skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These two quotes refer to different things. The first refers to PRISM, which gives the US a privileged position as it involves companies bound by US law, however, all participating companies denied it involved direct access to their data. See the quotes in the wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#I...

From the slides; it appears it works by the agencies (via the FBI DITU) sending the cooperating company a selector (e.g. email address), and then those companies sending back the actual material (e.g. emails);

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...

From transparency reports it is clear that the receiving company can see how many selectors are coming in and how much data is being "exfiltrated" under this scheme (and it is roughly 10,000 targets).

---

The second quote refers to a program of passive surveillance which - while probably the most underhand thing revealed by Snowden - did not rely on any privileged position of the US government, and could have been pulled off by an adversarial nation as well. It didn't rely on the cooperation of those companies, and in fact they were outraged by it and implemented encryption in an attempt to thwart it.
Which means 45 pixels under each lenslet.
The sad fact is that people choose flavorful news over verifiable facts.
What do you use guys to build such an awesome cross platform app? it is native, right?
> I’m not sure how you expect to have a productive conversation when, in this and parallel comments, you’ve made several insinuations that I’m a conscienceless lizard person.

Your reaction that perhaps corporations shouldn't apologize when they do something wrong if it have any selfish benefit, does lack conscience and is a wholly inappropriate reaction to this situation. Discussing the self-centered strategic merits of apologizing from the perspective of a sociopath isn't a productive conversation.

However, I'm not one to write people off based on one interaction. Just because you've reacted without conscience in one situation doesn't mean you would do so in all situations.

> But to be clear: Triplebyte’s specific situation is a an ethical issue only in respect to the fact that they planned to enable by default for existing users. That’s a bad move. They’ve stopped the bad move.

There are more ethical issues than that--they haven't stopped them all.

> I’m more interested in the overall pattern of “company does thing, people disagree with thing, people express outrage to company, company issues statement”. Which in many cases has zero ethical components.

Which is irrelevant in this case, because this case does have multiple ethical components.

And, more to the point, this is still an ethical question. Apologies are never about benefiting the person apologizing. Apologies are inherently an ethical action--if you claim that the company didn't do anything wrong, then they shouldn't apologize. Not because it doesn't benefit them, but because lying about being sorry isn't ethical.

"Should a company lie and pretend to be sorry when they haven't done anything wrong?" is still an ethical question, and you're looking at it from the perspective of selfish gain is still an inappropriate way to look at it.
Cue 10 ICOs for AuthenticityCoin type things, most of which just exit scam and the rest of which don't actually work.

The real security hole for forgery is at the point of injection. Tracking a forgery along with a block chain doesn't prove it's not a forgery.

One thought is a camera sensor that cryptographically signs (watermarks) photos or video frames on the sensor before they are touched by anything else. It's not perfect since a highly sophisticated adversary could get the secret key out of the chip, but it could definitely make it quite a bit harder to fake photos. Nothing is ever perfectly secure. All security amounts to increasing the work function for violating a control to some decent margin above the payoff you get from breaking the control.

I could see certified watermarking camera sensors being used by journalists, politicians, governments, police, etc.
> AI that read every Facebook post

I doubt FB would let you do that. It's "their" content.
If you make it extreme, then its easier to see the folly / error -

500/1500 students + 1/3 students = ?
I understand that the author(s) like to surf, but what does that have to do with this library?
There are more than 1.5 billion users on Facebook. If they are not worried, and want to be misused, why the hell are others so hell bent on bringing down Facebook lol.

If the users really cared, we wouldn't be having this talk.

Also this is the media wanting to bring down the enemy.
I did the same thing with flossing! Almost at one year streak now. Glad you've found something that works for you too. :)
Doing a Google search 'site:reuters.com "far right"' I couldn't find any hit where the "far-right" would be inappropriate. Could you give an example where Reuters is left-leaning in your opinion.
eqdw:
>Fox news is a laughably pathetic excuse for news.
>But, so are the rest of the major corporate news outlets. In the US, they're all garbage, and Fox isn't any worse than the others.

I agree that all the major corporate news outlets are pretty bad. But Fox News is _significantly_ worse. They push patently false narratives on purpose. Up until March, Sean Hannity was calling the Coronavirus a "leftist hoax". He never apologized or corrected himself and even had the audacity to further report "we've always reported accurately on the Coronavirus". Most of their shows push some form of the "deep state" conspiracy theory. And now they're helping the president push this "Obama-Gate" hoax.

Everything they do is designed to help the GOP and the president.

Jon Stewart once put it very well when he said (paraphrasing) - "other news orgs are sensationalist and maybe a little bit lazy, but none are as activist as Fox News".
Isn't facebook (and reddit, and twitter) showing you posts by people companies etc. that you decided to follow? (And some ads)?

