skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In this work the authors evaluate the popular 3rd-party anti-bot services. They observe that the state-of-the-art in browser fingerprinting is commonly used to identify bots and automated environments. They challenge the anti-bot services with various bots and test "Content Scraping" and "Account Attacks".

On the positive side, the majority of the services can defend against basic bots (Python-based, PhantomJS). At the same time, if attackers are willing to mix-and-match tools and mitigation techniques, the can go as far as bypassing the protection of 82% of the protected websites.

Link to the paper: https://securitee.org/files/webrunner_dimva2020.pdf
While I generally agree that we ought to have an inheritance tax, I want to push back on this because I think it's a poor argument in favor of inheritance taxes.

The question is never about what the children think they deserve, it's entirely about what we as human beings work for. Most parents don't care about their own consumption, and instead work entirely for the well-being of their children. It doesn't matter what the children think. The argument is that it matters what the owner of that wealth thinks should happen to their own wealth, and that nuclear family values are deeply entrenched in society.

There are a number of arguments that you can make that the cost of inter-generational wealth and the benefits of taxing it far outweigh the familial considerations of wealth transfer (especially after a high enough dollar amount). But THOSE are the arguments that we need to be making.
So just like any other product, if you choose not to use it, you don’t get to take advantage of it.
They were too busy grinding leetcode and focusing on "playing the game" and not growing or hiring innovators. The Max Howell incident is a perfect example. Creates legitimately useful software that everyone loves, can't invert a binary tree (because we do this all day right? this question is highly relevant to the job /s) so you can't work here.

Maybe at one point edit distance questions were useful in identifying the 2% of CS grads that actually paid attention in class, but now it just produces code bots.

Google gamified the interview, and in the process, became beholden and captured by its own madness.
$23MM+ is the middle, though. Upper middle, but still middle.

You're not really a power player in national politics until you are a billionaire (i.e. the top 1%), and that's where the real power inequality lies. For example, Sheldon Adelson recently pledged to drop $100MM into Trump's 2020 campaign, and like the article mentions, he "used a different strategy involving trusts to avoid $2.8 billion in estate and gift taxes between 2010 and 2013".
Carrier capacity cuts send trans-Pacific rates into orbit
Google is by far the most ethical of anyone with meaningful tech power over my life, maybe second to Signal. It is mind blowing how muck flak they take when almost every other company happily operates in China with prod DB access.
I am extremely doubtful.
I am. Morale is good, took a minor hiccup recently but has pretty much recovered by now. When I tell everyday folk that I work for Facebook, the reaction is usually, "wow, cool!" and if they're tech minded, they might ask a few questions about the tech stack we use.

Most people at Facebook believe that FB is good for the world, Zuck is a good leader, and that we are working to address dubious ethical decisions made in the past. Sure, FB itself may be a bubble, but HN is even more of a bubble :)
I work more time nowadays, to the tune for 70 billable hours per week (and generate more tax revenue to my country as I both get more revenue and my tax bracket increases) so I can give a better life for my kid, and if something happens, he will face no difficulties.

If I knew he would not get it, or would get less than half of my savings/everything else, I would not work a single hour above what we need currently to live as we do, taking decreasing tax revenue for my country. Maybe I am biased as I also am set to receive some money when my parents die, but my grandfather immigrated, worked his ass off, built savings, returned here, started a business, built properties, my father inherited it, and works hard to keep them well so I inherit them, which I will do the same for my kid. What would be the point of my grandfather sacrificing a lot of his life away from his home if not to build a better future for his future generations?
Accessibility still matters, or should still matter even if you’re a radio station, but probably especially if you’re a news radio station.
Mastercard plans to buy financial data provider Finicity for $825M
> There is no point in building wealth or a family business other than to ensure your family will benefit from it when you're gone.

Sure there is. They'd still get to keep the majority of it.
Disease link: diabetes comes with coronavirus, illness worse in diabetics
Those "happy" users are just ignorant users who don't know what to do with their money. Their happiness wouldn't be any lesser if Apple would provide ways to fix their laptops.

You should watch Louis Rossmann who is doing repairs, how purposefully Apple makes any repairs hard.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uYUB8DZH2M&t=2649s
I'm an African. I've lived through fantastically corrupt, despotic, authoritarian rule riddled with nepotism and kleptocracy. I find GOP politics to be disturbingly familiar. And it reeks of regulatory and state capture.
Google had (or still has) perverse incentives.

No incentive to do the boring work of maintaining and improving existing products.

