skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't realize this was going to be such a controversial take. It's possible you think there's a clear definition because you haven't seen examples of what some industries think is ethical. I'm trying to pick relatable examples but clearly not doing a great job. Again, I tend not to think these things are ethical, but I'm not the ethics police, so the fact that one person thinks it's ethical and one person does not means it must be blurry.

I feel pretty strongly that tracking cookies are evil, but the entire ad-tech industry did not think that was a dark-pattern.

I feel pretty strongly that GDPR "accept all or leave site" dialogs are a dark pattern, but the EU is happy with that implementation.

I would also love to point out that "dark-pattern" is still a blossoming terminology, there's no definitive body of law or ethics that describes what is and isn't a dark pattern.
cant read. paywalled
The website trips one of my major heuristics for caution: it doesn't say who is behind it. There's no "about us" section (that I could see, maybe it's there and I missed it?)
In specifics, I'm learning about using AWS's CDK to set up API Gateways and Lambdas.

On a broader level, I'm learning about creating APIs/microservices.

On an even broader level, I'm learning how to make (architectural) decisions and run projects.
How is this? I’ve never seen meters installed in the open with the display readable. Here in the Netherlands they are usually behind two doors. The front door and the door to the cabinet with all the meters and utility connections.
The major concern is only about long term stability, with people starting to talk about stopping things, some paranoia kicked in.

'age' is still quite beta, so not sure if it's entirely worth the switch. But yeah I guess the long-term archival is something that I hope to have.
https://archive.is/KzXNq
>As a startup founder, I started Earth Wallet around these core values - Creating a Better Planet, Innovating & Evolving, and Trust & Respect.

This is such a tired line. It's like reading, "So and so company who just got caught doing shady shit really takes shady shit seriously and we intend to fully investigate the matter. We fully respect so and so and this and that."

I'm not saying you are doing shady shit, but it reads as the same phony stuff as any PR drone has been regurgitating for the last 40 years.
Many years ago I added the feature to xbox.com to allow you to easily cancel your Xbox Live Gold subscription. We built a UX that was ideal for consumers - a couple of clicks, no "Here's what you'll be missing..." screens. It was awesome.

Before this feature was released you had to call Xbox support to cancel.

Once word spread that you could do it on the web, huge numbers of customers, that had been stuck paying for an Xbox Live Gold subscription they weren't using, began cancelling.

So our PM got a call from a VP. We were instructed to remove it from the site immediately. We fantasized about telling the VP to stick it and quitting en masse, but we knew it wouldn't change anything. We'd just be replaced by someone that would.

So we complied, but we all lost a little bit of our faith in Xbox that day.
John McAfee's Final Message to the Youth
Related PSA: many customer support chat integrations on websites today give the rep a real-time view of all input changes before you actually send anything.

Think twice before pasting unknown clipboard contents, typing while angry, etc. Best, explicitly copy your finalized reply from another app and paste it into the chat.

(I confirmed that first hand when a support person replied to specifics of my message while I was editing the phrasing.)
I think well paid workers may even leave in higher numbers, I am thinking of quiting myself after having a horrific year working almost nonstop with my Wife also working as well. Couple that with a child being forced inside and its been a complete nightmare. 2021 has been even more stressful as the company is piling new projects and initiatives ever higher. I may quit by summers end and I expect an avalanche of resignations as well as burnout reaches epic proportions.
It'll be more fun when Covid makes its way onto a U-boat that's out on station somewhere in the ocean or onto a ship of a carrier group that's deployed somewhere.
I've noticed that US utilities generally have a "dependency hierarchy": the telephone company is allowed to rely on the electrical utility, but not vice-versa. Water+sewer are another step up (and often have large, expensive diesel generators).

I think most electrical utilities in the US would balk at being dependent on a cellular telephone company. Many of them won't even lease fiber from the telcos, insisting on stringing up their own instead.
Gaming Discounted Products 2021
Have you thought about using central/global differential privacy (which tends to have much less noise) on the "high level aggregates" or "aggregated datasets" that persist after the research study ends?

E.g. from the FAQ: "We do intend to release aggregated data sets in the public good to foster an open web. When we do this, we will remove your personal information and try to disclose it in a way that minimizes the risk of you being re-identified."

It's a little worrying to think that this disclosure process might be done with no formal privacy protection. See the Netflix competition, AOL search dataset, Public Transportation in Victoria, etc. case studies of how non-formal attempts at anonymization can fail users.
Bad example actually.

