skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has been going on for a while. It started with using unidentified units at the DC protests. Then the clearing of protestors for the photo op.
Now they're roaming the streets in unmarked rentals in Portland abducting people. This is against the wishes of the Governor and the Mayor.

The DHS secretary visited Portland yesterday, this is what he saw that has prompted him to send in these forces: pictures of graffiti [1].

For that he labeled these are violent extremists and violent anarchists. And he has labeled these unidentified units abducting people as our valiant men and women in uniform and patriots. This is war on terror language used in our country, on our streets.

On Wednesday Trump, with AG Barr next to him named other "blue cities" in addition to Portland: Seattle, Minneapolis, and Chicago.

If this chills you and you don't want to see it progress, call your representatives and ask them to intervene to stop this.

[1] https://twitter.com/DHS_Wolf/status/1284095525122453504
Do cameras actually matter when it's socially acceptable now to wear a mask?
[Me dons tinfoil hat.]

It's a false flag operation. Trump realized that his tweets have become a political liability, so he had this done so that he can claim that someone hacked his account and posted all this weird stuff on it.

[Me takes off tinfoil hat.]

More seriously, what would the point be? Stock price manipulation? Making users think about moving to another platform? Political? International espionage?

[Edit: Since everyone seems to have missed it, the part inside the "tinfoil hat" blocks was not intended to be taken seriously. I expected it to be interpreted as a /s, but apparently it was not.]
birthrates are falling in every part of the world - most countries are well below the replacement rate. The effect is hidden by people living longer. We should hit peak world population within 30 years
How Shopify Built Size.link
To be fair, I do pay for subscriptions for a few YouTubers. Wintergatan in particular is excellent. Of course, many creatives are using Patreon and other external revenue sources and frankly that's wise, given YouTube's track record with unusual copyright strikes and other platform nonsense.

Even if I were to pay for Youtube Red, this application has a feature that I cannot get with the official app: a lack of dependence on the Google Play store and services. Since I run a build of Android that does not include those services, this app is wonderful to bridge the gap, as it performs much better than playing the videos directly in Firefox. That it happens to include a bunch of extra features the official app does not is just a bonus really.
People who hate PHP-- or even worse, hate other people for writing PHP-- generally don't have anything of value to add to the criticisms of PHP. They just dismiss the language entirely, link to 2012-era blog posts about its imperfections, and never bother to see if anything was fixed in PHP 7 (or, as of the end of this year, PHP 8).

This kind of toxic mentality doesn't produce better code, and it sure doesn't produce better coders. It's just free-floating hostility and gatekeeping.

Here's a few parts of PHP that improved in the past 6 years:

* Static type declarations (and return types, and strict typing, ...)

* Composer has become the de facto package manager for the PHP ecosystem

* Better cryptography (bye mcrypt, hello sodium)

* High quality open source libraries (i.e. Guzzle)

And I haven't even reviewed all of the changes coming in 8.0.
Show HN: spent a weekend “hacking” the UI of WhatsApp, then published two addons
I had a need for two missing features in WhatsApp and Messenger, and as I'm used to modifying the sites I use the most (JavaScript injection with TamperMonkey) I eventually went ahead and started the projects.

It took just a few minutes!... for me to realize I had greatly underestimated the difficulty of the tasks.

Those apps, it turns out, don't use regular inputs for the users to type messages; they use a weird combination of divs and spans, probably to avoid security issues.
I took it as a challenge to at least, make sure that it wasn't possible. But the more I pushed, the more fun I had!

Screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/tMf531B.png

These were some of the projects I enjoyed the most, and I was left wondering if being a hacker feels as fun as that.

I made the code open-source, with MIT licenses:

https://github.com/ivocass/quick-emojis

https://github.com/ivocass/whatsapp-quick-reply-button

Demo videos:

https://youtu.be/Ixha7icPXkc

https://youtu.be/seTnOZlyEBs
Wow, times have sure changed. Roughly 10 years ago I wrote a dissector for a layer 7 protocol on top of UDP. It was an incredible amount of work and really hard to do without introducing bugs. Would have loved to have been able to do this in Lua.

It's hard to overstate how great it is to have a dissector for your protocol in Wireshark. It can make troubleshooting obscure opaque issues a breeze.
> Seriously though, even if there was footage of the actual hack occurring, it's just going to be a room with computers and users in front of a screen.

