skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tech demo? Have you played it?

It's a heck of a "demo". It's about the size of Half Life 2.
GDP per capita isn't that insightful for this topic because it doesn't tell whether disposable income actually grew. It could also be the case that i.e. only the top 1% household income grew.

Median household income is a better metric to get a feeling for the live of the actual, average citizen. Median personal income in the EU grew 18.5% from 2008 to 2018 and 8.7% in the US. (It grew more in 2019 but I couldn't find the corresponding EU data for 2019).

The divergence from GDP per capita means most people didn't receive the growth in productivity.

US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

EU: https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/submitViewTableActi...
I agree, and that's not what I said.
Even the improvements over the last 15 years have been immense. Remember using printed directions from Mapquest?
> prebuilt PCs marketed for living room play

That's been a dream for a long time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
How to convert 4.5x more leads to sales opportunities
> Are men really replacing flesh & bone prostitutes with VR sex sims?

Considering people are already buying Realdolls. I don't doubt it.

> Is this really a "good" development?

Maybe in some niche cases. But I'd say it wouldn't be good considering how damaging porn/sex addiction can be.
This is the situation forced on us by the court and the magistrate. Certainly if there was coverage of the proceedings from more sources we might choose to read those as well or instead of Craig Murray's blog.

At this time he seems to be one of the few people allowed in the public gallery.
a little too on the nose for me, especially given the cia's history trying to develop a dragonfly UAV [1] as a listening device. now they're seeking to be approved "flies on the wall" at the top labs in the country. given their history with abuse from tech development, i'm hoping people are approaching this with caution.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/heroic-failures/meet-...
Tracking the working dogs of 9/11
Facebook will let people claim ownership of images and issue takedown requests
On the Media's series "Scarlet E" is an exceptionally good and disturbing look at the (pre-Covid) eviction and housing phenomenon in the US. Podcast out of WNYC, New York.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/scarlet-e-unmasking...
It is a bit sad that Lisp isn't taught universally anymore. It might not be the most popular language, but it offers a lot of concepts which are worthwhile studying.

Dynamically-scoped variables (more precisely: variables with global scope and dynamic extent) are one such wonderful thing. In languages which offer those, one might use one in a function to hold a state which isn't related to the primary task of that function, e.g. a stream reference to send debug information to. Sure, one could give that to the function as one of the arguments, but doing so will make the interface eventually unwieldy and carrying such state from function to function becomes a hassle. Alternatively, one could keep such state as class variable, but if it isn't directly related to the or a single class, that wouldn't be easily comprehend-able design either. Keeping such state in a plain global variable (with indefinite extent) restricts it to being a single value for all consumers.

There's always more than one way to solve a technical problem, but dynamically scoped variables are sometimes the easiest, most straight-forward and most flexible way to do so.
> IMO problems are simple, but only in the sense that they don’t require any advanced math — even calculus is considered beyond the scope of the competition.

I kind of disagree. IMO problems require a lot of studying and theory that an average person wont know.
Goji Investments Enhances Developer Experience via Observability
Observability isn’t just a way to gain visibility into applications and solve problems. It’s also a key contributor to developing a thriving culture for developers.
Part of this is Lisp-only history, outside of old Lisp users dynamic scoping really has few friends although the somewhat similar environment variable mechanism is widespread and accepted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(computer_science)#Histo...
So this is basically Theranos but for automobiles. Have we learned nothing?
> most schizophrenic platform

> danger money

In my experience, these often go hand-in-hand. Also, never heard 'danger money' and absolutely love it, thanks.
Wow you say "only $4.3 billion" for not huge company.
Reminds me of when Strava routes were disclosing info about personnel & physical structures of military bases: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

I haven't used it, but if the company is so set on opt-out versus opt-in, maybe it'd be preferable to default to 1st or 2nd degree connections only for location sharing. For the fly-By functionality where it's supposed to be public, it seems a little reckless to disclose name, picture, and location by default. I can also definitely think of other popular apps that do this.
Not that it did much before that, since it lacked funding. Just like the IRS, CFTC, and FinCEN. And it lacked funding mostly because regulatory capture / special interest groups successfully lobbied to keep them "simple", to keep costs down. Of course keeping them simple sounds great but they are all very much in need of reforms, serious investment to modernize and to catch up with the market, which became very complex.
I loved Fallout 4
Those will probably become the most militarized zones in the solar system when planetary governments realize the WMD potential of an asteroid plunging into the sun's gravity well.
Only difference seems to be that there all ports remain closed (making it obvious that you're using such a method, since you need some way of accessing it too.) And you get some kind of signal about a port opening if you do happen to get it right, whereas allowing password / key exchange to properly go through after some sequence gives no real signal. It also seems simpler implementation wise than dynamically changing the firewall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperMemo
I think this is tangential "International Criminal Court officials sanctioned by US" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54003527 .
^On the other hand, the alternative is worse: a proprietary platform which shifts unpredictably and from which the owner can ban you.

