skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What probability do you ascribe to that reviewer clicking the wrong button, be it out of habit/zoning out (because the system usually shows them true positives), cheating (always clicking "yes" because it's usually correct and allows them to get paid without having to look at horrible images all day), mistake, wrong instructions (e.g. thinking that all images of children, or all porn including adult porn, should be flagged), confusion, or malice?

1 in 10? 1 in 100? 1 in 1000? Pick a number, you now have an estimate of how much room for error there is in the whole system.

If you consider 0.15 lives ruined on average per year acceptable, and the reviewers have a 1-in-1000 error rate, then the rest of the system has to make less than 1-in-10-million mistakes per year. And I'm pretty sure 1-in-1000 for the reviewers is very, very optimistic, even if you do quality checks, control for fatigue, etc.

On the other hand, hopefully there are some safeguards after the reviewers (e.g. human prosecutors who don't blindly rubber stamp). But my point is: The room for error in anything done at scale that has severe consequences is extremely small.
There wasn’t such a hurdle before or in the counterfactual where they built infrastructure to scan iCloud while also keeping iCloud Backups for every device.
Or like MTV no longer showing music videos 24/7
It apparently wasn't hard to "discover" the fact that this CSAM database can and will change over time. In fact, Apple explained this in detail as well as how they are attempting to avoid the problem of governments abusing the system. Are you suggesting that a different software update might be even easier to discover?
Quantum Computing Startups Draw Record Investment
If you like the state so much why don't you renounce your citizenship in whichever developed nation you currently reside eschew your money, and ride out life in China? Maybe India? Vietnam?
So this can be a good opportunity for practical test. Let the workers and writers organize and create their own magazine. Use their own funds (or borrow from like minded investors) to execute their own vision.
CPI is showing a 45% increase in used car prices over the last year.
Absolutely no one involved -- no one who conceived of this effort, no one who implemented it, and no one who defends it -- was under the impression that you couldn't get around this by not storing your images on iCloud. The idea is that it will catch pedophiles who aren't careful or tech-savvy enough, and such people exist, trust me. I suspect pedophiles aren't especially smarter than average, and most normal people aren't even going to be aware something like this exists.
>citing mounting pressure from banking partners and payment providers

Based on the tweet, I would presume their ability accept payment via the established payment networks is being threatened.
First thing that came to mind as well.
Why the fuck do we not have a system to harvest/kill/detonate already deployed satellites??

Thats pretty fucking simple science, is it not?
They're doubling that this year, so 4b?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237666
I feel that it's the kind of scheme that requires too much cooperation from too many people and organizations with conflicting incentives. It's possible some countries would not want the hashes from certain other governments in the db at all. And then what? I may be wrong, but I also believe we can know how many hashes are in the db, which means that if it contains extra hashes from dozens of governments, it would become suspiciously large relative to how many CSAM images we know exist. Furthermore, in this scenario the db cannot be auditable, so the scheme falls apart as soon as some rogue judge decides to order an audit.

I honestly don't think Apple wants to deal with any of that crap and that they would rather silently can the system and do exactly what everybody else does than place themselves in the line of fire when their own unique trademark system is being abused.
I guess I just don't understand how payment processing works in this domain: are you saying MasterCard is basically saying that their credit cards cannot be used to purchase adult services such as these?
mounting pressure from banking
partners and payment providers

HN is often sceptical about use cases for crypto beyond speculation.

This looks like one.
People understand just fine. They understand that pretty much everything they own these days has a computer chip inside it.

Using a simple example people understand they can't get consumer electronics like Xboxs, Playstations, and Switches because of the electronics shortage. People understand there is a car part shortage due to electronics. These aren't high information people talking to me about this. It's understood there's a chip shortage right now by the general population.

People are fine with and nobody really argues that America should support a steel industry. Frame the argument the same way and most people would be ok with supporting a technology infrastructure local to America.

The other issue that hasn't been touched on is that a chip subsidy will probably only benefit 1 or 2 states, where as agriculture and other commodity level subsidies get spread out so there's less political will to make it happen. (along with a zero sum attitude in politics that if X state is getting money it means my state is not getting that money)

It's actually a pretty critical geopolitical issue, sense there's a real chance that China makes a move on Taiwan soon (soon being within the next 10 years), which will result in either the destruction of alot of the chip infrastructure or China with global control over chip infrastructure.

I'm kinda surprised countries like Japan and Korea aren't making moves to address this by starting their own fabs. (Maybe there are?)
Yeah, people underestimate the complexity of chip production. It is not one fab that you need to build, it is an entire ecosystem around it.