Lots of us on Windows are still stuck with .NET Framework, because no matter how Microsoft keeps pushing it, even their own products aren't fully ported to Core, let alone 3rd parties.
The actual damaged 64K age blocks would likely be unrecoverable after the start of the damage unless the chacha20-poly1305 ended being self synchronizing as it was used (as opposed to the CFB that OpenPGP specifies). The question I can't answer is if the undamaged 64K age blocks would then be recoverable. There might be just a counter, but you could instead (also) make a particular block dependent on the previous one(s).
> Gamedev has got to be the most rewarding type of software coding there is.

Well sure, when you're doing the fun bits for fun.

> It’s a type of coding that is much closer to actual artistic creation rather than engineering.

Unless you're in a team with both artists and coders, which is, y'know, all of the commercial ones with a chance of success.

> The sheer amount of creative & engaging stories, puzzles, real-time strategies and on top of this entirely multiplayerable online allows for an infinite amount of types of entertaining creations… all made possible thanks to code.

It's the game designer who gets to do all this creating, not the coders. Unless (see point 2) you're in a tiny team hoping to win the lottery. See also "the kid fresh out of gamedev boot camp who wants to be a designer and is confused when nobody wants to join their team because everybody else has already has their own great ideas for a game which they've been working on for 10+ years while they also learned to code or model."

> But surely building “yet another react form” feels like coding an already solved problem.

Try building "yet another 3D model loader (that has to handle the quirks of three different modeling programs and eleventy different graphics cards)" - it's just as much reinventing the wheel, but with the added bonus that if you really cock it up you can hard lock your computer. Or my personal favourite, "debug this third party open world game engine which is clearly just a model viewer with a for() loop around it and the object loading part in a separate thread with zero synchronization." :D

> You’re not approaching the creation with the usual “what problem am I trying to solve” but rather “what’s the most fun thing I can build?”.

Sure but 99% of professional game coders don't get to do this. This interdisciplinary paradise is the domain of hobbyists who never get paid and of the tiny minority who are there at exactly the right place and time (and also probably never get paid.)

Career traits: Fun, lucrative, attainable. Pick any two. This applies to gamedev as much as any other line of work.

This rant brought to you by distant, slightly salty memories of my brief stint in gamedev.
I plan to learn Gleam. I write Elixir for work and to have access to a statically typed functional language that can compile to (as of just recently) both the BEAM and to JavaScript fits an actual use case that we have.

For non coding related stuff: acoustic guitar and French.
How did you learn about it? By studying the code?
Ranked voting also can have unexpected surprises as well. Every system has flaws, and if we open things up even more, I believe we’ll just get a collection of even more radicalized parties who only care about a single issue. At least with two parties there’s inner tension they need to modulate.
This seems a highly unethical app. Most governments will (correctly) regard the users as spies and will treat them accordingly. I think that most users do not fully comprehend what the app does.

The following seems particularly shady:

> Data from Wi-Fi networks, cell towers and mobile devices can be valuable

> to the military for situational awareness, target tracking and other

> intelligence purposes.

I really doubt that all users understand the risk they are taking.
I agree completely with this. I've recently started considering SAAS companies for a certain area, and I'm starting to lean more heavily towards open source self-hosted software, for the simple reason that I get complete control over the data. It's not fun to build a core part of our business under someone else's control.
Actually I've been doing a bit of exactly that...
1. I've been writing a Forth interpreter on the side for fun.
2. I'm learning how to distill liquor. :)
What barrier of entry for HTML5 games? Not like you need to install 40 frameworks to make web games.
Look at the times on some of that stuff too. 5 weeks for one dev to make a tool to close old JIRA tickets? WTF?
Most hierarchies are shallow in practice. Keep it simple.
Show HN: Create Pokemon Messages
What Google's $7BN Building Spree Means for Construction
It's rewarding, but also exhausting. Either you put months/years of your life into something that pretty much no one plays, so it almost feels like why did you bother (other than you gained some skills along the way), or it gets some success and then you get bombarded by neverending expectations from entitled gamers.

Among Us: "I definitely burnt out. It was tough because during all of this, we weren’t able to see friends and family. Being so tired from working, I couldn’t even go visit my family during covid and had to spend holidays alone...That was definitely the hardest time.” [1]

Minecraft fans getting angry at Notch for daring to take a vacation I remember, and here's one about a fan getting PISSED at an update with only one new thing to play with: [2]

Stardew Valley fans mad for how long multiplayer update took "I love you ConcernedApe and your game, Stardew Valley, but people are getting impatient. I am getting impatient. You've had your vacation, your space and your earnings." [3].

Or Shovel Knight "We wanted another Shovel Knight game, but we didn’t want to make it. We’re sick of making Shovel Knight games."
[4]

The book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels goes into this more, especially for Shovel Knight and Stardew Valley.

I worked on several games in the industry, a few small free ones on my own were popular but every game I worked on for a company failed to be successful or enter the gaming zeitgeist at all. It almost feels like a waste of my time when that happens, and often lead to layoffs. I got out of the industry after the third company in a row where that happened.

