skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> are bound in the US to do this. By law

I keep seeing this asserted, but there is never any legal citation. What exactly compels a software company to make their software product scan for CSAM?

I get that a service provider like cloud storage may need to scan what they themselves are storing to avoid possessing such material themselves. And iCloud could scan uploaded blobs all day to fulfill their legal department's recommendation.

But what exactly compels a software developer to include a content scanning function in code they distribute? And does this requirement also apply to the authors of rclone?
New Material Inspired by Chain Mail Transforms from Flexible to Rigid on Command
I know vi very well - but for programming, these days I use JetBrains, which for me is like having an assistant to do all the rote work that doesn’t actually contribute to the task I’m concentrating on.

Manually adding imports is not virtuous. Renaming a function is not virtuous. Searching across files in a project is not virtuous. They are just chores. That’s what we have computers for.

There are plenty of reasons people choose their editors and I fully respect those choices. But after using IDEs like JetBrains and VSCode for the last few years, vi feels like editing a video file using a hex editor.
Your "most likely" theory seems extremely fringe with absolutely zero evidence. I can see how it's possible but it seems vastly more complicated than just a lab leak.
The challenge with this analogy is that the rich countries could unilaterally solve this asteroid problem. If that was true for global warming, I think we might have a chance, but not only isn't it true, the rich countries don't even _matter_ at this point.

(Yes, they matter _per capita_ but that's a fairness discussion not a capability discussion.)
> "there’s YouTube footage of a totally incompetent pat down of one of the 9-11 hijackers"

Do you have a link? I can't find this.
Yeah that's true, although to do some sort of mass scanning stealthily they would need a system exactly like what they built with this, if they tried to upload everything for scanning the data use would be enormous and give it away.

I guess it comes down to that I don't trust an OS vendor that ships an A.I. based snitch program that they promise will be dormant.
I'm not sure what you mean by chunks of images. My understanding is that it's a perceptual hash meant to determine if it's the same image, with minor adjustments like cropping or adjusting the colors. There is no AI/ML classification running.

Apple says false positives occur at a rate of one in a trillion or something like that. Someone elsewhere in the thread calculated that this would not be frequent enough for false positives to trigger a manual review.
Given that his role as a father was central to him creating the first bear, what word should they have used that would have conveyed the same amount of information? Are we really going to pretend that "Man makes toys" is a superior informational choice to "Dad makes teddies?"
Related

Modded GNU Nano using ycmd code completion and IntelliSense.

https://github.com/orsonteodoro/nano-ycmd

Long live nano
For me, nowadays there is only one thing that really sets text editors apart and that is: what is the largest file I can open with that editor?
IMO, people largely DO care. If you ask the average Joe - is online privacy important to you, the majority would obviously say yes. Why then don't they stop using FaceCrook?

1. The penalty of social ostracism due to the network effect. This is a severe punishment to most humans - particularly in today's socially disconnected world. Without these apps, a large # of people would not have any contact with much of their social circle - including family.

2. Learned helplessness. I think that many people have just given up. Even if they knew how to fight for their privacy, they see time and time again that money always wins.
Packages in front of houses are crime magnets, literally the lowest-effort theft target. Is there actually a problem with crime around these lockers? Why would anyone try that rather than an ATM?
But they’re young, so their risk is minimal, and if everybody’s going to get exposed to the virus anyway (that’s what they’re saying now), you aren’t protecting anybody.
You seem to be missing the fact that they're only scanning for existing images in a database, not detecting brand new images. Grandma's photo won't be in the database unless she uploads it somewhere that reports it.
Yeah, it's weird. Speaking purely personally, whether the scanning happens immediately-before-upload on my phone or immediately-after-upload in the cloud doesn't really make a difference to me. But this is clearly not a universal opinion.

The most-optimistic take on this I can see is that this program could be the prelude to needing to trust less people. If Apple can turn on e2e encryption for photos, using this program as the PR shield from law enforcement to be able to do it, that'd leave us having to only trust the OS vendor.
The exact technical details of how an app executes code is a lot less interesting to an end user than whether or not it uses the native UI. The former has almost no noticeable impact on user experience, while the latter can cause tons of annoyance.
I think this is the right answer. I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I have friends and colleagues who are so non-technical that they can barely use a command line, so I find myself wanting to make tools for obscure purposes that would also be really easy to use.