Linux might "shifts unpredictably" too (looking at you Gnome ;) but at least the owner can't ban you.
Application development on the web is much more pleasant than what we were doing on any pre-web platform, and possibly even now.

The platform that the web was designed on (NeXTSTEP) was much nicer to develop on. VB programmers had a much easier time than web development now. The web was designed as a document delivery platform and it continues to show how hard it is to get basic functionality going.
This is kind of true. Young tech entrepreneurs are mostly either harvard/stanford/other top college grads, or theyre from wealthy families. But entrepreneurship has always been this way, its not a middle class career path, and arguably, tech has increased the number of middle class/raw talent trying to start their own companies.

If you were to look back at the early 1900s, or even 1980s, its much better today than back then
It's not a 100% reliable method for checking if there should be more content somewhere, there could be a bunch of JavaScript listeners attached to surrounding elements that could add more content upon interaction.
Quantum computing: randomness as a service
> Keeping the log file on the boot partition was the first mistake

Wrong assumption. With logs on a full system (but not) disk, your system can still grind to a halt during boot. Sure, if you do have access to the bootloader, you can do an emergency/recovery boot. But you do not always have that on systems build by others (especially product vendors).

I would not be making this point if I had not run into situations where this was an actual problem. I can assure you it was never the result of my personal bad architecture or maintenance and almost exclusively while dealing with third party products.

It would be valid to argue they should get their shit together, but the reality is that at the end of the day, companies buy systems like these and you still will have to deal with them.
"Why is my state run media outlet ignoring one of the biggest whistleblowers in history?"
Please bring this to GCP!
I'm not sure if you think all devs 15 years ago where stupid or all devs today are awesome, but either way I'd say you're wrong.
No offense but I think you're being dramatic and a bit naive.

There are plenty of small companies chasing a dream other than total economic world domination. Obviously if you look at Facebook etc that's all you're going to see.

Also, good luck running a business, any business of any size, without caring about money. Once you're responsible for the the livelihood of your employees and yourself (and maybe even SO and your progeny) your perspective changes radically.
If you think that's a perk you don't belong doing that work. It's not the james bond life you think it is and the people who think of it that way are insufferable.

Try living in a windowless box for 8 hours a day and having no resume.
I remember reading the privacy policy of Snapchat and refusing to install it because they explicitly mentioned accelerometer data.

I’m pretty sure they (and a lot of other scummy companies) are using this data to track location and/or relationships between users based on correlated accelerometer data.

If you are in a moving vehicle, the accelerometer patterns would be very similar and would reflect the movement/vibrations of the vehicle, which can be matched similarly to how Shazam is able to identify songs based on partial and noisy audio waveforms.

If you have one user whose location and accelerometer pattern is known and then you have another user whose location isn’t known but their accelerometer pattern matches the first user’s one in the same timeframe (with some margin of error to account for clock skew) you can infer that the second user is in the same vehicle (thus location) as the first one. Multiple measurements over time would eliminate any potential errors.
There's an app for that:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.civvl.agen...
Video Recovery
If you haven’t recovered any lost data, recovering video might sound to you like rocket science, but in fact, video recovery isn’t that difficult at all.
I’m not sure I parse things the way you do. Assange is accused of going beyond leaking into assisting Chelsea Manning get pass security systems. If he was not only the distributor of classified material, but actively participated in expropriating it, he’s on the wrong side of the law.

Folks had been willing to overlook that, because they viewed him as sympathetic. But he’s undermined that with his connections to Russia. Moreover, Russian attempts to manipulate the 2016 election showed a lot of people that radical transparency isn’t cost free—hostile governments can use this information to jeopardize American national security, including by manipulating otherwise well meaning leakers.

If you’re neither sympathetic nor on the right side of the law, you’ve got a problem.
Right, but the correct analogy for putting up the drywall is deploying to production...
The US has done (and avoided doing) everything to keep their tech giants getting bigger, from keeping centralized internet infrastructure on US soil to lax privacy laws, to blocking competing payments tech like blockchains, to immigrations law, to providing a good environment for those companies to grow grow grow. It's a strategic choice to dominate IT that has borne fruit, and only China got away. I don't think that was pure accident, just look at the contrast in welfare between the US big tech sector and the US telecom sector.
What's often missed here is that the problem the lego is slotted in to is often subtly different each time. So you have a guy building an 8x2 lego brick that slots perfectly into his mansion and then someone else really needs to cut a corner off of it to fit their problem. But the original designer never gave you the option to do that so now you have to write an adapter to plug the 8x2 into an 8x2 without a corner.