After reading the headline, I expected webcam footage showing the hackers' faces -- or something similar. I don't think m000 actually anticipated true pants-less video :)

That said, this is all really interesting; I'd love to see the data itself. Unfortunately, all this really shows is that Iran conducts state-sponsored cyber-attacks -- which, of course, we already know.
To continue adding:

Books on the history of the Middle East...

A Netflix documentary about the Middle East, offering a free Netflix trial if you want to watch it...
Step 1) Document the system (what currently exists) in more detail than you think you'll need, paying specific focus to the system and module boundaries (if the Interfaces are done well this should be a fairly easy step)

Step 2) Modularise all the things, tuck all those fiddly bits behind the abstractions you pulled out in Step 1

Step 3) Mock and unit test all the things, this is actually crucial because this is where you clarify all the crud that built up due to developer assumptions, you test and check all those Modules and verify the system is doing not only what you think it's doing but what it's supposed to be doing

Step 4) Introduce a good Dependency Injection Framework

Step 5) (This is where you actually fix things) Now you can break up those Modules and refactor their internals - even swapping out entirely freshly written modules thanks to that nice DI framework - with confidence that you won't break the overall system.
Incoming PHP hate train. Just like every other article that even mentions PHP in any form of positivity.
This, incidentally, is why I strongly resist installing apps onto my phone. Because once you let an app run on your phone, you really don't know what it's doing. At least with a browser, it's somewhat sandboxed/limited. I don't have nearly as much confidence that I've correctly twiddled whatever settings I needed to, to limit data sharing for an app, and even if I did, I don't have any confidence the company didn't find some way to get around those settings.
That's an interesting remark you've brought up here.

COVID-19 is very obviously shaping up to be the defining issue of this election cycle. Mexico is very relieved. But as we are all aware - as the election goes, so goes the media.
There is a growing body of evidence of longer term effects in adults. Obviously the picture is still developing because this is a novel coronavirus, but I think there is plenty of reason to be very concerned.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-...
Igniting the atmosphere was merely the most obvious candidate for an unintended consequence. Countering this possibility does not address the underlying problem of what we do not know. My other scenarios are obviously far less likely. Yet, Neanderthals would never have detected radio waves. What are we not detecting? Who understands consciousness? There are limits to our understanding of physical reality.

Those with unquestioning faith in our current understanding of science are no different from those with unquestioning faith in a religion. With the Trinity test, we were playing with matches.
That is really interesting and on its face something that should definitely be done at random...however, its sad to say I wouldn't be at all surprised if such a system of solicitations could easily be used to manipulate the date for political purposes.

In other words if you jurisdiction has a high positive test rate, you may want to bring that % down for optics and the way to do that would be to use contact tracing (tracking tools) to solicit people who have properly been isolating and their exposure would have been minimized.
Yeah, except enough websites poisoned that particular well for this to not be a thing anymore.
A trip down memory lane, bringing back so much just looking at the fonts. It’s amazing how much I associate each company’s historical fonts with their brand.
Rebrand America
> it's harming your own society and planet due to myopic decision making.

Umm, we _are_ talking about a foreign-power-supported, semi-feudal monarchy which keeps most of the population in abject poverty while living like, well, kings and princes themselves. Benefiting society is not really priority #1 for the kingdom.
Reading that, I’m SO glad I left facebook.
Are you sure they didn't receive an NSL over the issue?
You should be able to do that, and it was the first thing I tried when it was removed by default. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me then, and having just checked again, it still doesn't work now (I'm on 68 for now, as the 78 update isn't being pushed to the regular release channel for me yet).

Edit: Apparently I was wrong and the replacement "Smart Reply" button does show up, but only sometimes depending on context. Since Thunderbird only shows it selectively now, I did not see that when I was checking before.

So I withdraw my criticism about removing functionality, and I replace it with criticism of changing user settings during updates, replacing a well-established feature with a subtly different one, and hiding controls that are currently not applicable rather than showing them as disabled. The fact that this comment thread exists is a pretty good demonstration of why these are bad ideas.
Historically, people of color arming themselves has been the biggest catalyst for gun control measures. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that's going to be a priority for the next administration. As usual, these measures won't apply to police officers on- or off-duty, for service or personal weapons.

They're seeking a monopoly on violence.
They stand behind what they wrote despite every company mentioned publicly insisting the claims were BS, despite no evidence being presented then or now, despite the fact that it actively hurts their integrity?

Why would they do that?
When you see [flagged] on a story it means users flagged it, so that part is no mystery.