I liked VB back in the day for the ease to being able to throw together a simple GUI quickly though I don't miss the verbosity of Basic. There's a lot of RAD options available these days but few have hit that sweet spot of being relatively powerful while also accessible to first timers and bundled with a good variety of examples and helpers.
Yes, you had to trust Apple, but the huge difference with this new thing is that hiding behind CSAM gives them far more (legally obligated, in fact --- because showing you the images those hashes came from would be illegal) plausible deniability and difficulty of verifying their claims.

In other words, extracting the code and analysing it to determine that it does do what you expect is, although not easy, still legal. But the source, the CSAM itself, is illegal to possess, so you can't do that verification much less publish the results. It is this effective legal moat around those questioning the ultimate targets of this system which people are worried about.
> The intuition that I've built up is that most of the time that you have a debate that goes on for more than about 5 minutes, there's a problem at a different abstraction level.

I strongly agree. Also, that's poetically put. I'm saving this in my quotes file.
FISA is from the 1970s and covered wiretapping.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveil...
I get a broken link ("unauthorized"). Here's a cached version that works,

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tech.m...
Which country are you in? These hornets have only recently appeared in the US and well, when you say "suck for the native species"... We're trying to avoid that here.
The US Dept. of Justice has an Antitrust Division[1], along with a page that details how and why[2] to get in touch with them.

The FTC has the Bureau of Competition[3].

Each individual state has an Attorney General office that will hear these types of complaints, and some of them have explicit antitrust divisions[4].

[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr

[2] https://www.justice.gov/atr/report-violations

[3] https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-competi...

[4] https://www.naag.org/issues/antitrust/
Search "dark side of meditation" and you'll find a bunch of articles.

Here's an organization dedicated to helping people who've been destabilized by meditation: https://www.cheetahhouse.org/
All good and well but what do you do when Google decides to the same in few years time when this has blown over?
I feel like I wrote my question in a way that indicates a lack of React positions, but it's more about that most companies are looking for only React developers, and everyone else seems to be react developers. I don't struggle with React, it's pretty easy actually, and I have a small amount of professional experience writing it, but because it can boil down to basically who completes the test and who completes it fastest, I don't even know if it's worth trying to compete with everyone who's most likely been doing React exclusively since they got out of bootcamp.
I agree. I think this is a straightforward dumb mistake, most likely.
Nano is a great little editor, however one thing I have not figured out yet is to achieve a true cross platform .nanorc file when dealing with paths, windows vs posix, things like include directives and backup dir.
This is a difficult topic because it's so fraught with misunderstanding and complexity, but I'd like to share a few thoughts, not all from the OP but from this topic in general.

1. Meditation as a tool for self-improvement

Meditation, especially and specifically Buddhist meditation, has been sold to Westerners as a tool for self improvement for the purpose of "getting a leg up" and as another commenter pointed out, this is self-defeating.

Buddhism, as taught by the Buddha himself, was about getting off the hamster wheel. It's about a prince who stepped down, but also who did not try to somehow get a leg up through suffering. But using Buddhism to get ahead in the corporate world is ultimately fraught with a contradiction of clarity, honesty, kindness, etc. with the tools often used in business- deception, exploitation, etc.- tools that are enforced by the constraints placed on corporate leadership.

2. Mindfulness as a tool of blame

One of the paradoxes of Buddhism, but specifically Zen, is the idea that the practice teaches you to be able to handle enormous stress. Practioners are taught to stay in meditation through physical distress, through mental distress, even while being hit with sticks, etc. This is a form of training.

What we have seen is that some unscrupulous people are using this as a way to exploit workers. "If you're stressed out, that's on you for not being strong enough/meditating enough." rather than address the working conditions.

3. Meditation as a badge

People will misuse anything as a badge, and meditation is no exception. There are meditation "jocks" (for lack of a better word)- people who will go to retreats and push themselves to meditate in harsh conditions or for long periods. They will then come back and use this as a signal to others of their greatness. It's paradoxical to the ideals of Buddhism, but it nonetheless exists, and it's used in ways that other signals often are- as a way to create cliques and networks.

4. Inwards looking as the only direction

Looking inward is great, but meditation and mindfulness are not substitutions for other types of self improvement, including therapy.

All of those can be true and it can be true that meditation is great and helpful. Any practice can be too much, or weaponized.

Those are just some of my thoughts on the topic.
Just call and have a beekeeper remove it. It's free, and you don't have to dump cans on insecticide into your living environment (and the local insects living environment).
Ranked: Fastest Growing Cities
That isn't the argument at all. What Apple can't have happen without major reputational damage is get caught doing it without telling its customers.

