skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think perfect really is the enemy of good in this case. Attack vectors will presumably always exist. I look upon any argument against openness - be it software licensing, protocol federation, data export, binary blob usage, or anything else - with _extreme_ skepticism.

> ... I generally have to trust every single host that any of my contacts has decided to sign up with ...

In general, you should only have to trust a particular host with communications going to the specific contact that uses it.

> Am I the exception here? Does everyone here only have friends who are IT security experts ...

No, I think you're just looking at the problem the wrong way.

With a centralized model, you generally have to unconditionally trust the central authority.

A federated system offers much more flexibility. Metadata is likely to be spread piecemeal across multiple hosts and network paths, making it much more difficult for an adversary to analyze in the general case. Instead of a blanket trust decision, you make a per-contact decision based on the nature of the interaction you intend to have with them. If you feel the need, you can even self host and insist that a particular contact register with _your_ server to communicate with you.

If you absolutely can't trust someone to make good decisions with security critical information, it's unlikely Signal can do much to change the threat they pose to you in a real world scenario anyway. At the end of the day you're ultimately choosing how much trust to place in the person you're communicating with regardless of which system you use to do so.

> ... there will eventually appear "supernodes" which have a disproportionally high number of edges/connections to other nodes ...

That's certainly an interesting dynamic but it's hardly an argument against federation. Centralization is literally the worst case in that model (ie a single node and nothing else). In a federated network you have a choice of whether to make use of such supernodes. If it really matters, I can (for example) refuse to communicate with a particular contact regarding some sensitive topic via (say) gmail. A centralized system doesn't provide that option at all.
That's probably going to change with macs having it as the default.

Never underestimate the power of "Well, it worked on my machine"

People seem to be willing to do apt-gets (or equivalent) in docker files, I could see several of my old co-workers doing that just to get a script working.
I mean I can give more examples despite them being secret initially which would incorrectly color the public statistics in a way against my argument.

The point though is that, from the prosecutor's perspective, the end goal of trying and winning trials is ultimately hindered by making an indictment like this public, and that the option to make these indictments secret even in the case of extremely geopolitically charged indictments exists. Which leads one to the idea that of making this indictment public is contrary to the standard goals of prosecuting a crime, then there's a different goal in mind. That goal is intrinsically linked to making public declarations you can't execute on.

I can't think of a better definition of propaganda.
It's not just eminent domain abuse, either... part of the Foxconn deal was set to bypass the Great Lakes Water Resources Compact and use water from Lake Michigan for LCD manufacturing.

The City of Racine basically argued that they could take the water for "public use" because they were allowed to do so (cities source drinking water from the lakes) and give up to 7 million gallons a day to Foxconn via a pipe.

Wisconsin environmental oversight signed off on this, but the plant hasn't happened so it hasn't been tested in court. Hopefully the Compact will be strengthened to prevent potential abuses like this in the future.
I suppose it depends entirely on what the account is securing.

My bank? Needs to be pretty independent of everything else.

Some random web store or something like Kickstarter? The only reason I care about those accounts is to track orders or for the convenience of not having to re-enter credit card info. The risk of losing my Apple account because ??? and dealing with recreating those accounts is negligible. In many cases I just use guest login for exactly that reason.

The convenience accounts are the ones I might use Sign in with Apple for. The bank? Not so much. But I won't trust Google or Facebook with even the convenience accounts.

I would also use something like this Touch ID on the web feature for 2FA, particularly if the only other options are SMS or email.
This is not what happened clearly.

Foxconn didn't know what to do with the facility at all and had no material plans, it was like expansion without a cause. The hiring had no purpose other than to probably break even on the subsidies, which I don't think they met profits from, so it was a big debacle from start to end.

The 'problem' was Foxconn didn't have a business plan for the facility.

The 'subsidies' meant that it took way too long to fail.
From the pyramid diagram I feel like the destructive argument tactics of “isolated demands for rigor” and “disputing definitions” sums up the vast majority of arguments I see around Hacker News. One step up from social shaming and gotchas that you see on many other social message boards, but not much better in all honesty.

I think that’s probably OK for the most part though. It’s easy enough to ignore bad faith demands for evidence or “citation needed” commentary. Disputing definitions can be hard to break free from, but both of these failure modes are less likely to lead to toxic behavior or social shaming like “did you even read the article?”

I think it’s way too much to expect message forum discussions will ever consist of good faith survey of evidence. Even if you have pure motives, it’s just not going to happen. You have really little time, you’re going to rattle off comments that come from your deep seated pre-baked opinions and areas where you believe you already completed a good faith survey of the evidence and already are bringing the most well-rounded opinion to the table. You have exactly enough time to unload it and then go take care of your kids or go to the gym or something.
Ommwriter. Beautiful, elegant, and very, very simple.
> The dreamers of the decentralized internet now place their hopes in blockchain technology, which promises to break governments’ control of currency and the tech giants’ control of the internet. Many intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and investors, from Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz to World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, have staked their reputation, careers, and plans on this vision.