Lots of incentive to create new things -- even if they overlap functionality of existing things -- which then must be phased out to make room for the awkward new things. Even if everyone preferred the old things.
You can still install Linux, FreeBSD and FreeDOS on an old PC.
Perhaps, in some low-cost-of-living areas.
Do you honestly think all police are like Al Qaeda? Have you ever known anyone in law enforcement on a personal level? I find similar reactions from people who have never known a gay person before.
Also the gall to make up Samoans to frame as cover for their sloppy operations.
I made another comment here about owning one of these.

Yeah, there is a really compelling idea in single use tech/computers, especially for creative use. AlphaSmart really is distraction free to an extreme and instant on, writing where you left off in like three seconds is amazing.

Problem though is that this is a cottage industry at best and any new devices will be priced in the same range as a POS laptop.. so why buy it? $600 for a new Justwrite? That’s a little dear.
The only reason you think long term is for your children and not their wider community or society?
For sure but the virus isn't actually "doing" the damage. The presence of it starts an immune cascade that leads to the damage. So the trigger for T1 diabetes could still be a virus, not because of symptoms but as a result of an immune cascade. Framed that way, a lot of unexplained illness could indeed be friendly fire.
The purpose of taxes is to fund the budget. This feels like back door social engineering.
There was some point in the past year I read a comment here about the problem with Google is that when people wants to get promoted at Google to a senior or Staff (PE?) position they need to invent those big changes or projects. It results in adding bloat into existing software or abandon one.
I am having that feeling at this point in my career. Without a moonshot project I wouldn’t expect to get pass an assessment committee. It’s sad.

One of my colleagues working for Netflix tells me that they don’t have any fancy titles except senior SDE there. They pay you more if you’re that worthy, though. I can’t stop wondering what if tech companies follow this practice. Then, people would just focus on making stuff better instead of chasing the carrots waved in front of them.
How does this apply to all the chat apps? Google chat was great, wouldn't redoing the tech and making apps for all platforms have captured more territory than changing every couple years? When you have network effect, it's just crazy to try to rebuild that network every couple years if the point is to grow.
It's not likely to be a pure "performance" thing. The 6S, according to wikipedia [1], is the oldest phone containing an A9 chip, which has an image processing unit, a coprocessor that can handle Siri voice commands, and an NVMe storage controller. It is also the minimum requirement for ARKit.

I doubt very much that Apple is being arbitrary in their support cutoff for phones. If it's capable of the features they build into the OS, it gets support. If I had to make a guess, the next cutoff point (iOS 15?) is going to be a chip having the Bionic Neural Engine, which would make the iPhone 8 the oldest supported phone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9
Tired of links to paid content, pay walls, Admiral anti-ad blocks.
You make the link unclickable when you format it as code.
The internet runs on ads and unless every site becomes membership driven ads are a natural revenue stream. And I personally don't see memberships becoming a preferred method of subsidizing much of the internet for most people.

So ads it is, and ads it will likely be.

With that said, Google doesn't have to a bad actor to survive with regards to advertisements, as it is relatively safe revenue stream for the foreseeable future.
> Win your arguments on merit, not by silencing the other side.

In the wild world of unmoderated social media, "merit" at scale reduces to "the most salacious information that feeds what the audience wants to believe, regardless of whether it is grounded in evidence". It's just a propaganda rally, ultimately underpinnned by the old ominous maxim "might is right", with the target being a group who is not present in the conversation.

People don't have as innate a desire for intellectual rigor in deconstructing untruths as you or I would like. Even you and I don't always have that rigor, even though we probably both strive for it. If anything, many people want to be lied to if the lie dovetails with their feelings and agendas. Is it wrong to want to be lied to? I don't know - it's hard to judge another person's deep desires.

It's a real problem from the perspective of the social fabric and the shared narratives that hold it together, although the alternative - the government regulating non-violent speech - is arguably even more worrisome.
I don't understand why you think the government should double dip into other peoples hard earned money. If I work hard it's for my kids and family, period.
One of the central tenets of Apple's marketing since forever is that price != value, and this is the manifestation of that idea. You might be paying more for an iOS device, but unlike Android ones, it maintains its value for years on.
Here's a non-paywalled version:

https://liber.post-gazette.com/news/nation/2020/06/15/eBay-e...

Just insane.
Non-facebook link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23629477
Apple Safari to Block Google Analytics from Collecting Data
Apple’s Safari browser will reportedly block Google Analytics from tracking users and collecting data about their web browsing activity.
> there is now a compelling reason to perform the impossible: spend all that damn money before the tax man gets it.

Isn't that a recipe for hyperinflation?
Show HN: App for Swift Developers
App visualizes your Swift source code. Turns your source code and build artifacts into relationship graphs.
I've still been using an iPhone 8 Plus as a daily driver since launch. Right after updates, or after not being used for a bit, there's some indexing that slows down the phone a little, but that recovers pretty quickly with some additional use.