Thus this is seen as a marketing backdoor to the actual backdoor. This is seen as a ploy that later gives Apple the plausible deniability argument that the government is making them do it (other forms of content) even though they created the means (on device scanning) for the government to exploit.

Why limit it to content that will be uploaded to iCloud? Why limit iMessage scanning to kids? Why not also let the government know? Why limit it to child porn since the system works for any image? Why limit it to 30 hits?
"Train users"? Why not just call them passengers?
> Does nobody remember the iCloud hack?

The iCloud hack was a few hundred cases of spear phishing.

How does your concern differ from physical access to the phone by an unauthorized user?

I think the law is the problem. Simple possession of that type of content is criminalized, as opposed to requiring the traditional elements of a crime to prosecute it.
That depends on what kind of companies you want to work for.

If you look outside of FAANG (companies in the rest of the world with unattractive stock), finding good engineers is a problem and most codebases are filled with horror.

The plus side is that, once you're a good engineer, you get little stress/pressure and a lot of leverage on flexibility (eg. remote in cheap places, in pre covid times), even if you won't make as much as FANG engineers.
Also, interviews don't require 2 months of preparation every time you want to jump ship.

I'm sure if you're paying FAANG money you can find plenty of good engineers happy to do backflips.
Speaking cynically, I think that them having announced this program like they did makes it less likely that they have any sort of nefarious plans for it. There's a lot of attention being paid to it now, and it's on everyone's radar going forwards. If they actually wanted to be sneaky, we wouldn't have known about this for ages.
I did build a arch Linux install using cat <<EOF, grep and sed. But golly it gets tedious
Yep there sure is something fishy about this whole thing. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot...
I’m not sure why this is so hard for pageandrew to grasp. I assume they think since anyone can register and use these sites, they think that makes them “public” when in fact people who register with and use these sites are paying for the privilege; with their personal data, their attention, their clicks, and their manufactured outrage that drive engagement, precisely what pageandrew is trying to do here.

User pageandrew can set up their own stall by the web public area and publish whatever they wish, discuss whatever they wish with whomever they wish, also censor whoever they wish. It’s their stall, their property. Just as twitter etc are the property of others. Pageandrew.com will most likely not have the views or clicks though, and that’s what they need to peddle their outrage.
No, the threat model differs entirely. Local scanning introduces a whole host of single points of failure, including the 'independent auditor' & involuntary scans, that risk the privacy & security of all local files on a device. Cloud scanning largely precludes these potential vulnerabilities.
One act expresses disagreement, the other - cancel culture - is tied to getting a person fired from their job or otherwise cutting off their ability to feed themselves. One of these is vastly more significant than the other.
Theres another GNU "pico-like" editor called moe. Its written by the maintainer of ed and some other GNU projects.

Not much written about it.
I think the number of people who care about a native UI has dropped to effectively zero over the last decade. The ship's sailed.
No, architecturally there's no reason to do it on the client side. You're uploading a photo to iCloud, encrypted with a key that Apple controls. The only reason to use even a little bit of battery power to do the check on the client, and to do this elaborate song-and-dance around only notifying Apple if there are a certain number of positive matches, is that it creates the (false) impression that Apple couldn't just check your photos on the server side if they wanted to.

It's basically engineering with the goal of creating a perception of privacy rather than actual privacy. I don't really care that much about Apple policing what you upload to iCloud, but this disingenuous architecture does annoy me a bit, and there's also the added insult of having a device in your pocket that by design works against its owner (reminiscent of "treacherous computing"). These problems would go away if they just did the check on the server side.
I think you misunderstood the point you were responding to. I don't think they were suggested there are right leaning sites with similar type of bias, I think they were suggesting Snopes may have articles with similar right-friendly bias.
All the meditation I've done taught me that it was about being aware of what was happening in the present moment - i.e. mindfulness.

Most of the meditation I've studied taught me that quieting one's mind was not the goal and further not possible.
I can't remember the last time I used vi and was unable to use arrow keys. That includes typical Linux installations (Vim, Busybox), Solaris (default is Vim, oddly, but I just confirmed arrow keys work in /usr/xpg4/bin/vi), and various BSDs (nvi).

I'm not a power vi user, though. I usually use JOE (thanks/blame to '90s Slackware education), but occasionally vi is more convenient. It wouldn't be nearly as convenient without the arrow keys as I never learned proper typing technique.
There's an inherent difficulty in making difficult things easy. I think we're more likely to improve the ergonomics of writing software rather than make it easier for others to translate business logic into code.