The article linked for Tim Berners-Lee talks about Solid[0]. Lumping that in with cryptocurrencies is a bit much, unless I'm missing something.

[0]: https://inrupt.com/solid
AI's first spoken words on second day at the job: "What in the hell goes on here anyway? Geeeez"

Also software development makes all intelligent actors into mumblers usually after year 7 ... so we can expect to hear, if we strain our ears, some more choice words from Captain SourceCode. Gonna be fun!
I don't see why not? We flare natural gas at oil wells for this exact reason.
Have you ever read The Story of B? Would you be able to read it without trying to argue against it simply because it contradicts your raison d’etre?
>I do see the first link says 67-4, but the second link uses 71-4, which is the correct vote count. You can see on the ca.gov website:

Fair enough.

>In this blog's survey ~70% of drivers want to be independent contractors, and ~60% are a Yes on 22. In case you think it's biased, the writers ultimate argued for the No vote.

My point was not necessarily that the workers should always decide. It was that there is a huge difference between roughly 0% who support it for journalists and a roughly 30%-40% who support it for rideshare workers.

Also that 60% who support Prop 22 is wildly influenced by the money spent by these companies and the underhanded practices that were the topic of this post. If these workers were given an unbiased account of Prop 22 and the ramifications, I think the numbers would be different. If this was truly a popular proposal, why would this become the most expensive campaign in history with roughly 95% of the money coming in support of Prop 22?
Seems like something Profitwell or Chartmogul should add to their offerings. We rely heavily on Chartmogul for our weekly stats/scorecard and it looks like we've been wrongly celebrating our "super low churn rate" for a while now!
I think this falls into the very popular category of 'key money' we've been hearing so much about.
Overall I'm hopeful that people will actually put the (relatively little) work in to actually deliver WebAuthn on more web sites because it has both better security and a nicer UX flow. Win win. But, as to this particular article:

The code snippet elides two really important values: userIdBuffer and challengeBuffer. I get why - they're complicated and not very exciting to the intended audience. But they're also vitally important, so I think it would have been worth putting it non-zero effort.

userIdBuffer needs to be some sort of unchanging unique identifier for the user. Probably pick suitably large random values in an indexed table or something. It might be tempting to stick the row ID from your user table or similar in here, but that's actually a bad idea you'll likely regret.

challengeBuffer needs to be actual random bytes. Hey, the Javascript interpreter has... No. The random bytes need to be chosen fresh by the backend server where you're authenticating users. And they must be actual cryptographic quality randomness, not a Mersenne Twister from your utility library.
I am not sure about that, it sound like they lost money. Who is the con artist who lined their own pocket in this story? Is this about tariffs?
Crazy isn't it? It wasn't even a wise decision imo, this administration was most likely on there way out in 3 months and the Biden administration would have removed them from the list at no financial cost.
This keeps coming up over the years...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19037625

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21350837

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19099923

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22850723

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784924
Yes, these sorts of "tax incentives" are a negative sum game. As long as they are done, companies will hop around to the best deals, depleting the tax base as they force more and more competition from struggling jurisdictions, forcing local citizens to foot the bill for more and more of the infrastructure and services that make those businesses possible.
You should be aware that some (if not all) blockchain analysis software gives a higher risk score to coins that have come from a mixer.
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, the box could be used to build more projects, having the cutting patterns is a great idea!
Not remotely. Users can buy Android phones.

Having ~50% market share is not a monopoly.

Even suggesting Apple has monopsony as I did above is a stretch and is only the case if you define the market based on paying users.
Take a look at some of the metadata-hiding ones:

https://vuvuzela.io/
https://petsymposium.org/2015/papers/vandenhooff-vuvuzela-ho...
https://katzenpost.mixnetworks.org/
https://leap.se/en/about-us/news/2017/katzenpost
http://web.archive.org/web/20151101081526/https://pond.imper...
While others have already answered your question, there's another thing to bear in mind: the most elegant way to think about some concept in mathematics is not necessarily the best way to introduce it to someone who is new to the topic.

There are multiple ways of defining either the number e or the function that takes x to e^x (you can define one of them in terms of the other; if you know e, you can define e^x in the same way you usually define exponentiation: first you define it for integers, then rationals, and then you "fill in the gaps" for the irrational arguments (let's leave out complex numbers for now); while, if you know how to compute e^x for any x, then e is just that function evaluated at 1). Each of them highlights a different aspect of that all-important number.

What the GP was trying to explain was that the exponential function to the base of e, up to a multiplicative constant, is the only function whose derivative (roughly: slope) is equal to itself. That is: any such function is of the form a*e^x for some real number a. This is certainly one big reason for why e plays such a central role in mathematics.