I am pretty sure things can be worse than right now, pretending like we are in some kind of hell state at the bottom of some well where it can't possibly be worse, seems unrealistic to me.
Two decades of experience suggests that "strengthening human security by training" ain't happening, no matter how hard/smart you try. The technical controls have to be beefed up to a point where that human-weak-link is eliminated.

These tests are nothing but CISOs'(and Red Teams, and the whole industry around it) justifying their existence, and potentially doing a song-and-dance about it at the quarterly all-hands. Nothing more, nothing less. We can come back to this thread in another year/two years/five years/decade, and I can bet dollars-to-doughnuts, the industry will still be training humans, and claiming these pointless statistics about phishing. ;-)

On this note, see #6 "Educating Users", in Marcus Ranum's excellent article "The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security": https://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/...
I agree with this, except that the reason they receive so much criticism is because of their monopoly status.

If you're trying to make money from digital video, getting banned or even demonetized from YouTube is a death sentence on your vlogger career.

So sure, I don't blame YouTube. They're likely good folks doing their best to solve hard problems. At the same time, that this is such an impossible problem to deal with is probably a good reason to make sure Google doesn't have too much monopoly power over advertising (in this case video ads).

In short, the stakes are too high! They'd be lessened with more alternatives.
I wasn't aware press releases could include a script for a presenter. Is this really common? What is the industry name for these packages?
It has a lot of mechanisms but they are usually way more complex with more code. For example when I do data binding in WPF I could write a five line macro that fires change notification events as needed. There are other approaches but they are way more complicated.
This is good advice. However, I've seen this advice before and the example is usually something where it's easy to imagine what an incremental step is. The advice is when you want to do n just do < n. This is great for some things but I find it doesn't work for everything. So I'd like to just expand on this for tasks where doing < n doesn't really make sense.

For example, if you're trying to solve a difficult bug it can be overwhelming and you feel like you're not making progress and you procrastinate because you don't have the time to dive in for five hours and you feel like spending thirty minutes isn't enough to accomplish anything.

My advice, if you're struggling with tasks like these is to make excessive notes. Save the link to the Stack Overflow question you looked at. Write down file names and line numbers with your thoughts. Copy bits of relevant documentation right into your notes. The basic idea is that if you can ramp up from your notes in less time than it took you to make them then you have made progress.
I was curious, how does Surfboard compare to Librosa?

It looks like Surfboard is a wrapper combining feature extraction methods from Librosa and other libraries, plus some of its own implementations. Is that correct?

https://github.com/novoic/surfboard/blob/master/COMPONENTS.m...
Yes, that is. Want to drop me email (jgc @ cloudflare . com) with details?
One significant difference is the sharp decline in value per watch/listen. Your favorite songs in your music library probably have hundreds of listens; how many times have you seen your favorite movie?

No one signs up for Spotify to binge listen for a month and then unsubscribe. In video, that's not uncommon. I heard of people who would wait for Game of Thrones to end the season, then buy a month of HBOGo and watch the whole thing, then unsubscribe. Likewise for movies; if you're okay not being up to date with the latest movies you could just buy a subscription for a month once or twice a year, watch the things you've missed and then unsubscribe.

I think that's a big part of the reason movies don't go in that direction. Most of what you're paying for in a movie is novelty: a novel plot, novel characters, novel setting, etc. Music is effectively the opposite; you find something you like, and you listen to it all the time. Their model works perfectly for a "pay per view" system.

As for the fragmentation, I suspect the amount of money that the rights owner gets to keep is higher on their own system. I.e. Netflix gets a flat $X/month/user, which they have to split among all their publishers. If you're a large enough publisher the math on what Netflix will pay you versus the number of subscribers you can get yourself probably works out.

The only better, yet still tenable, model I can think of would be for Netflix to go to a model similar to cable. I.e. you pay $10 to get access to Netflix's library. If you want to access Disney content on Netflix, you pay $8 for a Disney upgrade. If you also want WB, you pay $6 for a WB upgrade (in addition to the Disney one).

It would likely be cheaper than paying for Netflix and a separate Disney+ (I have to believe the marginal cost for distributing a movie is lower if we centralized on Netflix than it is for them both to have their own CDNs, etc). Publishers still get paid per-user, so they don't have to worry how big their piece of the Netflix pie is. Users get a single interface to stream all of their favorite stuff.