EU has lately been thinking about localizing chip production here, but they seem to be stuck in the same fallacy: we need a huge, gleaming fab on our soil. No, that is just the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately.
Tumblr is exactly what I had in mind. It will be a much less popular place with other copycats just taking over on that business model.
> As for why we do so much at runtime, my assertion is we check at runtime that which is determined at runtime. When getting data from outside the static program, there is little help the static type system can offer. So, deep in your system, get things out of strings and primitives as soon as you can. Don't pass a string username, pass a username. This gets you essentially what you want, but flags where the invalid value could have come from, as well as where it could have been used. And lets you add on other validations. AuthenticatedUsername and UnauthenticatedUsername, for example.

See, but that's exactly what I'm saying. Get out of primitives ASAP. I just want our languages to allow us to do that with minimal ceremony and minimal performance cost. Most languages fail on at least one of those. As a result, most developers don't do it, and I'm stuck interacting with their code.
Gopher – NFT
They use payment processors that specialize in adult content - who charge exorbitant fees for the privilege. Adult payment processors charge 15-20% vs the 2.9%+30¢ Stripe charges, and is nowhere near as nice to use.
Negative Vs positive is about the eigenvalue of the feed back loop not about the weighting how it affects external signals
Paying with a Credit Card? That’s Going to Cost You
It is a hard requirement that my two non-profit organizations have a FaceCrook presence. It is the same for a majority of businesses. This is clearly a monopoly position.

The level of service that they are providing to the user pales in comparison to the value of the data they extract in exchange. There is clear harm to the users.

That this is not a simple case against them is a clear failing of the regulators and/or their laws.
For ideological consistency, are you dumping every service provider that scans the contents of your account and reports offending data to law enforcement?
A bit funny to have a paper on arxiv.org investigating archive.org (and europarchive.org and archive-it.org and so on).
Congratulations, you've blocked one virus.
Use Teamcity. There you can use Kotlin.
I always felt like adult websites were tech unsavvy. Like they usually designed the site with plenty of love and care, but the structures holding that design up felt notably behind-the-times. Got a take on that?
> why bother with fake CSAM hashes?

Because Apple has already built that functionality, and it exists? What alternative dragnet currently exists to identify iOS users who possess certain images? This would be code reuse.
I agree with violence, it is perhaps the one true natural monopoly, but the rest of the items on that list are very much up for debate.
Never saw those! My favourite mememory from that that game is when you open that door to the first bossfight, behind it waiting is huge guy with gatling guns instead of arms saying: "Guten Tag" befoee he start shooting.
This supposedly coming soon system should ideally be able to serve as the electronic payment utility.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...
It sounds like they'll basically continue to allow tasteful nudes, which is probably about half their content. So they're only killing an enormous fraction of their business, not the entire thing.
If they spend their time on Insta instead of FB, they switched.
You don't have to delete your account if it's enough to abandon it.
That it's not at all obvious that a circle maximizes the ratio area/boundary.
Just so you know, the original source of the expression would be The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

VOGON GUARD: I’ll mention what you said to my aunt.

[Airlock door closes and locks]

FORD: Potentially bright lad, I thought.

ARTHUR: We’re trapped now, aren’t we?

FORD: Er… Yes, we’re trapped.

ARTHUR: Well didn’t you think of anything?

FORD: Oh Yes.

ARTHUR: Yes?

FORD: But, unfortunately, it rather involved being on the other side of the airtight hatchway they’ve just sealed behind us.
Upcoming headline: "OnlyFans to close down business starting in November"
Poison is a matter of degree, and mining is the process of taking huge volumes of ore and concentrating the metals, so yes you can poison groundwater with material that was previously distributed in the ground
Considering how rampant and meaningless HOAs are I am not really sure things are better here too. My co-worker here has been fighting a losing battle for the past year to get solar panels on his roof.
Thanks for the introduction - that is a research line I might get stuck down for a few days!

Its a bit sad too see how the mainstream system pushes people way from this way of living. "It can be difficult to obtain a mortgage for an earthship home. Many banks are unwilling to lend money for earthship homes, since there are few (if any) comparable sales in the area the lender can use to determine the home’s value."

https://www.realtor.com/advice/buy/earthship-home/
> Why do you feel so attacked about the subject of this

> part of the issue - that these women are not being written about at the same rate as men.