[1] https://kotaku.com/among-us-developers-say-they-burnt-out-af...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/iaeqj/dear_notch...

[3] https://community.playstarbound.com/threads/rip-stardew-vall...

[4] https://www.fanbyte.com/features/shovel-knight-dig-interview...
Not only that, it breaks browser-native search functionality—and apparently replaces it with nothing, at least on Safari, where they've removed the standard search option entirely.

Strangely enough, the in-Google-Doc search function works just fine on Chrome.

I recognize that it sounds somewhat paranoid, but I strongly suspect this is a deliberate attempt to push people to use Chrome over other browsers.
I don’t have much to add to the discussion here. Sensitivity is poor, specificity is pretty good and could be better if used as a confirmatory test(?). What I found interesting in the comments is how many people involved in healthcare lurk on a forum very much not dedicated to healthcare. Kind of cool. You all should chime in more, I learned a lot.
> We have to break away from this stupid idea that if only we studied what was happening on Twitter and Facebook we could fix our problems.

Analogously, to demonstrate absurdity, consider this statement: we have to break away from this stupid idea that if we studied what was happening on our crop fields and our roads we could fix our problems with agriculture and traffic.
You are visibly making progress in your understanding of the problem, for which you are to be commended, especially if you are a complete layperson in this field. Thank you.

This test isn't a 'bad test', though applying it in the wrong way can lead to bad outcomes. This is why tests used absent symptoms have to have a false positive rate that is much lower than the base rate at which the disease occurs. These tests - unlike software tests - should not be thought about in absolute terms but in terms of probability, so a positive test indicates a probability that you have a specific disease, but it is very well possible that you do not have it, and a negative test indicates a probability that you do not have it - but it is very well possible that you in fact do have the disease. And the reasons for a false positive or false negative may have nothing to do with the test itself, but could easily be an environmental factor or some benign aspect of the test subject that was not accounted for when designing the test.

Whether or not a test is suitable for mass screening hinges on the factors above, the base rate for the disease, the age of the group being tested, in some cases gender and so on. In order to have a positive outcome across the population all these factors have to be taken into account and by the time that you have done so there are - unfortunately - at the moment no miracles to be had. But combinations of knowledge, for instance a genetic pre-disposition to a certain disease + a positive test can have much higher signal to noise ratios than either by themselves.

But make no mistake: this is an important development in medical diagnostics and it may very well be that once more evidence has been collected and some of the kinks have been worked out that this particular test or an improved version of it can be applied in a screening setting for one or more of the cancers that we currently have no reliable detection method for and that could be cured if detected early enough given a high enough base rate and a low enough false positive rate.

Note that the scientists behind the project are very careful with their statements and that the reporting on this was actually quite neutral and trends to cautious optimism, which I think is warranted, but until the result of the new studies is known it is way too early to shout 'revolution'.
Contemporary architecture doesn't help. In 70's developments houses have front porches, but sometime in the 90's they turned houses around, and now everyone sits on their back deck or their games room in their cardboard palace. You don't encounter people any more when you are walking the dog.
> Company culture is trying to create patriotism except for capitalism

This feels extremely true and I'm going to steal this comparison for future use.
I disagree and think that learning through imitation is itself a creative process. It opens up possibilities that didn't exist for the imitator beforehand. It shows how things work and creates new conceptual models in their minds. At the same time, I do think that creating from first principles is the most creative.
Perhaps a better example than you intended -- recently colonoscopies are being considered more risky as a regular screening tool, because the procedure itself can result in harms, including (rarely) death. Not an expert here, but it seems they are still used in a fairly wide age group, but the recent trend is to be more cautious about their usage, as particularly for older patients they are more risky vs. the potential benefits. [1]

However I think this concern would be reduced if we had better first-line screening like the tests in TFA; the harms come from using a relatively-risky assay like colonoscopy for regular screening in healthy individuals, whereas if we had better noninvasive screening, the colonoscopy could be reserved for patients where there's a higher probability of a positive diagnosis.

[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2529486
This is trite. Just about any way of understanding something is going to create perverse incentives. Keeping the metrics secret has other problems too.

I don't think there is a a good solution. Maybe with radically shortened work hours and less pay disparity, the strives can strive off the job instead.
Yes, I want to use Dropbox to share my invoice with my client and my client to share the assets from their designer with me.

I don't want anybody tracking what websites I visit, articles I read or facebook videos I watch.

These are two VERY different definitions of "data", mingling the two is not helpful to discourse.
Definitely agree. Some of the game engines are taking the pain out of this but Flash had something really special going with its stupidly easy to use animation-first workflow.
If you want to talk about fairness, imagine the guy who had everything handed to him, born into a wealthy family, with parents getting him into a top-notch college despite horrible grades, and... I can't even finish, but you get the idea.