Piracy is always going to be more prevalent for movies for two primary reasons:

1) Movies are ephemeral for most people. You watch it, and you move on. You don't need something like Spotify to manage a massive library of content, you can download stuff and delete it. Keeping it involves a lot of storage

2) Music has a much larger convenience factor. I'm fairly often doing something else (driving, working, exercising) and think "dang, I want to listen to this thing I've never listened to before". Movies are typically something I plan more. I would like to see a particular movie, but not right this second. I can wait a few hours or days for it to download, no biggie. Discovery is the bigger issue with movies, and that's already provided by third party sites like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB.
Absolutely. It's a common and very old belief that GIMP's worst enemy isn't just Photoshop, it's pirated Photoshop. The same was being said about desktop GNU/Linux and Pirated Windows XP.
How do you block unwanted DNS requests outside of the Pi-Hole’s radius (e.g. Home Network)? If I’m on mobile, NextDNS let’s you disable on user specified WiFi networks and then re-enables when you leave range.

NextDNS can also be used as a fallback if your Pi goes down for whatever reason too. Might as well have options in this space.
Reminded me of [750 words](https://750words.com/). I have some brief experience on writing 750 words everyday for a couple of weeks, then gave up (just like my other blogging attempts, unfortunately). It seems overall beneficial, but hard to keep on doing.
I think this is good advice under one assumption: your intent is to create a practical language that other people will adopt for real products.

Reasons you might make a language that isn't bound by the above questions:

- For learning

- For fun

- To explore a concept

- For sheer novelty

- To make a point
Strongly relate. I gave up TV news a long time ago and became an NPR fan for a while, but that grew old after a few years. BBC World Service radio was my last refuge before all of my news consumption became print/reading. I'd still go back to the BBC, but their broadcast schedule doesn't mesh well with US time zones.
The problem with this is that NN are in general, overconfident in their predictions, even when they are wrong. This is a well known problem in the AI/ML literature. Using ensembles of overconfident predictors is not the same as getting an unbiased estimate of the uncertainty.
> I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect.

I think everyone has a natural human need to feel that they have agency in their community. The need to feel that they participate in the culture that surrounds them and that they can have some affect on the groups that they are members in. The alternative is being a powerless pawn subject to the whims of the herd.

In the US, I think most people lost this feeling with the rise of suburbia, broadcast television, and consumer culture. There are almost no public spheres in the US, no real commons where people come together and participate. The only groups many people are "part" of are really just shows and products that they consume.

Social media tapped into that void. It gave them a place to not just hear but to speak. Or, at least, it gave them the illusion of it. But, really, since everyone wants to feel they have more agency, everyone is trying to change everyone else but no one wants to be changed. And all of this is mostly decoupled from any real mechanism for actual societal change, so it's become just angry shouting into the void.
They're not the answer as long as they don't have loads of people. The attraction of FB and the like is that almost everyone has a FB account, just like almost every public figure has a twitter account. The downside of things like Mastodon is how do you know what server you want to connect to? For a non-technical user it doesn't offer any more obvious utility than a FB group.
It seems like a weird time to post this article to HN. Aren't we all living through an extremely good example of why paying attention to the news pays off? Generally speaking, people I know who read the news prepared for SARS-CoV-2 by mid-February, and those who were disconnected from the news were caught off guard a month later when everything shut down.

One thing I will happily grant is that _watching_ the news is a terrible idea. TV twists everything into being frivolous entertainment, regardless of the topic. Newspapers aren't much better. Too short a time horizon, too much blow-by-blow, meaning no time for context and low signal to noise.

I find that weekly and monthly magazines strike a better balance. Authors have time to write up background and provide context, and little blips and false starts get smoothed over by the passage of time.
Because they consciously and purposely got themselves into it. They played with fire and got burnt. It's not like they woke up in some zombie state and started drinking and doing drugs. Many people abstain from drinking, gambling, etc. precisely because we know the outcomes, and it works.
Any page with actual details? This just says "download brave", which I don't want to do.
> Sure this could work, for some. But nothing about

Yeah its a blog post not a doctors orders. Someone shared some positivity, on their personal blog, with a clearly playful title.

If it helps "some" people then its a success. Everything doesn't have to work for everyone.

Lighten up
I'm not sure.

Is this talking about TV news? If so, I might agree. TV oversimplifies and goes for the sensational and emotional. Plus, they have hours and hours to fill even if there's no content. These days TV news is almost completely a time waster.

But other kinds of news? Disagreed. Especially world and national news. Those are the most interesting. If you keep yourself focused on community news -- which are both relevant and at the same time the most inane -- you stay parochial, which is ok if you don't mind it, but I do. I find the world and world news interesting and relevant. My immediate community is not that interesting.

Also, the news is not only about taking action (though there is that, too). I can't possibly take action about a nuclear disaster in Japan or a famine in Africa, but I want to know about them. I want to know about world's events as they happen, not only in a documentary years later.