Sometimes it's a mystery why they flagged it, but I'm not sure it's hard to understand in this case. The topic is inflammatory, the comments are poor (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23867523), and there's not much information to discuss.
‘Excited delirium’, used by police to justify brutality, is junk science
Quite impressive

Me: How to become CTO of microsoft

Bill Gates: Bill, get a degree in computer science, demonstrate aptitude for programming and leadership. Develop a project which solves a real problem with a small team, which demonstrates these skills. Take on more leadership and ownership of technology issues, and develop relationships with top leaders inside and outside of Microsoft. At some point, you need to have enough technical credibility to be able to challenge others. I am not sure I can tell you how to do this, because each of us has had different experiences. For me, it was difficult and took a long time. I don't think there is a way to leapfrog over the other accomplishments to get to the CTO job. This is what I did, which may or may not be relevant to you. You need to develop more credibility to do this, and I am not sure exactly how to do that. You should first develop a reputation as a technical leader. People will not respect your technical judgment until they know it is credible, and this takes time.

Me: Is the process same to become CEO

Bill Gates: The CEO of Microsoft is the chairman. There is no other CEO. So you need to become the chairman, which I think is a separate process. I assume I would have no inside information on how to do that. I think a person needs to build trust with the current chairman. In a way, it's the most important part of that. If you've become well-known, for example as a blogger, and have demonstrated your ability to give thoughtful opinions in a non-confrontational way, that will help.

Me: Where do you see microsoft in 10 years

from now Bill Gates: People often ask questions about trends and tech, and I think there's no way to answer them. We have to understand the specifics of what's going on. Microsoft has a good technical strategy for the future. We have a lot of really great software engineers. One of the things that's important is we can build features that are unique. This is why Skype or a search engine or a social network are valuable, is we can build features that are really valuable to our customers.
Is not a CO2 reduction, but that to the excess of CO2 that is already in the atmosphere, we worsened the situation as much as previous 2 years, not more. There is little to celebrate or feel relieved about it, we are still bleeding, but at least the cut stopped getting wider.

The other "good" news is that we lowered the increase caused by carbon and replaced it with new emissions from oil and gas that may have other side effects.

I'm a bit negative about this, even for an article that seem to have possitive news, maybe next year report will give us brigther news because there was less activity because the coronavirus.
Fontforge Free (libre) font editor for Windows, Mac OS X and GNU+Linux
There is no credible evidence of re-infection. The isolated cases can be explained away in a bayesian sense by PCR false positives or false negatives. It’s the usual base rate neglect fallacy.

The idea of reinfection contradicts decades of well established immunological principles. It also ignores the fact that we have a close relative of SARS-2 to study. That relative is SARS-1 and we have detected strong t cell activation after 17+ years. Therefore immunity is enduring and long lasting.

SARS-2 is substantially structurally similar to SARS-1.

Alternatively, take a statistical argument. There have been millions of cases around the world. SARS-2 is highly infectious for those who are susceptible. Therefore we would have thousands if not more well-documented, inarguable cases of reinfection. We don’t have those. All we have is a bunch of articles from heavily biased sources like Vox that have a vested interest in pushing the “doomer” narrative.

Why haven’t we seen widespread reinfection if it is truly possible?
Guardians of the Rule of Law

(1) Lawmakers -- Not doing their job

(2) Law enforcement, police -- Not allowed to do their job

(3) Unmarked vans from a federal agency -- DING, DING, DING!
The takeaway I got from DNT is: "It doesn't work, and it just makes it easier to fingerprint you." So I used to do it, but now I don't bother and turn/leave it off.
One of the problems with ads is that they try to jump in front of me while I'm going about my business trying to do something else - it's the wrong time for a product recommendation in any case. I'm happy to go on sites like thewirecutter or cleverhiker when I want specific product recommendations for something. But that only works for products and product types that I already know about. If I could have an inbox of products that were likely to interest me, which I could check or ignore at my leisure (sorta like Spotify's Discover Weekly) - yes, I might just check that out, and even keep coming back if it kept giving good recommendations.
And on 3/21 hundreds of thousands will be dead that likely would have otherwise been alive. We’re already at 1/3 the number of Americans who died in WWII, in less than half a year. They won’t come back in “a few years.”