But I think for someone not very familiar with all these topics, it's much easier to think of e as some number somewhere between 2,5 and 3. There are also some explanations for where exactly this number comes from, e.g. as the basis for continuously compounded interest (which is useful in economics), but they do require the student to be comfortable with some sort of, at least informal, limiting process.
Where all predictions misses the point is when they think technology is iterative and that we learn and improve from previous mistakes.

That is false for most of the cases. We keep reinventing the wheel and making the same mistakes, just in a slightly different and incompatible way. We have also been getting worst at establishing standards, which could be used as building blocks for utopia AI automated everything.

Software development is not going anywhere different.
They were imposed a deadline by the US actually. 24 hours to pay up and recognize Israel, something like that according to Middle Eastern outlets. The Sudanese cabinet literally met together in a hurry and rushed forward, in response to the extortion.
I think a reply that simply dismisses phone number outing as something unimportant is fairly offensive, and does not advance the case you are making.
Should there be a non-anonymous option, for social media sites where you have to log in under your real name? Verified by face recognition and fingerprints?
> How is Face / Touch ID more secure that user + pass

Because the password that the average user is using is shared among 100 sites and has been leaked 10 times over, and meanwhile there is nobody dusting their leftover coke can for prints.
Fair enough argument I suppose but let's be honest. When the US names and charges a North Korean hacker it is more of a badge of honor than a punishment. I would expect that "PJH" or any other government hacker has and will receive special treatment from N.K. leaders now that the US has charged him thus proving their skill and value to the state.
You are essentially correct.

Many (if not all) blockchain analysis companies give a higher risk score to coins that have come from a mixer aka they are "dirty".
Observations on Consequences of Short-Term Thinking in Technology Organizations
GGP actually said "[using] nothing but recycled organic byproduct".
Yeah! Like I said, too big for my britches. (;
Isn't Foxconn all short to medium term potential with sort of middle of the road upfront costs?

Their upfront costs are probably nominally higher than average, but state of the art manufacturing moves fast, the up front costs are either paid back quickly or a waste.

The same forces limit the long term potential; if they don't keep up, the investment quickly withers.
Negative, if you get their triggered anti spam response for creating an account fresh, or even logging into an existing account, you literally cannot log into that account anymore without providing a nonvoip phone number. You have to attach a phone number to continue.

What's the issue? Maybe the user doesn't have a phone number to give. Maybe the user already has that phone number attached to another account. Maybe they don't want to attach their phone number to a huge set of data, depending on their use, if indeed discord sells or begins to sell it. Rhetorical question if you ask me.
"Everyone is a junior developer" >> Philosophically yes, practically no. When you get a group of people together, there is always going to be a RELATIVE difference in skill between them. The consequence is inventing adjectives (junior, mid, senior) to distinguish the difference in skill. So context matters.
ScuttleButt is pretty interesting, even if it uses an utterly flawed data encoding system.

https://scuttlebutt.nz/
https://librelounge.org/episodes/episode-14-secure-scuttlebu...
I cant tell if you're being sarcastic lol.
I didn't encourage anything.

Per the article, Google made a strategic investment in ADT, and it appears that partnership will replace Nest Security as Google's home security business line.

If Google has moved on to ADT, it's only fair to offer their customers the same lifeboat.
Wow this is insanity. I thought these would all be the default. I recently introduced .gitattributes into our work codebase, but that was to improve GitHub's ability to hide generated files from PRs:

# package lockfiles
poetry.lock -diff linguist-generated=true
go.sum -diff linguist-generated=true
yarn.lock -diff linguist-generated=true
Cargo.lock -diff linguist-generated=true

# generated protobufs
*pb2.py -diff linguist-generated=true
*pb2.pyi -diff linguist-generated=true
*pb2_grpc.py -diff linguist-generated=true
*pb2_grpc.pyi -diff linguist-generated=true
*.pb.go -diff linguist-generated=true
> ... the very fact that people can move from one host to another ...

I think it's worth explicitly spelling out that federation reduces the cost to switch hosts to near zero in many cases. There's no technical reason you can't use a different host on your end per contact in Matrix (for one to one messaging at least). It would be absurd, but you could do it provided that your client supported it.

If it's really needed, federation combined with open source software means that tooling can be adapted to facilitate your particular security and workflow requirements. (Not that you should need it generally, but the freedom is always there if you do.)
Increase in Analog Problems
The “well rounded” education stops at college for me. It’s too expensive. If you want to take those courses, you go ahead and take them. But they aren’t necessary and shouldn’t be required.
Jug Is a Three Letter Word
QE, Deflation, Inflation, Dollar, Eurodollar System, Future US Economy
I know, and I don't like the decision, but there is a correlation with money none the less. Exercising speech takes resources. I cannot speak to the audience of newspaper readers without either investing capital to create a newspaper or by paying for ad placement in an existing one. Money is not, in itself, speech, but in our society it is integral to exercising that right at any scale much beyond a few individuals.