This guy Joseph Well runs some kind of writing course, right? Because I'm unimpressed with his essays...
I use around 40 KB of JavaScript (transferred size). It’s self hosted. I don’t load JavaScript from other domains, and I have a very strict Content Security Policy.

My website’s performance and security should therefore be pretty good. I don’t think it’s a problem that I use client-side rendering, but I’m willing to change my mind if I’m presented with a good argument.
There are many similar cases where the outrage was wrong, the facts of the case weren't as originally reported, and the resulting outrage couldn't be rolled back or productively channeled. My heart breaks at the idea of a guy being murdered with no consequences, but that can't mean that we embrace anything and everything which delivers those consequences.
I used to do the same thing. I'm impatient and I want to see results asap, which makes it really hard to slow down and take it one thing at a time.

The thing I've learned lately is that with habits, going faster in the short term slows you WAY down in the long run. Counterintuitive, but 100% true.
It's only ever resolved favorably if you have enough clout.

I understand there simply not being enough manpower on Earth to manually review so many cases, but the balance seems to be so heavily skewed towards automation (which still does a very piss poor job at it) that just feels like there's no human element vetting the final decision at all, and that's the approach which so many people have gripes about, rightfully so until Google strikes that balance.
Yes, 1/3x + 1/3x = 2/6(x + x).

Units are absolutely necessary, and 'fractions' don't make sense without them.

'1/3' without units is not a 'fraction' but instead is 0.3333, a number on the number line, which is why it looks so wrong to see 1/3 + 1/3 = 2/6.
Thank you, that’s good to know.
Completely agree. Sacrificing engagement with the social structures and historical progression that we as a species depend on is not an option that can deliver a healthy society.

No, “the news”, as in the propaganda emanating from the corporate hegemony machine, does not count. But, checking out entirely is nonetheless the worst thing one can do.
It was cheaper to make the iPhone with a touch screen, than it would have been to make it with a slide out keyboard. While the iPhone has a big market share in the US and a few other high income countries, touchscreen phones have taken over in almost all markets, even inexpensive phones, because they're cheaper to make, if you've already got a large enough screen and a fast enough processor in the phone for other reasons. You can still make a cost constrained phone where buttons is a better choice, but a cost constrained android isn't that much more expensive in absolute dollars, and provides so much more functionality so it only makes sense for the most cost constrained buyers, or those who eschew a smartphone for other reasons.
They have a LOT of writing classes. Neil Gaiman, David Mamet, Judy Blume, Joyce Carol Oates, Billy Collins, Margaret Atwood... Yes they have Dan Brown, but if you want to study writing there are some fantastic ones (Gaiman, Mamet, JCO, Billy Collins, Balldacci were all fantastic)
> When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”?

> I’ll answer for you: probably never.

The article is dated "July 29" so I'll assume 2019.

We have a pretty huge counterexample right now: the pandemic has led to a lot of critical information needing to be conveyed to everyone very rapidly. For example, people need to be aware that they cannot leave home, or that they should wear masks when doing so, etc.

Often, the government doesn't have a reliable way to reach the entire population quickly. For example, in the UK, the government sent a letter to every household outlining coronavirus guidance. This letter takes a few days to reach everyone.

The news can be leveraged by the government to relay important messages to the population without any effort.
It's weird that this has anything to do with the ebook. My e-reader gives those options (and many more) for plain epubs.
I want somebody to figure out a way to "backprop" / train neuromorphic nanowire circuits[0] and interface one with this retina to create a complete bionic visual system.

The main limitation of the retina appears to be interfacing the nanowires to a processor, and doing most of your processing in trained nanowires instead of digital circuitry maybe solves that.

You could make a sensor with all the benefits of human vision and similarly minuscule power consumption.

[0]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191226084403.h...
Why on earth does the headline on NYTimes say "only school left" as if there are no other online schools running.
>> quite a few misleading, if not actually false, statements. See the paragraph mentioning Malcom X for an example.

How so?
There’s no email address in your profile
Keeping up with the Joneses. I think it’s good to have opinions on the new hot thing.
I was probably one of the last users of their original directory. It was my browser homepage until the day they removed it.

I eventually stopped using it because it didn't keep up. These days, search is for many purposes completely useless. If I want to find someone to do work on my house, the last place I'll go is Google. It's truly amazing just how worthless the results are. You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business. I imagine it's a fraud-ridden garbage dump if you actually try to use Google to find businesses to do work for you.

On the topic of blogs - not completely useless, but overrun with shallow, uninformative trash posts by SEO experts. I think Google is more vulnerable now than at any time in the past 20 years.