skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't understand how anyone - even Apple's usual cheerleaders like Gruber - can justify defending this with a straight face. It's scanning your content on your device, without your consent. Full stop.

Apple's FAQ to try and quell some of the backlash for this just makes it sound even worse in my opinion with gems like this:

_Could governments force Apple to add non-CSAM images to the hash list?_

_Apple will refuse any such demands._

Bullshit. If China "requests" this with threat of banning them from selling the iPhone in China? They'll just say "Apple must operate under the laws of the countries it operates in" and its hands are tied. Which is most likely how this whole thing started.

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Expanded_Protections_...

Maybe there will be more of an uproar when this inevitably comes to macOS.
It’s a visual hash, not something like an md5. And now you’re talking of a directed attack to intentionally make hash collisions?
This is (rightly) causing enormous damage to Apple's brand and undermining one of the key messages they are using to promote the iPhone. What is more I'm sure Apple's executive team would realise that this would be the case.

I can't help but feel that someone has wielded a 'big stick' to get Apple to do this. If not it's a huge misjudgment.
To be fair as a video game it doesn't need to have working economics. It's OK if something is cool and doesn't make economic sense.

I rarely play Vanilla, but I thought it had some type of powered minecarts allowing primitive automation? Maybe some types of rails that get a redstone signal speed up carts or something like that?

In modded I take the same attitude as in programming: Don't Repeat Yourself. If I have to actually mine more than a few blocks of iron, I'm done. One of my favourite innovations of the past few years has been Hopping Bonsai Pots and subsequent iterations on that idea. Miniature tree (of whatever species) grows in the pot, when it reaches full size it is harvested and gets hoppered into a container below, then grows again. Awesome. But, not at all Vanilla.
How is that analogous to 200bn of bonds for 200bn of bank reserves?
Interesting, has some similarities similarities to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botanical_identity_of_soma%E2%...
Another counter against "I've got nothing to hide" is: You don't decide what's worth hiding. The police / intelligence agencies / whoever has access to your data do and they are really good at misinterpreting and mischaracterizing you. Besides, what's legal today, might be illegal tomorrow.
Despite having a wide range of top marginal tax rates in the US (from 90%+ in the 50s to mid 30s today), tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has stayed remarkably constant since post-WW2 (~19%) [0].

It's not as simple as looking at the top rate, but you have to look at deductions, the caps, lower rates, etc. But I don't think there is a clear line between tax rates and taxes paid. There's likely an equilibrium rate that people will pay at which point tax aversion strategies make more sense. For instance, as I hit a higher tax bracket, I've invested more in pre-tax retirement, education and health savings accounts. Wealthier individuals have even more options.

So looking at marginal tax rates is a kind of red-herring.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law
The problem with these one-time URL's is that most people share them in places where the "one-time" is usually a cloud provider. If you share over IM, the IM service will check the URL to provide preview, or virus scan it. Same for many email providers. By the time you try to open it, it's already been burned.

You can whitelist those parties, but it somewhat defeats the purpose of a secure one-time link.
Show HN: A WebAssembly-based sandbox for bioinformatics
They say there is a human review, but fail to explain the parameters of the review.

How many photos is a reviewer expected to review in an hour? What are their incentives and performance metrics? Do they have a 3 party voting system to confirm? For positive human review is there additional scrutiny? Is data anonymized properly? Does law enforcement receive a copy? Is this going to be limited to child exploitation?

Without this info I just have to assume it's some guy in a box expected to review 1000 pictures an hour and gets scrutinized if he doesn't click at least 10% positive. So he's just counting 1 positive 9 negatives.
It is a per-signator per-bank per-type per-POD
If you own a device with builtin software that synchronizes part of the data on it to the cloud then it was never truly yours to begin with**

Fixed it for you. I hope you are not implying that Google, whose bread and butter has been selling personal information, has resisted the temptation for all these years?

I use Apple and it's an informed choice. I am pretty realistic about their practices. And realistically we don't have a choice. Either you use a smartphone and it's a Swiss cheese of security vulnerabilities -- worst of which are embedded in the device on purpose! -- or you don't use a smartphone at all. This is the era we're living in.

I hope that custom ROM Android communities can win and give us back some freedom but I am skeptical. Still, I am open to try some of the de-bloated Xiaomi ROMs at one point. Or maybe put LineageOS / PostmarketOS on them.
As a back-end engineer I can't understand this outrage.

Apple's approach is less intrusive than Google and Microsoft since they don't touch your photos in iCloud except when you passed threshold and Apple workers will have technical ability to decrypt your detected (not regular) photos and manually compare with images from the database. Also iPhone doesn't trigger photo scanning if you don't upload them to iCloud.