I like to think that making software easier to write will just free up more capital to be spent on other software problems. I haven't seen many software projects where the client doesn't compromise features due to budget or time.
And yet comments on many substacks like Greenwald's are for paying subscribers only who are going to overwhelming be supporters in agreement. It's almost like he's policing his platform and providing a space space.
Actually saw this in depth linked article the other day about how Real Estate inadvertently become used for money laundering (Hint: Lobbying)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/how-kle...
More context: Afghan government also has Taliban backers internally.

These desire more for Taliban to attack Pakistan instead, and they indeed fund, and facilitate them to do so.
That's a pretty bold comment for such a large site... did you have any good experiences with other folks from Moto?
> Java feels playful and flexible.

Insane that anyone could say this with a straight face
There's surprisingly high backlash on /r/apple
Worth remember for comparison that the Kármán line is at 100 kilometers. ISS orbits at ~400 kilometers. So, if such a hole were to appear on the surface of the planet, even the crew of the ISS would have a very bad day.
In Hebrew (with subtitles in English and Arab), worth a mention I think (free to watch)

"VeHaaretz Hayta Tohu vaVohu": History of the Land of Israel from prehistoric times to the Ottoman period.

https://www.kan.org.il/program/?catid=64&subcatid=427

Really recommended, and does not have much of the epic/religious vibe
documentaries on the history of Israel often have. Also note that it stops at the Ottoman empire so does not get into the history of the state of Israel.

(The title is from Genesis 1:2.
It roughly translates to 'and then the earth was chaos')
But that risk assessment is right. Why would a black guy worry about COVID, some 1/10000 risk? They face a higher chance of getting arrested for a crime they didn’t commit, a higher chance of getting murdered, and a much higher chance of getting laid.
Surely they could do their image matching against all photos in iCloud without telling you in advance, and then you'd be in exactly the same boat? Google was doing this for email as early as 2014, for instance, with the same concerns about its extensibility raised by the ACLU: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/04/google-ch...

So in a world where Apple pushes you to set up icloud photos by default, and can do whatever they want there, and other platforms have been doing this sort of of thing for years, it's a bit startling that "on device before you upload" vs "on uploaded content" triggers far more discontent?

Maybe it's that Apple announced it at all, vs doing it relatively silently like the others? Apple has always had access to every photo on your device, after all.
You’re being a little unfair to the commenter here.

The western interpretation of meditation is that the rat race can stress you out so meditate once in a while so you can keep running. Hence the name mindfulness based stress reduction.

This can help a lot of people but this was not what the Buddha was about. Buddhism goes far deeper and it’s understandable why they want to sell a more sanitized version. I can’t imagine a corporation paying for a spiritual practice that would make their employees question if working their lives away was really worth it.

The Buddha wanted us to transcend ourselves. To realize the illusory nature of most of our conceptions of ourselves. It’s not an app or a success technique. It’s something beyond all such ideas.
The perceptual hashing are being applied to a chunk of the image - not the whole image but some part of it.

These chunks contain less entropy than the whole image so necessarily have higher chance of triggering false positives than whole-image comparisons.
This is over by Florida Atlantic University, originally built to be a lot harder to get into than most well-known institutions at the time. Didn't offer much undergraduate, just upper level only for top transfer students.

Things have changed, the campus plus the airport were a former airbase carved out of the wilderness and used during the Cuban Missle Crisis.

Boca was a small resort town on the coast and you had to go way west of town into the boonies before you came upon FAU out in the woods. Go much further west and it was basically everglades after that.

One summer as a teenager a buddy and myself were riding horses about that far west of Boca Lake. Nothing but pines & palmettos for miles, it would not be fun to try and hike it because you need to be up on the horse to see over the palmettos.

But this was not like any other summer. We came upon an unfamiliar clearing.

As we got closer it loomed larger, it was zero vegetation, nothing but dirt with the rest of the woods still there as a wall on the other side of the field.

We rode on out into the cleared land, this was no farm, you could see for miles to the north and south, yes we were in the middle of I-95 on horses, but no worries we were the earliest passenger traffic and there was no pavement or any way to get there by car yet.

Well when they built the IBM location it was widely known to be for secret projects, so it was recognized to be appropriate for it to be like the Pentagon, except of course a hexagon instead.

My grandma wanted me to work there, some of her clients knew some of the secrets, she was a fortune-teller.

I went to the university instead.
for screen shots, I mucked around with a bunch and ended up using lightshot https://app.prntscr.com/en/index.html and a tool called GifCam to take animated Gif screenshots.
Ask HN: What feature phone do you use and recommend?
I am struggling to find a good feature phone to buy. Any ideas?