skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Within Facebook, you can use the event stream collected by your FB Pixel to both define conversion criteria as well as create audiences and define inclusion/exclusion criteria for that audience. When it comes to tracking on pages behind auth, primarily it's for audience building which can be used for

– Cross-sell/Up-sell campaigns. Build an audience based on usage patterns, and create a create a campaign for a complimentary service or higher tier (say, for example, someone clicks the button for a gated feature they don't have access to).

– Suppression lists. If you don't want your campaigns to target existing users, you can build an audience from pixel data on your authenticated pages and suppress against that.

– Lookalike audiences. After you create an audience in Facebook, you can create a "lookalike audience" from that. So even if you aren't actively doing either of the above, you'd derive value from tracking your "best" customers and using it as a seed list for a lookalike audience.

You're also not limited to using the FB Pixel for any of the above. In addition to a browser-side pixel, FB allows you to upload hashed customer information and use those for conversion tracking and audience building. Which used to be completely transparent to end users, but now you're able to see a list of companies that have uploaded your info to FB in this manner (I can't recall where it's buried in the user settings, off the top of my head).

All of that said, it's entirely likely that Backblaze wasn't intentionally sending any of this data to FB to begin with. An insidious aspect of FB's Pixel is that it automatically attaches listeners to a bunch of stuff on the page such as buttons and sends back interactions and associated metadata[1]. The flag to disable this isn't mentioned in the implementation instructions that are generated upfront, and it's actually a fairly uncommon trait for ad pixels. So a typical implementation tends to leave it on out of ignorance rather than make a deliberate determination on whether to use or disable that functionality.

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/advanced...
I believe at least 80% of iPhone users never connect to Mac or PC with Type-C. So it should be also e-waste.
Chernobyl: Worst Accident Ever
They also mandate EasySpin/Infinity, which breaks the game, so I basically don’t trust anything the say. >:)
It will harm the environment, but no less than the rest of our economy. There are two problems being conflated here. In basically all of society, people harm the environment in order to acquire resources. In proof of work, you go one step further and proceed to destroy the resources you just acquired. This is because destroying resources via reversing hashes is a costly signal that cannot be faked and is hence not susceptible to a Sybil attack.

Proof of Stake doesn't have this problem. The mere act of owning a coin does not entail the destruction of value. In proof of stake, you just make money, probably harming the environment along the way as you do, and buy the coin. That's it. The resources you obtained are not destroyed, they are passed on to whoever you bought the coins from.
Word for word, what you said here is extremely valuable to me. I hope that this isn’t seen as the typical guideline-breaking +1.

Sometimes I resent the patchy compensation mechanisms I’ve built up. It’s almost impossible to explain the frustration, the exhaustion, of choosing to be kind in a fashion that differs from my own understanding of kindness.

I am inherently kind, and I don’t have to choose that. I am confident in that statement. What I do have to force is mapping my default expression of kindness to the norms that friends, family, and acquaintances will understand. This is so important, because failing to do so means pushing all those people away. I feel like I can never let my guard down.

Then I remember to stop talking about myself; cue flash of (rational) anxiety; catch myself from a mental break; go and take a 50 minute long shower.

I’m so thankful for the people that give me a chance to reset, learn, and grow from these iterations.
> Not all code deals with resources. Streaming parsers normally don't. When you don't open/close any resources, manually propagating errors complicates code for no good reason.

Code doesn't deal with resources until it does. Similarly with everything else that forces you to reason about control flow - you don't care about thread management until you do, you don't care about action logs until you do, you don't care about performance until you do... and from the other side, code doesn't need to be exception-safe until it does. The trouble with this kind of "magic" language feature is that correctness becomes non-compositional: you can take two working pieces of code and put them together and get something that doesn't work.
Take a look on https://wasabi.com/
>are forced collectives

You'd be surprised. There are people who would die for their country, and nobody has a gun to their head.

Hell, historically people died to BUILD or FREE their countries.
Wouldn't a partial order be possible using logical clocks? Vector clocks probably don't satisfy "practical" but a hybrid logical clock is practical if you can assume clock synchronisation is within some modest delta.
Did we read the same thing? How can an "ETL" that he uses as example be just a "function or class"? If he meant simply function, then, you'd have 4 classes (ETL, E, T, L) each doing "one thing" and his entire argument would be moot.
>And what's wrong with that take, exactly?

You know what's wrong with it and you described what's wrong with it over the next several sentences. Somebody who doesn't understand that is not fit to be a leader. If you don't understand those power imbalances, you are bound to do harm.
The notably limitation being that you can't combine negation and recursion.
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217667238-Backb...

backblaze signs BAA agreements with companies storing personally identifiable medical information, I wouldn't believe anyone who told me that this facebook data leak was turned off for those customers; they should immediately be investigated and fined if any such breaches indeed happened.