From technical and privacy standpoint they have the best approach and it seems people are mad don't even understanding what Apple is doing.

Android users never cared but when news come to Apple everyone is losing their shit. I can't believe people are that weird.
California’s climate nomads from the 2018 Camp fire
Pretty sure they can infer your normal sleep schedule and, after your phone has fully charged (1h to 3h after you fall asleep) they can freely use it as a P2P computing device.

They already do, the feature is called “Optimized Batter Charging”. It charges the battery to 80% and only does the full charge a bit before you usually start using the phone. You’ll find the setting in the battery health section.
Apple is going to scan images you download too, not just ones you take with your camera. Leaving their ecosystem is way more important than just getting a standalone camera.
Nit: Switzerland as a country is a semi-direct democracy not a direct democracy. Only 2 cantons fulfil the criteria for the classical definition of direct democracy.
7m-Wingspan Flying Pterosaur Discovered in Queensland
Agreed in principle. But in this particular case, I think it's difficult to exaggerate the badness of this scare. This strikes me as one of the "Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it" kind of things.

Like with the TSA and the no-fly list. Civil liberties groups said it was going to be abused, and they said so well before any actual abuse had occurred. But they weren't overreacting, and they weren't exaggerating. They were right. Senator Ted Kennedy even wound up on that list at one point.
No, the 'technology' knows nothing of the nature of what it processes. It can be adapted for any purpose.

A slippery slope problem I see with privacy starting with a clear-cut, 'yes we should' use case, is then we go on to another clear-cut case, maybe terrorism, whatever the second one is, then it's a pattern. I don't trust the process, people that administer, and other people that influence the process.
Where are you getting this from? That’s simply not true. It’s perfectly legal to “store images as E2E encrypted”
It easily happens that employees do whatever it takes to get their internal tool to show the right thing, or use an automated tool, without ensuring they don't destroy or duplicate existing data. (made-up example: someone is refining the mapping of streets, but destroys information about adjacent/connected footpaths in the process because they don't matter for their delivery-vehicle use case. Or maps street types as they would in country A, but in country B a different norm has been established, so the edits don't fit the surrounding data)

Data quality can be a problem, where the company data source does not match reality (anymore). Or it's difficult for the community to verify your data and be convinced your quality is good, especially if there are other concerns about your edits.

OpenStreetMap operates on soft consensus and can have multiple acceptable ways of doing a thing. Mass-editing that converts one form to other is frowned upon unless wide agreement that one way is deprecated has been sought. Often related to the first point, when company tooling prefers one style or employees only have been taught about one method, but in an area the other mapping style is widely used.

Similarly, communication to resolve conflicts can be lacking: if another editor challenges what you are doing (because they think you made a mistake or are overstepping norms), you need to react and fairly consider their point. OSM has clear expectations that if you are doing coordinated edits you clearly identify and announce your work and respect feedback.

Data sources/licenses can be a concern: what you find acceptable to import into your company database might not be acceptable to include into OpenStreetMap, and how does the community tell that your data is good and won't get the project in trouble later?
Yes it's absolutely hyperbole to compare the racist policy of apartheid to reasonable restrictions on people who voluntarily choose to avoid vaccines for mostly-nonsense reasons.

Do you also oppose driver's license restrictions? Or existing pre-covid vaccine requirements? I struggle to see how these new restrictions are so onerous.
Thanks for the commentary and link - I also searched high and low but could not find the paper. My understanding is the study is still ongoing so perhaps it hasn't been published yet? If you happen to find it though please do share.
I am confused. Do you want to code or do you want to do an MSc ? You don't need MSc to code or learn to code. So make sure you are clear on what it is that you really want because the opportunity cost of a degree is very high. Almost always, a degree is of no use if want to code. You can self learn and get a job.

Why not start in this semi-tech role at the startup and show them that you want to do more slowly. Perhaps they will let you as startups as scrappy and good ones will give you the opportunity to excel. You get to buy the house and code. Win win :)
You will be hard pressed to find actual useful alternatives that work at scale to most of these.

Plastic alone is a big one and most alternatives can only be used for very small niche areas compared to the flexibility of plastic.

Medicine have no alternatives, electronics, windmills, solar cells etc. No alternatives.
I would guess that 90% does not include R&D and is only about the general production costs like from manufacturing and building. So with scaling up (if they don't do R&D but just add a plant) it should be 90%.

It's a good question though, perhaps worth asking them.
> today the scanning is only for images uploaded to iCloud, and only for CSAM

This, to me, would be exponentially less privacy invasive as I’ve come to assume all major cloud hosting providers implement something like this (look at Google Drive), but Apple has said that the scanning is done on-device, meaning whether or not you upload your photo library to iCloud, your local photos will be scanned with an on-device database of hashes.