It only looks like reinventing the wheel every time if you're completely ignorant of the subtle differences of each problem domain. And if you make a bunch of changes to create arbitrary lego bricks then now everyone has to learn your brick framework before they can make an 8x2 brick.
Ok, if using a scalpel to dissect the statement minutely. The statement could be more precisely that workers have little to no income risk while working. One is paid where they have accepted both the upside and downside risk.

People always combine this point with workers being able to be fired or to have skills outdated. Those are different factors, where an individual should always look & project forward to place themselves in future better positions.
The Spiral of Silence
Is it possible to play dwarf fortress on mobile yet ?
> Now all restaurants are Taco Bell

Or was it Pizza Hut?[1]

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106697/alternateversions
Yes. CIA is a civilian organization. The majority of Americans with security clearances are civilians. The majority of CIA employees (perhaps technically all?) are civilians. DoD "Secret" level clearances are ubiquitous in the private sector; literally millions of people have them. I had one when I worked for a DoD contractor.
> I didn't know that, or that they were Japanese ('surimi') - I've only ever had or seen them in France.

Could be a coincidence. Naomi is a very traditional Hebrew girls' name, and also a Japanese girls' name.
It's my prediction of the future.
The equally interesting implication of your comment that "we don't get a stack trace from an ordinary loop" is that maybe we should have logging and introspection the behaviour of loops, and the fact that we have them for function invocation but not for loops is combination of a historical accident and a lack of interest in rethinking how languages are implemented.
My understanding is that Assange is alleged to have conspired with people in the USA to release classified information. One might compare it to collaborating with someone in the US to commit fraud (or perpetrating the fraud via the internet); being outside the country does not make you immune from prosecution.
It's a great deal. It's not meant to replicate a startup equity lottery ticket, it's closer to a financial services bonus or RSUs at Big Tech. ~$300k/year total comp and low risk compared to unicorn equity lottery is a no brainer, although if you can hustle and have the talent, you might do slightly better at FAANG.
Emergent Geometrical Symmetry with Mercury
Having just watched Netflix vs. the World documentary (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8407418/) last week, this acquisition seems to be inevitable as game streaming is taking off and will eventually become the defacto means of playing video games.

Microsoft's endgame is to increase the subscribers to its GamePass subscription so akin to Netflix's insatiable appetite for video content, Microsoft's will be for video games. But since IP development for games is expensive, time-consuming and hard to break into, it's arguably easier to acquire game studios entirely.

The impact is so wide-ranging: what becomes of Google Stadia and Nvidia GeForce Now? Same goes for Sony and Nintendo. The most interesting one could be Apple, who clearly does not want game streaming to be the norm.
As a customer I would give them all info they need if they paid be a small sum compared to what they spend with absurd technologies and time. Maybe it would even make their product cheaper, increasing demand and further developing the economy! I mean: in theory, if they target us better, it would be cheaper to market, therefore allowing smaller prices - right !? Most people don't outright say it, but we're not only being spied: we pay for it. And most people are subject to a true hostage situation refered to as employment/salary. This is all abusive, and the worst part of it is that it's self-inflicted. The whole privacy thing, including the privacy-paranoia refers to a serious collective health issue. "Because the quest for profit makes men into predatory, insensitive and stupid brutes."
Interesting. Ethics aside, do you think Google's ad-driven revenue model has affected the company culture at all?
Starlink starts to deliver on its satellite internet promise
The perhaps that needs to change, ASAP.

Apps shouldn't really have access to anything beyond the very basics without explicit permission.
Amusing how the article still has a "Brexit" tag despite Cleese insisting that he doesn't want to talk about it and that his "self-imposed exile" has nothing to do with it. Sorry if I'm cynical but it's kind of telling how the tags are driven solely by what gets the SEO department happy.
Is the NSA also working on the same projects?
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how it is illegal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/nyregion/sanctuary-cities...