Full agreement, any interest and goodwill towards the company is now completely gone.
This Sarah Mel character is the one who should be "cancelled".
> You can have a conversation whether Stallman is the best person to be a leader, but let's keep false accusations and blatant misinterpretations of his words out of that please

Well, yes, but everyone is talking about this, including your comment.

Was Stallman treated unfairly? Sure. It is what it is; the world is an unfair place. I can't change that either. It's been a few years: let's move on and talk about effective leadership for the movement instead.
I don’t think that’s the goal or at least not a primary goal. I would say the main goal is to contain criminals so the rest of society can live without impact from their harmful actions. The second goal, for me at least, is to create consequences that are very real and difficult to bear, to deter other would-be criminals. The next goal down might be reform or rehabilitation, but as a taxpayer I am just as happy to contain the problem if it is cheaper to do so. I’m not sure I’m missing anything with the “zero productiveness” you’re talking about.
>The field of virology doesn't draw a line in the sand excluding certain viruses with low transmission rates. Viruses that are more transmissible simply draw the attention of the field.

The field of meme-ology however does. So there's that.
>For many, the conclusion was clear: Richard Stallman must be “cancelled.” Many failed to make any distinction between what Stallman had done, question age-of-consent laws, and an actual pedophile or child rapist.

These discussions about cancel culture truly have taken a strange turn. I hope the author is not suggesting that the barrier for getting fired is to be an 'actual child rapist'. The response to that is prison.

Firing someone for holding views that go as far as defending sexual predators (Minsky/Epstein mentioned in the article), defending pedophilia, having a history of misbehaving towards students and so on has nothing to do with cancel culture. That is just responsible behavior because we should expect basic moral standards from people in leadership positions.

I won't give money and I wouldn't want my company associated with institutions that put people in charge who trivialize child abuse. You don't need to be a literal sex offender to be unfit to run a public-facing organisation. These contrarian cancel culture blogs have become bizarre.
I explicitly said that people still organize. Not as collectives, though. Perhaps you're missing what a collective is - it's an organization where people share equally in the results. It's characterized by self-sacrifice for the collective benefit.

The huge majority of organizations are set up for selfish benefit, not collective benefit.

Cooperation in mutual self-interest is NOT the same thing as cooperation in self-sacrifice.

Company members, for example, certainly cooperate. But the employees are doing it out of self-interest.
What category is "What we have now manages to be even worse than just letting the murderers, rapists and child molesters run free"?
Let me add another data point: I never listen to podcasts. Ever. I've tried it, and I hate the format. Even when I am forwarded something highly relevant to my interests, I still check for a transcript, and if there is none I move along.

You can't search audio. You can't skim audio. You can't easily hyperlink to audio, copy-and-paste audio, or auto-summarize audio. Audio is not indexed or cached by the big search engines. It's a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE and inefficient medium to convey information.

Beyond all those very pragmatic reasons, there are also people like me whose personality type (introversion) makes us find listening to audio an emotionally draining task as it simulates interacting with people. I don't get energized by it--it is work. And why should I give you my working energy when I could just as easily have skim-read a transcript or blog post with the same information and gotten energized by the self-study approach?

THAT SAID, you said that you want to do interviews... and that is something that really calls out for an audio medium. Sure you can transcribe it, and people like me appreciate the transcription, but I recognize that the audio is the original source material and transcription is an additional expense. I'd rather have the full interview available than some highly edited transcript... but I would hope that there is at least a short summary of the content in the description of each segment.
For one, they get to live in safe and civilized countries. That's a price MANY wealthy people are willing pay.

But truth be told, there are many wealthy people that have grown up rich, in those safe countries, or have grown complacent.
It's not that simple. Do that today and you're not in trouble today. You may be tomorrow, though, because the rules change overnight. And when they do, there's no forgiveness based on "it was within the rules at the time I did it".
> A better question is, exactly how is that $500k being spent?

Why is that a better question? What would your ideal $500k spend to incarcerate someone be?

> $$ cost, corruption, and 'human toll' are all concerns, and in this case may well be related. Of those 3, $$ cost is the easiest to measure.

Only because the people in cages are treated as budgets instead of human beings.
In 2008 and again in 2011 there were clusters of incidents involving undersea cables that led to disruption.

I can’t imagine a single ship being able to effectively monitor undersea cables.

But I can imagine a mothership deploying semi-autonomous persistent drones and sensors to detect and someday possibly even disrupt/destroy threats to the cables.

A simple CARVER matrix says the cables are far harder to defend than attack.