We can sit around making up what-if hypothetical tropes till the cows come home, and nothing will change. The rich at the very top just get richer.
Talked to Peter Norvig after a presentation of him, and ended up having lunch with him and some other students.
Why bug leaderboard is important? Don't I have few ways already to showcase my profile?

1. Stackoverflow to show my expertise

2. Any Open source contribution that shows up in my github profile
Canada puts U.S. Three Percenters militia on terror list, cites risk of violence
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding how this works, this isn't "give you some perks for doing your job." It's getting perks for doing your job, for someone who isn't paying you. And that's what the problem is.

If you want me to fix your bugs, pay me for it. Don't do this gamification nonsense.

Edit: apparently I did misunderstand how this works. It seems like the "Bugbusters" are just a company's normal developers. It still seems kinda dumb, but not as exploitative as I initially thought.
This is a detailed refutation of that paper: https://pekingnology.substack.com/p/who-really-owns-huawei-a...

It goes into the specifics of the Chinese laws governing employee share ownership, and why the employee shares are held by the union (it has to do with arcana of 1990s-era Chinese laws governing stock distribution by non-publicly-traded companies). Balding & Clarke fundamentally misunderstand why the union is used as a share-holding vehicle, and what the legal implications of that are.
There are companies that pay for your interview work, I think DuckDuckGo is one of them.
When Russia invaded Crimea, there were still British red coats stationed in New York City. The Russian military has been there ever since.

Speaking of the British empire, only an upper middle class westerner can nod their head when they see the British, who oversaw a massacre of Chinese in Hong Kong in 1967, pontificating over China's obligations to the British empire vis a vis Hong Kong. They even have former commander in chief of British Forces Overseas Hong Kong Chris Patten on Sky News lecturing the Chinese. The reason the UK took hold of Hong Kong was they went to war with the Chinese in order to push heroin and opium on a Chinese population they were trying to turn into drug addicts.
Yep, as much as I love them Hak5 somehow still maintains a "fan base" for this kind of petty "hacking".

Still, hat's off to Darren and Shannon!
Maybe some of this is due to how little variation there is: I've yet to see a politician who isn't neoliberal (though Trump was more than a bit fascist at times). Even 2019-20 Andrew Yang still built his ideas (mainly UBI) off of neoliberalism, and imo, appealed to a ton of more traditional neoliberal values: that UBI is about providing equally and flatly for everyone, not specifically and directly helping the disenfranchised and indirectly aiding worker control of the means of production (how I'd view its effects). And then he abandoned the UBI campaign this year, becoming even more centrist.

Then, if we shift our focus further left, we see Bernie Sanders, who is just not all that socialist because he's really working within the neoliberal framework that his years of politics conditioned him to work in. Further left than that, well, there are no anarchists or communists in politics.

I could make the case that this is here (and bad) bc neoliberalism will slide towards fascism if we give equal weight to everyone's ideas, but that does feel like I'm sinking further into divisions, and it presupposes that my positive opinions about the far left are actually supported by facts, regardless of any ground truth. But really, it wouldn't be an issue if we had more variety in ideology: discussion would be more varied and more thorough, we'd all question our own ideology's assumptions just a bit more, and overall it would be easier to engage in someone else's ideas if you knew they weren't coming from the same baseline as you.

Neoliberalism is not a neutral or balanced ideology: let's have more communists, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, hell, maybe a few fascists or stalinists could do some good.
The point is that the code needs the runtime.
Many forms autosave, I don't see this as a clear example of a dark pattern.
The grid will work just fine without any cell connections.

The connection in home smart meters is used mostly just for consumption data and maybe remote diagnostics. In some cases it's used for load management, but this requires a written contract with the user.

Basically it goes "You let us turn off your AC/Furnace/other high load unit during load peaks and we'll give you a discount on your electric bill."

Just the information on which meters can't be connected to (due to cell networks being down) gives the power company a bunch of data on where the actual fault is located.
By "ideological boilerplate" I mean repetitive ideological points, the kind that people repeat over and over again to bludgeon their enemies with in internet battles. That's the opposite of the discussion we want here. What we want is people listening to each other, taking in the specifics of what they have to say, and then responding with something that they haven't thought or said before—let alone a thousand times before. Conversation should be a co-creation between mutually respecting equals. When done well, it is always new. This follows from the core principle of HN, namely curiosity [1], because curiosity withers under repetition [2].

Snark is also a clear indicator of repetitive bludgeoning because people only resort to that when they have, let's call it, surplus creative energy left over—no real thought being needed to repeat the underlying points—which they use to try to add force to the smiting [3].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...