I think the main problem with the decision was the assertion that entities like corporations, rather than simply individuals, have free speech.
Build more-inclusive tech by changing your design process
lol, did you even read the article? the situation had absolutely nothing to do with the pay of American workers and everything to do with the fact that Foxconn management went into this situation without a plan, and the situation was exacerbated by their almost feudalistic management structure.
What if I'm running a site that is against apple's beliefs? E.g you run an adult site? Would you risk it?
Yes. This investment made no sense. The state would have gotten a better deal by just hiring people directly.
FWIW, it looked great on paper/Github, so I installed and tried it. The colors just overwhelmed me, so I had to uninstall it.

Thinking "perhaps, it's just the default color scheme", I installed it again and tried the `delta --show-syntax-themes` command to see the themes in action. Didn't like any of them. So uninstalled it again.

I like my current setup, which is:

[core]
pager = less -FMRiXx4
I do have some sample code for tools on my Github for my course (you don't need to take the course, everything is commented etc)
https://github.com/dgovil/PythonForMayaSamples

And as for whether Python can help, it most definitely can but it depends on your domain. When I do any repetitive operation, I'm always looking to automate it.
Scuttlebutt is a decentralised secure gossip platform
If and only if you opt in to it. It's difficult to understate how important that is.
"Remaining" is a pretty weak consolation. Is that all that matters? The biggest Freenode channel I'm a part of is #nodejs. It has maybe 10 regulars. All of us probably 30+ years old, only clinging to the corpse of IRC out of old habit. And in 10 years we will all be 40+, and in another 10, we will all be 50+.

On the other hand, in 10 years if Discord pulls the plug, you'll have a community of people that can migrate elsewhere. To any other solution that will pop up. Because it's the people that are the community, not the platform. Whether I have to use Discord or Slack or future solutions is merely incidental and entirely swappable.

One example that comes to mind is https://thedonald.win/. Reddit killed their subreddit (r/the_donald), so they just moved elsewhere.
Thank you! I hear you on the expansion idea - there's quite a bit you can do with the Qwiic/I2C port, but it'd be super cool to have it in some kind of cartridge format like a gameboy. Could probably attach faster peripherals or analog effects cards, that kind of thing. Thanks for your feedback!
Vuvuzela is a private chat application that hides metadata
Cuckerberg sending support via thoughts and prayers. Remember how he bended over so much to seduce PoohBear?

Honestly I'm surprised they didn't release a DP filter for "I stand with Myanmar against Rohingyan terrorists", or something on those lines.
Must try to experience the power of AI beneath.
Giving money is different than speaking. Do we have a right to anonymous speech amplified according to our means?
Scott Walker and the $3,000,0000,000 Sheet of Paper.

https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/handwri...
The monopoly/monopsony distinction is pedantry. The important point is that consumers and developers suffer because one company controls access to the lion’s share of a market. That point can be criticized and debated, but litigating semantics makes for boring reading and anyway it’s off topic.
The Katzenpost Mixnet
Yes, but it should be noted identity servers are only used for associating phone numbers and email addresses to Matrix IDs. Matrix IDs themselves are federated just like email addresses (@cyphar:cyphar.com is mine, and it's hosted on my own homeserver at cyphar.com).

If you don't register your phone number or email address (which last I checked is not part of the default account creation flow) then it really makes no difference. I agree they should be federated (and they have been working on that among many other things) but it's not like every user's identity is centralised.
Corporations don’t have speech interests.

The majority’s opinion in Citizens United is premised upon the assertion that they do.
Pond is forward secure, asynchronous messaging for the discerning
> It limits the damage that some decisions can cause, but exacerbates others. Signal only allows the first-party client to connect to its network; if the developers were legally compelled to add a backdoor into that client, users would have few options.

Huh? I send messages to my friends daily using the API via https://gitlab.com/thefinn93/signald which is definitely third party.
What's a '.m' file? Matlab, Objective-C, or Mathematica?
Thanks and will keep it in mind when I get to that stage! I'm still gathering interest, but when I get enough I'll probably do a Kickstarter or similar crowdfunding campaign.
Most definitely, SideFX and Blender are eating away at the mind share for Maya. I don't see SideFX replacing Maya anytime soon for animation or organic modeling (and therefore rigging) work, but definitely is taking over everything else. Blender is gaining a lot of traction in those areas though, so I know quite a few studios investigating Blender+Houdini productions now. Though many are still just early testing.
Super glad to find this! Have you also seen the lifetimes library? https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/lifetimes
What level of maths is required to understand this paper?