However, the potential attackers are limited to a very small number of sovereign states with the capability to detect/disrupt cable traffic and a larger but still small number of sovereign states with the capability of destroying cable traffic.
> The toxicity in these communities is a result of what was leftover

Toxicity relative to what? I have worked in a number of places much more toxic than Stallman's GNU project, or Linus's Linux kernel etc.

As has been said before - the difference between open source communities and closed source companies is that open source communities are open - we can see the flamewars on public mailing lists. There are plenty of toxic Jira pull request code review comment threads out there, resulting in lots of meetings with managers over turf wars or whatnot, which the world will never see because it's private.
Almost all the challenges with GPT-sized models are engineering and training challenges, not architectural.

How do you train a model too big to fit in a single GPU? It's doable, but not simple. How do you update weights across your cluster? etc etc
Or apparatchiks inevitably replace enthusiasts, enabling mainstream influence.
Why are these blocks getting more attention than Uganda’s? Is it because Myanmar is less friendly to the West or what?
Encrypted Chat: How to Choose the Best One?
I think that this is just an attempt at explaining away toxic behavior without taking responsibility for it.

People in the OSS community can, at times, glorify toxic behavior. I know people who take it as a badge of honor to "speak the truth", "speak directly", or "have no filter". Speaking directly and speaking the truth are good ideals to have, but if you really want to PROVE that you speak the truth and don't fear social pressures, what better way to do it than to be rude or insensitive to people?

Take Mr. X, who is outraged by Microsoft's behavior and refuses to buy Microsoft's products, tells other people about his problems with Microsoft, and tells everyone to use FOSS alternatives? Now, Mr. X also thinks that it's stupid to believe in god, and is not afraid to say it to everyone he meets. He's suddenly changed from "FOSS advocate" to "toxic workplace on legs".

This is by no means exclusive to the FOSS community. Think of the product manager who styles himself a Steve Jobs type, who abuses his staff in the style of Steve Jobs. These aren't examples I'm picking out of a hat; these are real people.
You're extending the analogy beyond its usefulness.

In the case of subjective offense, it should be and usually is different.

If you're called a racial slur by someone who just started learning English and genuinely doesn't know the true meaning of the word, you should take less offense to it than if you were called the slur by someone with obvious malicious intent.

Intent and context matters both in terms of how the "accused" should be viewed as well as how the "victim" should feel.
Interesting that I didn't see this when it came out almost a year ago.
I was canceled on Twitter last year. Hundreds of people were harassed for being associated with me, my social circles were ripped to shreds, and I feared for my safety. I got into right wing shitposting and logs from a small private chat group were leaked. It was one of the worst experiences of my life and I haven’t recovered. They feel like they’ve made the world a better place.
Nope, she is the character that needs to be ignored. That's the proper way to deal with trolls - not feeding them, not fighting them but starving them of attention they so desperately crave.
Hmm. I think RMS’s anti-establishment push was so much earlier (mostly against Bell Labs, etc.) that “the 90s” don’t really apply.

If anything, it’s just his personality: he takes hardline positions and holds onto them. You might be right about hardliners being the only folks who have enough persistence to come through (vis a vis survivorship bias), but then you’re also just including the leaders of those companies you mentioned: Bill Gates and Larry Ellison were famously combative, competitive, and all sorts of other words.
My position is that there is something going on with humanity (post-industrialization? social media? too long time since a world war? something completely different?) that is incentivizing dark social patterns that are destructive in the long run. And that while we are all condemning this behavior on the other side of the globe, we ourselves are suffering from a variant of the same disease. And that we should focus on figuring out and fixing the root cause, if we do not want to share the fate of the countries we like calling "the 3rd World".

My theory is that in order to respect each other, people have to need each other. Not as in "need a commoditized pair of hands", but as "need I person who's professional opinion is so important to me, that I can look over some personal quirks". And that person's self-esteem would then come from their professional opinion being needed and respected, so they wouldn't be forced to resort to victim Olympics as the only way to get attention. And the low interest rates and numerous bailouts are eroding this type of relation at an increasing pace.
I'm fairly sure that a bakery doesn't produce the amounts of data where you need to worry about such things.
Darrell Huff - How To Lie With Statistics[0]. And the first chapter or two of David Spiegelhalter - The Art of Statistics[1] has a good example of absolute vs relative rates/probabilities with respect to medicine. Pretty basic an important issue to understand.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51291.How_to_Lie_with_St...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43722897-the-art-of-stat...
Honest question: how can a financial services company not have an in-house infoSec team?

To me, this is an even more concerning issue. But then, I have no idea how the finance services world works, so maybe this is more common than I think?
Has anyone done any investigations whether she had a profit motive doing what she did? Did she get paid by someone? Did she just do it out of spite to RMS? Or just to get plain attention?
...
>For example abort or kill might offend someone because it could be used for ending life.