I'm even running the iOS 14 Developer beta on my 8 Plus right now and it still runs like a dream.
can you tell a bit more how deta compares to similar (?) services like firebase, netlify, vercel?

(don’t worry if there isn’t a great “usp” answer, just interested in learning more)

I’m personally quite excited about getting the journey from idea to something to tinker (and shareable) back down to how I remember it from a few years ago where I just live-edited files on a server. I tend to over-analyze all the various tech stack and deployment aspects too early :(

For hackathons I’m currently also using repl.it and glitch to get immediate results.

edit: kudos to getting this shipped/launching, can relate to how difficult it is to get an initial version out!
I'm still upset they shuttered inbox and reader!
That is the single reason I switched to an iPhone. I don't want to pay US$800 for a phone that will stop being supported after 2, 3 years.
Things I wish I'd known sooner
I’m opposed to Apple charging to update phones, especially if they continue to try to push users to update automatically when you plug in the device at night. It also might be in Apple’s best interest to have the majority of users on the same current OS version, which a paywall might interfere with
> First, I think the primary trap is that developers think they can judge what code is hygienic.

If software engineering is engineering, they can. It may be a skill that is weaker and stronger between different engineers varying particularly by relevant experience, and it may require complex and context (including present development team) sensitive evaluations, but it is a real skill that exists.

> This is the evil twin of the notion that developers can judge what part of a system is slow without profiling.

Well, it's not, because there is no analog to the “without profiling” part. It's true that there is an analogous tendency of prejudging problem code, but certainly, at a minimum, hygiene issues can be discovered by experience of problems of development/maintenance stemming from, e.g., code duplication for shared functionality instead of use of shared abstractions.

> The secondary trap is that developers think they can amortize up-front development costs over a long period of time.

Note that when I said long term I don't necessarily mean a “long period of time” but “some period longer than the minimum development time of the present item”...

> Projects get the axe if they do not deliver.

Yes, they do, but plenty of real projects aren’t, especially at initiation, delivering actual value every iteration, just progressively refined demonstrations (this is particularly common on replacements that, for whatever reasons, can't go the strangler/ship of Theseus appproach, and on those projects the team often has an idea where things need to be for real delivery. It's quite possible for code that makes subsequent tasks more costly even though it saves time this iteration to delay real delivery.

> Everyone thinks they are the reasonable person with discerning taste who only refactors code as necessary to optimize total cost.

No, in my experience that's not even approximately true. Most developers I've encountered think that, in their current team environment, they individually have a natural tendency either to excessively favor direct solutions that produce ugly code with outsized downstream cost or to go a few steps too far with overengineering abstraction (and most of them also recognize that that that overall tendency is only on average, and that they also miss on the other side sometimes.)

My point is that when you get beyond the simplistic rejection of things which have no relevance to the task at hand (which isn’t a scenario that occurs all that much), evaluating what is the right balance is nontrivial.
Match are usually much more complex than a single ternary condition. Allow to inline them and you will see monsters in the wild.

But I do wish they would have not set aside generalized unpacking.
I believe it's their corporate culture. Google just hires problem solvers, good engineers. It's a sort of dual of Apple, that prioritizes design and marketing.

The result is you get things that Just work (and nothing else). While Apple gets you things that Just works.

I don't see real vision in their products those days.
None of them have real vision (Apple is too design centric and afraid to try new things, Google lacks creativity).
Wow I didn't know they were still around. My first PC was a VTech XT clone!
Studies always say we need more investigation and always have imperfections that could be improved upon.

It's about 1000000x easier to imagine a possible problem than to devise and carry out a series of experiments (or even simply analyze results) that genuinely assess whether the possible problem is, in fact, a problem.

You are doing the former. Scientific consensus reflects the latter.
Did you not make it to the bottom, which includes a very specific and useful definition of the services they offer?
I wonder if this obsessive focus on what the customer wants from the get go causes startups to optimize to the local minima, as opposed to trying to go deep in an area and coming up with a radically new idea/technology that can then find unexpected uses. Reminds me of the quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Not necessarily a bad thing, but it does seem to me there are other ways to start a company.
How does government pork benefit me? Other than burying me in taxes and my children in debt?
> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).