Essentially iOS photos now implement a direct API call to the feds with some vague “human verification” layer if you go above an unknown threshold
The aim is globally, we're working on speeding it up and cleaning out trains and water... We'll probably finish the US within a few days and move on to the EU or other places.
I’m anti-crypto cause not enough people can understand how it works as a value store.

It’s fascist to peddle what is effectively magic as truth of reality when it’s just another man-made concept power brokers will (already have?), manipulate for their outsized gain.

Nation state money schemes are low tech and well known; they haven’t changed much. We don’t need to make a meta-value store to exchange for nation state currency, at great material expense. I’d propose the opposite; we stop treating people like concepts we must pressure to import our perspectives and preferences.

It’s unverified, but I’m pretty sure if we just made medicine, offered education, and built technology for those ends rather than moved at the drumbeat of elder rich to validate their once youthful existence, and pipe dreams none of us will live to verify came true, humanity would be in a much better place.

Talk about energy vampires; don’t focus on living a varied and full life! Focus on validating the rich! Focus on consuming what we can make the best margin on! Watch our ads so you never forget us!

And then once they’re empowered… my privacy! My freedom of speech!

Nice work.
I'm in the opposite situation. I setup a Minecraft server and outsourced the hard work to my kids. They are toiling away for a couple of hours most days building all kinds of elaborate structures. I just drop in to say a few words of appreciation and go mining in search of diamonds.

They do cajole me into hunting food for them sometimes though.
I do think that a lot of folk's concerns around "clean history" would go away if --first-parent was more often a default they reached for (especially in GUI tools; it's fun work to draw "subway diagrams" of the git DAG, but it would be a better user experience in many cases to instead do a boring old master/detail drilldown starting with --first-parent and then exploring the DAG out from there).
Goodbye All Apple Devices

Hello All Linux Devices
> Well, the 40% are certainly not going be convinced if the "first United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate" flew on his private jet 16 times to places like Martha's Vineyard since January.

Why?

I mean, okay, getting angry about hypocrisy is fun. But why would you allow someone else's hypocrisy to sway your view of what is or is not objectively true? That is not critical thinking.
see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller

This has nothing to do with Linux PIDs!
MA coronavirus breakthrough deaths: 73% had underlying conditions, median age 82
I have no problem with Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.. Removing and reporting illegal content from their servers. My issue is with Apple doing it on your device or machine.

When did Apple become law enforcement?
> now exists

Is this true? I've always assumed apple can always do that (if they somehow needed to).
>Is there some evidence you have of this plan? Sounds like this is just a fear you have.

The EARN IT act. It may not be Apple's plan, Apple's plan, as you suggest, might only be for doing scanning on encrypted iCloud and excluding encrypted iMessage. But what Apple will be pushed to do after that is pretty clear.
Generate art from any text with deep learning
Excellent content Josh! Something about being able to adjust knobs makes me enjoy diving deep into a subject. I am excited for more of your course/posts.
> Every environmental damage can be offset.

Loss of biodiversity? Sea level change? Loss of ice sheets? You can't pay a tax somewhere and unshatter that glass.

> solving global warming is something that can be achieved without outlawing anything, including SUVs, plastic garbage and wasteful lawns?

Oh, not even close, not if even if there were less than 1 billion humans on Earth. None of those things is sustainable in the long run.
Perseverance Mars rover's first rock sample goes missing
I am no fan of the ongoing Tether fraud and share this view, however, instead of cynically declaring this to be the case, it'd be nice to see evidence of that occurring right now.
I didn’t mention Google at all, not sure why you brought it up
That’s actually what I’m looking at so far. Thanks for the gallery link - some nice shots in there
> Of course it was.

Poe's law [1] -- it didn't seem like satire when I read it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
> The key difference is that we allow you to invest all your money and still give you instant access to cash. With traditional banks/brokerage accounts, yes, you can invest your money, but if you invest it all, you can't go to the ATM and withdraw money.

Yes, you can. Every single one of my investment accounts comes with a debit card that can access both uninvested cash and take a loan against the value of my securities, which I can either repay by selling the securities or by transferring cash.
What I don't understand is, this (broken McFlurry machines) hurts McDonald's reputation. Why one Earth do they put up with this? They are large enough they should not have to.
> Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job.

Some lack morals and are dishonest, drunk, cruel, barbarous, and selfish. Some people survived a stroke, or fighting addiction, or live in pain. Some people come from a bad environment, as in, people are trying to kill them. Give any those people mastery of the concept, they'll still mess up the job. Odds are the job is messed up more from those than just lacking the concept. Don't have those, and lack the concept, job still likely gets done.