The CBC article is plainly an (ignorant) attack on Wikipedia. You say yourself that the problem doesn't seem to lie at Wikipedia, so how is it acceptable to attack Wikipedia over it?
It's not like they have a choice. Their business was only
ever viable at the behest of their payment provider. The reason no one has made an OnlyFans before, and the reason why people have tried and failed, entirely comes down to this.
Nomad is so perfect for this. I've been meaning to blog about it somewhere.
I have a checklist to do every morning. The first item is "make coffee". I've been doing my checklist now for years.

Imagine if I had put an "eat that frog" item there instead. That checklist would be ancient history.
> Nobody wants their porn purchases to be public knowledge.

I'm curious about that, I agree that you can trace transactions of a wallet, but can you figure out who a wallet belongs to?
Advice for Those Considering Startup Employment Offers
Netherlands practically invented financial capitalism in the 16th through 18th century

And even here, you find that the Dutch also instituted the first real central bank[0], which laissez faire folks would tell you lead to panics and recessions.

Tulipmania[1] happened about twenty years later, but I'm open to believing that was a coincidence.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_Amsterdam

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Oh god I can’t believe I’m going to say this.

Crypto/Bitcoin, in keeping with the relationship the Internet and adult content have. Congrats Coinbase, Venmo, and others enabling censorship resistant crypto payments on your revenue bump.
Re: LitRPG. I've read a few, but I'd love some recommendations. Any you'd care to share?
Ten Years of Bootstrap
It sure sounds like this was forced on them by their payment processors, not that this was a voluntary move.

https://twitter.com/danprimack/status/1428420774449266691?s=...
Alien on Mars
Call it "providing financial services to a neglected/stigmatized sector of the entertainment industry and bringing the benefits of official banking and regulations", then. Yes my first comment was probably worded with an inflammatory bent, but this does genuinely seem like an underserved sector.

Akin to the problems legal marijuana grows and dispensaries have with accessing banking services (though in that case due to federal regs), the stances of the entrenched industry leaders seem to bring more negatives than would come from providing the needed services.
China or any government adding collisions would be to use Apple's system as a dragnet to find users possessing the offending images.

The way it would work is the government in question would submit legitimate CSAM but modified to produce a collision with a government target image. Looking at the raw image (or a derivative) a reviewer at Apple or ICMEC would see a CSAM image. The algorithm would see the anti-government image. So Apple scans Chinese (or whoever) citizens libraries, finds "CSAM" and reports them to ICMEC which then reports them to the government in question.

Every repressive government and some notionally liberal governments will eventually do this. It likely is already happening with existing PhotoDNA systems. The difference is that's being used by explicit sharing services where Apple's new system will search for any photo in a user's library regardless of it being "shared" explicitly.
> Using someone else's configurations kinda defeats the purpose.

No it doesn't. Vim itself is just a set of someone else's configurations. The important thing is that someone else's configurations can eventually become your configurations, but there's absolutely no reason to "start from scratch" unless you're particularly idiosyncratic.

Good artists copy, great artists steal. Bad artists do neither.
Most of which is posted in violation of copy right.
I don't know the history of why there was never a cellphone directory. There was never a monopoly controlling all those numbers for one thing as was originally the case with landlines--and regional monopolies after the Bell breakup.

I also suspect that by the time cellphones got big, the public overall wouldn't have been big on cellphones numbers being listed.
Not really, Toyota handled the shortage the best and was the last to cut production. The supply disruptions simply lasted too long to be possible to compensate for.
On what criteria do you base this?
Dupe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274
Twitter unable to dismiss underage sex trafficking TVPRA under Section 230 [pdf]
The ransomware group does not need to know the identity of the disgruntled insider.
While setInterval works, requestAnimationFrame(time) is probably better suited for animation purposes.
The winner here is a majority of OF performers who are mortgaging their future reputation for present small payouts.
Isnt that kind of ridiculous?

If there is a case for cancel culture, free speech or capitalism issue, this sounds like it. Few powerful players systematically destroying speech and business because they don't like it.
LOL This is would actually work! Holy crap if OnlyFans actually started accepting bitcoin that would be incredible
Saying that people doubted online shopping also doesn’t add any value.

Just because they doubted that and they doubt VR meetings doesn’t mean VR meetings will be a hit.
Q&A with anonymous BitClout founder Diamondhands
So I can buy porn in a store but not online?
What's next?
They are payment providers not the moral police.