What’s insane is how much more under control this could be with federal leadership, and a more compliant public.
> I have a serious question. Obviously if one were to choose between an ad-free experience and an ad-full experience, one would choose ad-free. But, if ads were needed for monetization, wouldn't you choose personalized vs non-personalized?

No. If I have to be surrounded by messages trying to manipulate me (which is what ads are, by the way), then I don't want them to be personalized for extra effectiveness (at manipulating me).

I don't really understand how some people seem to treat ads as some kind of neutral, helpful information source. It's almost like saying "I don't mind propaganda, since it's such an efficient way to find out what to think."
So you've made your call, so confident in feeling you're in the right. Nice knowing you, "admiral".
That's objectively not true. "Crazy people" as measured by people with serious mental illness disproportionately gather in big cities. Even IF the per-capita rate were absolutely flat across the urban-rural dimension, which it is not, you'd still face more opportunities to cross paths with a "crazy person" in a dense city compared to a smaller one.
> If having a POLICE patch is a license to commit violence without the target having a right to self-defense, that’s...a problem.

I suppose so, but it's currently within the law to do so. In fact, the police don't always have to identify themselves as the police in certain exigent circumstances (!). It's also a common myth that universally the police must identify themselves personally and give a badge number. That's up to department policy.

I support reform in these cases, at the least requiring officers to wear patches that uniquely identifies them ("X25" or something) for later use in court. That said, what we are seeing is within the bounds of the law today.

>It's exactly the same thing

No, it really isn't. Men in civilian clothing or blank fatigues blowing things up with zero identification is indeed distinguishable from men in uniform with American flag and POLICE patches.
Report to Congress: Social Media Bots and Deceptive Advertising [pdf]
I know you did your best to convey the work and the idea behind this but this warrants its own "Show HN:" prefix properly done if I can say so. Try posting somewhere the images, embedded videos and the links etc as you did above, then submit it with the "Show HN:" prefix again. I'm sure it will get more attention!
My first thought was of course along the lines of "a flattened n-ary tree representation", but no, it's about real trees, or rather, pictures of them. Well worth a click.
Not confusing. He's saying that watching Judge Judy for a week doesn't make you a lawyer. And when hiring, be careful because lots of people who claim to be experts are far from it.
Does anyone have any clue what Doordash is paid by Facebook to do this? (Or other sites?)

Is it a straight-up cash transaction, or is it a discount Facebook gives Doordash on its ad spend, or something else?

Or is it just a side effect of using Facebook Analytics, that most companies aren't even aware that they're sharing data that gets used for advertising too? So they're getting free analytics software but that's it?

Just very curious what the business deal structure here is.
> Did you feel that your specific problem put everything you were learning into context and made it easier to stay motivated?

Absolutely, having focus on finding better solutions to a single problem for multiple years certainly helped putting everything into context and staying motivated. That is the biggest problem I think, really learning this stuff like is needed to in order to solve new problems takes years of investment and just can't be done in a week or a month. Pretty hard to stay focused on something for that long without a goal and support of some sort.

The way that having the specific long term problem to solve really helped was always having that thread spinning in the back of my mind thinking about how something new could be applied to solve part of it and possibly trying it out. Also thinking about if certain approaches could even be practical at all.

I suppose that is probably fairly similar to grad school though.
That actually is, because the doctors and nurses make more mistakes when they are tired.
I think it's fair to say that PHP was okay, historically, but with hindsight, I wish I would have moved on sooner.

I made a lot of money on PHP code. But then realized there were other languages that I could also make money on, that worked better for what I needed. But would I go back? No..
There are some more options available if it happens that you don't like Newpipe:
https://www.layluh.com/
https://freetubeapp.io/
http://omega.gg/MotionBox/
http://www.viewpure.com
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...
https://toogl.es
Where can I watch it (twitter is blocked at work)?
My own anecdote. I hated frogs and disgusted by them. I don’t like frogs because I saw them chopped alive when I was a kid in a wet market in Asia, my mom brought me there to accompany her grocery buying. I think I was a first or second grader elementary.

Then I became a senior high schooler, and we had a biology class where we need to open up a frog. It was a group project.

After I opened up the frog, there’s no way for us to fix the frog anymore. Then I rip the frog even more apart, from skinning it completely to cutting it in many ways to the bone and skull to “learn more”.

My friends in my group were a bit horrified with what I did and they said I looked like I enjoyed it.

It was until a few days later it dawned on me like “how was I able to do that without any disgust, not only that, but with an interested curious somewhat happy look on my face? I am a psycho!”