> it is more the property of a political culture than of the individuals in it, needing to be tackled at that level

No. Leave people alone. There's no changing people. Replace them. Meddle, you provoke them, wake them up, and make it so much worse.

Your argument is very arbitrary. Has anyone taken a good long look at the war on poverty like they do to the war on drugs? War on poverty failed greater under the same criticism. It just doesn't reward everyone with a license to be drunk all the time. Education, or civil rights, or multiculturalism, or activist celebrity governing of fools telling everyone what to do from far far away, ever ask if those are stupid? Why not? Just because it makes you upset?
If we are going to be totally paranoid then a lack of pictures on your mobile phone could be seen as an indication that you have something to hide!
I don't think you read the summary. The mechanism is pretty clear:

1. Compared with a flat tax, a progressive tax regime expands the economy because poor people spend more of their money than rich people.

2. This expansionary effect gets multiplied because this spending recirculates around and around (the "standard fiscal multiplier" in the summary).

3. Rich people accrue most of the benefits of the expansionary effect.

4. These benefits are actually larger than the initial increase in tax burden in step 1), so while everyone ends up better off, rich people end up _more_ better off than poor people. Therefore the progressive tax scheme has the net effect of boosting income inequality.

It's not a perpetual motion machine, the gain starts because rich and poor people having different consumption rates. You could only do this until you run out of tax dollars being paid by poor people.

Really, though, what the paper is proposing is saying is that rich people benefit quite a lot from expansionary policies, so much so that they can even afford to pay to get them started. I don't think this is very controversial or even counterintuitive. The thing to realize is that the paper starts with the claim that _progressive taxation makes the economy bigger_. If you accept that, it makes sense that the rich would benefit the most from it.
I can't think of any newsletter I have read that does reporting, as distinct from commentary/analysis.
I really wonder about their motives for this. It really has destroyed their image to the point that I'm thinking about abandoning the platform if nothing changes.

This will not just be about CP. In many countries this will instantly be used to detect any kind of dissent. In the US it will take longer, but eventually I can imagine "misinformation" as determined by some stupid algorithm flagging you for quiet social credit style lists. What constitutes misinformation will change with the political winds.

Hey... maybe we can let people select which reality they wish to be enforced! Maybe Republicans can get flagged if they spread memes about universal health care while Democrats can be flagged for discussing LGBT rights!

The only thing I can imagine is that Apple is facing enormous pressure from behind the scenes to become part of the panopticon. Private companies can't really resist governments.
> which is quite justified by the way, I am using iPhones for 4 years now and they've consistently won over any of the 13 Android devices that I've used in the years before (and sometimes during).

I find this a bit shocking. Were all of these Android low battery devices?

I don't have a good point of comparison, as I've only used Android on phones, but there are a lot of Android devices with really large batteries and very long battery life. It'd be pretty amazing if iOS were beating them in the real world.
Democracy cannot work without free acces to information. However, most people wont care about it. Especially nowadays when public opinions are shaped by social networks with censorship and sensations. We can implement all kind of ideologies on masses very fast. So direct democracy could be more dangerous than you can imagine.
How to Get a Dysfunctional Team Back on Track
That’s a completely different feature than the one we’re discussing. These things were announced together, but they are not the same.

Nobody is objecting to opt-in clientside content filtering.
> When has government willingly returned liberties taken under emergency pretenses?

How about the dozens of times already since the start of this pandemic? Every time case rates drop even slightly, they've rushed to re-open businesses, eliminate mask rules and limitations on gatherings.
I don't really want to comment on that. I think that's a thing that people should work with a doctor on and I don't think that what works for me would work for everyone.

I will say that It took a bit to get it right, and the best thing you can do there is try to keep notes every day so that you can look back and say 20/30 days this worked and keep track of it on a larger scale.
Dunaliella Salina
A lot of people seem to be forgetting/not know about the other aspect of what Apple will be doing, which is scanning iMessage pics sent or received by minors for nudity. If it's detected, their parents will be notified and have the ability to view the pic in question.
Not a Zig programmer, but that looks horrible.
I wouldn’t stop where Ben Thompson drew the privacy line between “your device versus the cloud”.

Your content should be your content regardless of where it lives.

-Photos
-Texts
-Social Posts
-Notes, Reminders

These are all what make up a person’s life. At one point in the not so distant future all of our data will live in the cloud, are we then property of the cloud providers?
phone's are just phones. At this point multiple companies and potential governments are monitoring or have the capability to monitor it.

But computers are another story. So far we still maintain some privacy there thanks to Linux.
A PID tuning guide with almost no math.
But very important thing to consider when making an system identification test indeed.
China Xiaomi Overtook Samsung, Apple in June Smartphones Sales: Counterpoint