That's one of the advantages of cash.
All the Way to Hell – Fractional Land Ownership Disrupts Fossil Fuel Development
Interestingly, fear of Western blockade and interruption of import of vital resources was what motivated the Japanese to go to war in 1941.
Through chatting and reading threads I get the impression that many folks think that pedophiles are all smart, extremely tech savvy, operating in networks that share information and collaborate to fool law enforcement. There may be some of that, but there are also plenty of Joe Schmoes who download or trade CSAM material without being especially clever about it. I remember when I was a teenager downloading porn I found more than a few probably-illegal photos just by accident*. If you want to find such images you can, it doesn't take an organized "network".

* edit - this was 25 years ago, admittedly, and much of what I downloaded came from randos on AOL. Things might be different now.
Longevity Expert: Here Are My Nonnegotiables to Live to 200
Only need to know basic Ruby programming - no libraries or deep knowledge.

But the project is unfinished I’m afraid - you will find dead-ends.
Right, but... is that 99% of their content, 99.9%, or 99.99%? Cause I bet it's at least 99%.
Mastercard (and Visa and AmEx and Discover) do not want their networks to be used by merchants selling pornography.

I would think the only reason is the chargeback/fraud rates are too high in this type of business, as well as not wanting to be involved in a business where there may be a high chance of illegal content.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-14/mastercar...

>The banks will now have to ensure that sellers require “clear, unambiguous and documented consent” in adult content, the payments network said in a blog post Wednesday. The firms will also be required to ensure websites document the age and verify the identity of anyone depicted in pictures and videos as well as those uploading the content.

>“The banks that connect merchants to our network will need to certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content,” John Verdeschi, Mastercard’s senior vice president of customer engagement and performance, said in the post.

Allowing merchants to sell pornography is probably not worth the hassle for the card networks.
Sourcegraph have been sending unsolicited emails to my personal and work email addresses, and there's no way I signed up to any marketing on either of them. Very dodgy practices going on.
It's a risky game though, because you're opening the space to potential competitors for two months. That's some significant time to achieve network effects, and people who move out are unlikely to ever get back.
Lol.. livermorons
half the content, 85% of the money.
This lack of transcripts really surprises and frustrates me. Wasnt Berkeley forced to take down its videos unless they added captioning? I guess it’s because they’re taxpayer funded right? But Twitter was also getting flack for introducing video without the accessibility of captions, but for a company that can afford $100 million to buy one podcast, why can’t they be compelled to provide transcripts?
https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture/?utm_sou...
So why do you think they decided to ban sexually explicit content rather than use cryptocurrency?
It was right as you started the game -- it looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/yjWksNt.png
Is it OnlyFans or paying money for things that's the issue? Would you pay $10 on Paetreon or for YouTube premium? Would you pay $1 to OnlyFans? How about paying $10, but no one would know you were paying OnlyFans?
Imagine there was a huge oligopoly of payment providers that had full control of global online economy explicitly regulating content.
The fact that the employee can't publicize the windfall means that the gang has no incentive to pay them, either. The employee can't exactly complain to anyone that they got stiffed.

It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma problem - since the game won't be repeated with any single employee, and there's no communication between employees, the gang gets a better outcome in all cases by not paying.

I'd bet on the employee getting scammed too.
Freedom is restricted in the name of Liberty and Fraternity. That's why I didn't just say your top most value is Freedom. Your top most value must be to maximize Freedom while respecting others' liberties and supporting others in need.

So if the speech doesn't respect other's liberties, then it is a problem to a multicultural society yes, because it wouldn't be in-line with the key top value that is critical to the success of a society that embraces diversity to get along with each other and prosper.

Think about it, I'm saying that the requirement to a successful democratic multi-cultural society is that everyone shares this as their top value. Therefore any attack to this core value or attempt to subvert this core value is an attack on that society's core.

So if your speech attacks this, it is natural to see a defense against it.

Of course, practically speaking, balancing how to maximize freedoms while respecting each other's liberties and supporting those in needs is a tricky act. There's no unambiguous infallible bullet point that always tells you exactly how best to do so. Like any optimization problems, finding the global optimum is a very hard problem (I believe it is NP hard, if not harder). And in the case of human dwelling, N is massive, and the number of variables in the equation are as well.

So what we have to do is our best, and as long as we have the right intentions, which is we come to the table with that same Liberal core value, then I think we can work it out.

Tensions will be created when anyone at the table will start to no longer believe the others value liberalism. So I think that be a good start is for everyone to be clear that they still value this core value, and then discuss where within that they feel like either there is a way to bring even more freedom while being respectful of liberties and supporting those in needs, or that they themselves feel a conflict between their liberty and the one of others which they want addressed.