Another case that may apply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Dole

It may be illegal, but it's not really clear, it seems like it would need to be decided in court.
And they're just human, why use a top secret tracking tech worth billions when you can use browsers referrers with the same result?
The thing that stands out for me here is the support for PostgreSQL extensions, which is pretty thin in other hosted PostgreSQL offerings.
When I watch these confs and compare to today I see an empty pattern. Something's missing.

ps: by that I mean, the show goes on but the soil is dry, I don't think the world dreams or needs more digital tech. It's ironically in autopilot.
Maybe, but that really depends on how independent Microsoft's gaming business is from the rest of the company.

I'm still waiting on the other shoe with github.
> when Facebook and Google noticed Russia and tried expanding into it, it was too late.

There were competing social networks in europe and UK as well, big names. Why are those in the graveyard though?
Excellent taste in colony survival titles!
Markdown is way easier than HTML and CSS. I've been hand coding some stuff, but am happy that I can maintain my own tumblelog [0] using a single Markdown file which is processed by a static site generator I wrote [1]. Even though the blog is mostly a link blog using Markdown saves me a lot of time and headaches.

[0] https://plurrrr.com/

[1] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog
Imagine how much more even more experienced developers can bring to the table, especially if they've been keeping up and growing :)
From your article:

“This is helping maintain US dominance, particularly from a technological perspective,” says Meyerriecks. “That’s really critical for national and economic security. It also democratizes the technology by making it available to the planet in a way that allows the level of the water to rise for all.”

Such a skeevy way to paint this picture -- it's not about global democratization to rise the water level, we know from history that the cia cares about the ability to impose controls through more powerful, more distributed tech.
The CIA does, yes. Labs is unclear, but probably not for an individual project - it commonly takes 12-24 months.
How do you know? Do you have any source information? I had not read of this before
As a counterbalance - reporting restriction from court are highly regulated in the UK. If a person breaks the regulations it is easy to deny them access the next day. No so easy on remote access, hard to control/prosecute contempt of court.
.NET Series N
Most Americans have never worn an N95 mask before, and I'm betting that the majority of them wouldn't want to wear them again after trying them on just once. Those things are effective, but both majorly uncomfortable & inconvenient to put on/off.
Just curious, what problems does fail2ban suffer with thousands of unique ips? (A crowded iptables I guess...)

I still use it with a super oppressive jail time and few retries, with a few whitelisted IPs and it seems to work ok.
Music royalties and professional VJ's (read, unionized) eat into those profit margins. That 70 year old man figured out he could cut costs by hiring unprofessional "reality" actors and running his network on the sweat of young perma-lancers.[0]

[0]https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/8/12/1968730/-Sumner-R...
>If so, is there any evidence that the EU tech sector has been stifled because of US government espionage?

Other sectors have been, and there's no reason tech would be immune to this. Also, it's only logical that attempts to create an EU tech sector, therefore threatening the US dominance, would be met with attempts to stiffle it similar to the ones below.

>In 1999, Enercon, a German company and leading manufacturer of wind energy equipment, developed a breakthrough generator for wind turbines. After applying for a US patent, it had learned that Kenetech, an American rival, had submitted an almost identical patent application shortly before. By the statement of a former NSA employee, it was later discovered that the NSA had secretly intercepted and monitored Enercon's data communications and conference calls and passed information regarding the new generator to Kenetech.

>In the early 1990s, the US National Security Agency intercepted the communications between the European aerospace company Airbus and the Saudi Arabian national airline. In 1994, Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia after the NSA, acting as a whistleblower, reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials to secure the contract.[65] As a result, the American aerospace company McDonnell Douglas (now part of Boeing) won the multibillion-dollar contract instead of Airbus.

>The American defense contractor Raytheon won a US$1.3 billion contract with the Government of Brazil to monitor the Amazon rainforest after the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), acting as a whistleblower, reported that Raytheon's French competitor Thomson-Alcatel had been paying bribes to get the contract.

>In order to boost America's position in trade negotiations with the then Japanese Trade Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, in 1995 the CIA eavesdropped on the conversations between Japanese bureaucrats and executives of car manufacturers Toyota and Nissan.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

You can argue that the bribing cases make the US government the "good guy", but I can safely say that the NSA/CIA would not leverage it's espionage capabilites to subvert a US companies deals/operations.

And remember, these are only the cases that we know about.
IMO fail2ban is still useful just to cut down on the noise.
> I would imagine CIA officers get a regular civil service salary

What is a "regular civil service salary"? Presumably CIA officers are better paid than the clerk behind the DMV counter? Perhaps a CIA officer salary is still "excellent" if not on par with defense contractors?
The CCP has already decided to be a bully, and it seems its people are supporting them (except the poor ones being murdered like the Uighurs). Let them get a taste of their own medicine.
What happened to our infra when a customer gets 10m page views in a few hours?