This is totally unnecessary. Striking is a serious matter and not just getting company paid days off for some lazy egineers.
Are you suggesting that capital gains taxes on stock sales are also wrong because the stock was purchased with post-tax dollars?
Ah fair enough! Thanks for pointing that out.
My venture in hacking a fake vintage radio
You are currently sending the shadiest verification email I ever encountered.
A language that I am working on has those things "built-in" (it still generates compilable C++ in the backend). I did recently add pattern matching (and not just on variants) where the above would be equivalent to:

$v:|[:int, :bool, :double] = 5;

$vi: = v.[:int];
$holds_int: = v.?[:int];

switch v {
.[:int]$i { /std cout << "got int:" << i };
.[:bool] { /std cout << "got bool" };
.[:double]$d { /std cout << "got double: " << d };
};

If a type repeats in the same variant, you would match by index to tell them apart:

$v:|[:int, :int]<(.[0] = 5);

switch v {
.[0]$i0 { /std cout << "got first int:" << i0 };
.[1]$i1 { /std cout << "got second int: " << i1 };
};

(I have some ideas to allow named labels instead of numerical indices but that is not yet implemented)

It is, in spirit, an implementation of the inspect proposal [1], but with a (subjectively) much simpler and more powerful syntax (the grammar of the entire language is fully LALR(1) without ambiguities).

[1] http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2019/p137...
I actually don’t look at the screen when I’m typing on mine. I’m like zoning out when I use it.

I write my first drafts on my MacBook in a similar way where I turn the screen off and type away.
My near-new iPhone 7 is snappy with latest iOS.

Check battery health?
While the NYT has always had its share of bias claims, since Trump's election it appears that even the facade of balanced reporting is taking a back seat to their editorial agenda.

You have editorialized headlines[1] that incorporate common liberal phrases to invoke outrage. Other "How to Raise an Anti-Racist Kid"

Any story that mentions Trump will have a negative headline, even mundane stories about disaster declarations and normal government business.

The line between editorial and news content has grown increasingly blurry: scrolling through their app you'll need a second look to determine whether a storing is news or opinion - they're mixed together, often without delineation. For example in the app today you'll find an opinion piece calling for slavery reparations sandwiched between an analysis on Trump's reelection campaign and a story about a problem police officer.

As a long-time subscriber (and no fan of Trump), it's both frustrating and worrying to see the "paper of record" of my country begin to parrot leftist talking points in their daily reporting.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/13/health/trump-health-care-...
Tangential question: how come the Bloomberg website recognises me in incognito mode (I have reached the limit on free articles) I how can I overcome it?
Can you give real numbers? How much are you currently expecting your kids to receive post-tax after your death under existing regulations? How much would it be under the proposals?
And you aren't taxed that amount when you sell it, you're only taxed the profits.
This is creating a false narrative that the only way to economic mobility is through theft upon generational transfer. It conveys a message of helplessness rather than rewarding usefulness and it's a vicious cycle.

Economic mobility should be solely predicated on the expression of competence/ability in the pursuit of providing value to others in your society. It's not even that hard[1]. Get an education and a job, avoid the big economic sinks.

> This means that 40 percent of why some Americans are extraordinarily well off has nothing to do with smarts, hard work, frugality, lucky gambles or entrepreneurial ingenuity. It is simply because they were born to rich parents.

We should not fear the money landing in undeserving hands, it will rapidly be drained away if that is the case. Many(most?) very wealthy families employ wealth managers that ensure that money is profitably engaged with the society anyways, so in reality the money is not really in the heir's hands anyways, but is tied up in companies that are serving the country and employing others.

[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-t...
Push can cause thundering herds while TTL expiration should occur uniformly over time.
Yes, those industries are exploitative and we've even had presidential aspirants take aim at those exploitative practices. But the OP seems to think that only the gaming industry gets special attention.
mail, docs, drive et al ... they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising

This seems obviously false. Google clearly monetizes gsuite as a paid service, and "everyone uses the same service at home that they do at work" has clear advantages, whether or not there is advertising in your gmail. Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite (or "google apps for domains", as they called it then - horrible).
The main thing is to encourage it to be distributed to a large number of heirs because if 10 people get $1m they will spend far more than 1 person getting $1m and will pay sales tax, property tax and so on with it, also the people they spend it with will do the same and so on. The problem comes when folks pass $10m + pools down through generations.
>It's only these Silicon Valley cults that expect everyone to drink the koolaid about "values" and center your personal identity around your job.

I can't understand why you're being down ranked for what is objectively the truth.

I've a long career inside and outside tech and this is consistent with my experience. Tech companies are uniquely toxic in the sheer volume of koolaid you're expected to digest to merely maintain your job there.

A tech company not filled to the brim with HR crap would be a breath of fresh air at this point.

Maybe many here simply haven't worked outside of tech?
This may be true, but there have been articles in public since 2010s if not longer, that show general contempt for having clean code and code maintenance, like having clean code is what lesser engineers worry about. I’m saying that thinking seeped into universities where smart kids, who generally imitate the smart professionals in their profession first. Google may not be the only company guilty of it, there are places like Uber where backend code is held by so much duct tape , 3m shares rose up as a result.