the queue" when most are just trying to escape pretty terrible situations.

Honestly, I see more outrage over animal cruelty than I did from removing three year olds from their parents.

In years passed, we as a society endured a lot when required. In the World Wars, there was rationing and a lot of sacrifice to support the war effort.

But we've somehow transitioned into a society where we don't want to do anything for anyone. And we want to call that "liberty".

What we have here is something that may help tracking contacts for a disease we need to fight. That seems like a good thing to me. I don't give an F that some privacy nut may think "but the government might use this to track us".

Not every surface is a slippery slope.

Just like we had curfews, rations, shortages, blackout blinds and so forth in WW2 and now we don't. Not everything has to get worse.
First, you make some good points but you could have made them without rudely characterizing the author ("...but the gubment could.." etc.)

Second, the author is not wrong - when you build in tracking at such a deep-level it is open to abuse. Read the authors bio, he is not a naive techie. This is an area he has strong background in and deep technical knowledge.

Maybe this is the path forward, but Apple and Google appear to be rushing into this without considering the larger picture.
Leaving Things for Others
I would pay more than that for a version of Google which searches exactly for what I input like in the old days, and doesn't try to guess what I'm trying to search for with some nonsense NLP while ignoring half of my query
Compare https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Understanding_Darcs/Patch_theo...
Coronavirus spreads to 75 areas in Dhaka?
Friends and Family Minecraft Server Terraform Recipe
What prevents spammers from recognizing the + pattern and omit it?
Also, the government already has this capability in place, they can track and bug individuals and groups via telecom networks.
> People that were not placed into Gymnasium at age 8 are set on a course where, once they turn 18, do not get to go free Uni; they simply are not allowed to go to Uni at all!

There are a few ways to get into University later in life in Germany. I wasn't placed into "Gymnasium". But I got my "Mittlere Reife" (grade 10, age 16), did a three-year apprenticeship, worked a few years and got back into school ("Berufsoberschule"). I finally got into University in my late 20ies and have a Masters degree now.

> Also the problem of cost of living while studying isn't exactly trivial. Accommodation, food and participating in general student life all are things that cost a lot of money.

If your parents can't support you, there is "BAFöG". Depending on your situation the state can support you with e.g. around 600 EUR per month for up to five years. You have to pay it back after your studies but only up to 10000 EUR (~ $11000). You can wait up to five years to start paying back and then pay around 390 EUR per quarter. Or you can get another discount if you pay it back all at once.

And there are other programs to help pay for your accommodation if you really can't afford it.

I'm not saying it's easy, but it's certainly possible if read up on the school system and support programs or if you ask the right school/student advisors.
The Economist is quite proud of their signature concise style.

If you like that kind of writing, you can consider subscribing. (I used to read it cover to cover as a uni student, but have since grown out of it.)
To be fair, apparently this appears to be the current internal prototype, https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/187317

It still appears quite far from being done in 2021, though.
Same here, no issues whatsoever.

You hear these complaints with every macOS release, but they are probably a very small vocal minority. I've never run into any of the reported problems nor have my 20-odd colleagues.
Indeed. Or two be even more precise, renders the computer functionally equivalent to a brick.
I agree on your points regarding Italy and the same applies for Greece, Spain, etc.

But the problem is that unless this happens on European level, providing loans to economies that for whatever reason have not yet recovered from the crisis of 2010 is only going to make things worse for them. Putting more austerity on these countries provides the perfect ground for movements in favor of Italexit and Grexit. If that happens won't it affect the Eurozone as a whole and, by extensions, the economies of the surplas countries?

In other words, can we afford not to deal with it at a European level?
Why do human beings keep getting diseases from bats?
Note that you can avoid a second pass by doing 'backpatching' - essentially assuming whatever code you encountered was correct, emitting the relevant bytecode/machinecode with enough reserved space for an address (e.g. for a 'jump to address' instruction, emit zeroes for the address), keep a list of 'unknown stuff' and then resolve them once compilation is finished.

Many years ago i wrote a Java-like scripting language (classes, GC, etc) with that approach. Funny enough, at the time it didn't occur me that i could have separate bytecode streams for methods, etc, so the VM was almost like a custom CPU (the only non-CPU-like feature was an instruction to allocate memory) and since it generated bytecode while it was parsing the source code itself (even skipped any separate tokenization, i parsed the character streams directly) while it also allowed code to be placed outside of functions or classes (it was a scripting language after all), every time a class or function was encountered in source code, it'd emit code to jump over it - so the final bytecode would start by a series of jumps over the functions and classes before arriving to the first actual instruction :-P.
If Google or Apple wanted to track the movements and activities of everyone using an Android phone or iPhone, they would just do it. They wouldn’t need to publish an API and wouldn’t need to tell you about it. They could just do it and we might never know.

So this has nothing whatever to do with trust of Google or Apple tracking us, it’s about trusting what data they share and expose via this API for virus contact tracing. That’s it. That’s why the concerns of the linked article, and yours, while possibly valid in a themselves are completely irrelevant to this specific issue of virus contact tracing.
Hrm. This is very interesting. Your post made me think about using a couple of different software packages together. I could use IMAP Grab to pull all the email to disk on the server and then use https://www.duplicati.com/ to push to the cloud storage of my choice. Sigh. Sounds like another project for me. Thanks! Your post was super helpful to get me thinking about how things might work.
> The decentralized web isn't using non-web projects or web abstraction layers. The decentralized web is everyone hosting their own webserver from home. It's easy, everyone has a fast enough connection, and without the motives and requirements of a business it's safe.

This attitude is IMO exactly why the decentralized web movement outside of the blockchain/crypto space has not come further than it has in the last two decades. I run my own website out of a VPS and even that is nontrivial: occasional outages due to SSL certificates expiring, the VPS getting shut down because my credit card expires so the auto-payments stop working, troubles with the server software itself, etc etc. Meanwhile, if you just dump stuff onto one of these decentralized layers or even just a blockchain, you publish once, it's easy and it's there forever.

I truly believe that for "fully decentralized" to be viable, it must mean "serverless" (as in no servers, meaning no single computers whose IP addresses or DNS names or equivalents are explicitly referenced in a line of client-side code, not meaning that AWS lambda stuff). That does mean you're making significant efficiency tradeoffs for the foreseeable future; for some types of applications it's worth it and for others it's not.
First tech you need is a vaccine.
13.4 failed on my phone and I had to do a manual clean restore via my Mac. Then 13.4.1 did the same thing and this time I had to do a DFU restore to get it functioning again. Not fun when taking it in to get it fixed is not an option.

I'm still getting freezes on my brand new 2019 MBP due to the still unfixed GPU switching bug and I don't dare install any macOS updates now.

Apple has had a lot of software quality issues in recent years but this is a new low.
We needed to solve a similar problem - version control & synchronize .json files from different machines (annotations for ML models).

Writing a custom git merge driver was quite painless - a cmdline script (written in Python), which has task-specific logic on how to merge data from these .json files. Load these files, parse them, decide how to combine, detect unresolvable conflicts, etc.

It seems one may need custom logic to merge structured data, there is not a single best solution. This could make creation of a generic tool harder.

git is not a bad base technology for this. I'm not sure what other things are we missing (e.g. better diffs for structured data?), because .json is still text; it is just merges which are unreliable if you treat .json as text. There are also caveats - e.g. you can't install a custom merge driver on github, so "merge" button becomes dangerous. But overall for .json this approach works fine.