This makes me weep. I remember in my late Junior/Senior year in college taking the Operating Systems course in which we dove down into the nitty gritty details of "what does an OS do anyway?"

Half of the fun (which given the other classes I was taking at the time, was sorely needed) came from the word play and at times absurd sounding valid statements that were completely normal within the context of computing.

Jokes included:
-Processes forking, creating child processes.
-Parent processes killing child processes
-child processes killing their parents, becoming orphans
-The perils of Dining at a table of Philosophers, with insufficient silverware
-no Abort jokes, but strangely, I seemed to have missed the part of the curriculum that originally explained signalling.

...Later, upon graduating to my first industry job, I got to enjoy the simple joys of occasionally explaining to the unitiated that no, we weren't planning heavy family rearchitecture and downsizing, merely trying to figure out why one piece of software was telling another piece of software to stop doing what we put it there to do.

Every technical field has this. I've not even heard of Software Psychology, but I'm willing to bet it's and offshoot of computational linguistics which puts a bit too much "human" into crafting efficient input spaces for guiding the machine. Some degree of that is fine, but as with most things, moderation is advised.
Why is it laughable that Americans want a better world for others? Most Americans have no control over what their country's leaders do.
This is how societies work when there's no rule of law (or no respect for it, or insufficient coverage or enforcement of the issue). Things get really ugly really fast.
Read Ben Franklin's autobiography; you are looking for the book story.
SpaceX not competing against NASA, instead it was was always competing against commercial launch provider such as ULA.
I know it’s the title of the article, but if you’re going to work in poop, startup and Theranos, at least give me the name of the company...
How do companies do analytics on Blockchain?
I'm curious to know how companies do analytics on blockchain. Let me explain: Smart Contracts generate events which can be extremely useful for analytics. Is there an analytics platform leveraging these events to do analytics ?

Thanks
What, if anything, would you update in your post from a decade ago [1] on Steve Jobs, RMS, and empathy?

(My guess is not much, other than maybe a personal preference on the empathy side?)

[1] https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2011/10/11/why-steve-jobs-did...
>I was toxic because I was a teenager with low empathy who hadn't learned things yet. I grew out of it.

Participation in political mobs can serve as a surrogate replacement for empathy. A change in political allegiance is far easier to enact in an individual than a change in personality.
> armies

We tend to give medals to soldiers who self-sacrifice, because it's unusual. Not many are interested in dying for their country. If you refuse an order to advance on an enemy stronghold, you'll get shot. Remember those Soviet blocking battalions? How does that relate to self-sacrifice for the collective?

You overlooked the rest of what I wrote about armies.
A Google search shows that Corrections in NYC receives pension benefits after 20 years, or 22 years if employed after April 1, 2012.

Life expectancies are pretty long these days and 20 years is not all that long.
Neither do I, for what it’s worth. My approach to this subject is probably too brash, but it comes from a time when I was among the servants and being priced out of the place I would live to continue that work.
I don't have huge backup needs (around 500GB, doesn't grow much over time), so I just use duplicity and upload to AWS S3 with the "infrequent access" setting, and have the bucket auto-replicate to another region in another country. Costs me around $12/mo just for the data storage. The AWS calculator tells me if I had to retrieve all that data it would cost under $10 to do so.

Given it's all personal data that I can stand to be without for days if needed, I could probably use Glacier (or even Glacier Deep Archive) and pay less than a third of the cost (or less than a twelfth!), but the absolute dollar amount isn't high enough for me to go through the trouble of changing up my backup scripts.

Sure, if you're running a business and are constantly generating lots of new data that needs to be backed up, that gets more expensive, but I also would expect a business with that much data could easily afford to spend several orders of magnitude more than I do on backups.
Yes and No. There are so many preferred sounds out there that a $300 and a $3000 headphone are likely to be quite different, and you would expect the $3000 headphone to be technically better, but it comes down to preference. I have a $1000 pair of headphones, and they do just about everything really well, but I also have cheaper headphones that are more accurate (to different target curves, but that is getting into psychoacoustics), or more enjoyable for certain genres.

Price doesn't necessarily correspond to audio quality very well. For example, Ultrasone sells some objectively terrible headphones for $3000.
Let's be honest, RMS needed to fade away long before September 2019. It was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
All you'll do is shift it to people hosting "proxy" services on their main domain so they can pipeline the requests through if the browser stops it.

That's extra effort, but the big ones will do it
>>legalized obstruction of justice
That's a contradiction in terms. No person owes a red cent more than what their legal required to pay. There is no obstruction of justice unless you're of the persuasion that sovereignty & property rights mean nothing while any government should have a right to pilfer bank accounts as they see fit.