skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But making technology on its own is not a bad thing. Lying about it and/or actively ignoring the impact it has on society the way Google and Facebook did is. Conflating technology itself with shitty morals is dumb.

Even if you believe that Apple is somehow different from Google and Facebook, I think you're missing a key part of the argument made in the article: the technology not only can be used for unethical purposes, it almost certainly will be.

Apple itself doesn't need to be evil. The technology it's pushing is inherently vulnerable and given the value of what it enables to bad actors, will almost inevitably be hijacked for nefarious purposes eventually. Pretending that your technology isn't vulnerable and imminently capable of causing great harm to people is indeed unethical.

> When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked. It has nothing to do with technology.

Have you ever considered that technology has played and is playing a key role in the development of our money and fame-obsessed society? Money and fame have existed in some form for millennia, but thanks to the web and social media, for example, people are now bombarded with a previously unfathomable amount of media that glamorizes it in ways never before possible. This exposure now starts at a very early age and therefore almost certainly shapes how children relate to money, fame, their impressions of themselves, etc.
And I don't see any indication of this being safe :)

It's radiation isn't it? Most of the stuff I encounter on a daily basis are much lower on the table. So there must be some differences.
Well, try it. It's a paid service so you might get some support, or maybe I'm plain unlucky.
You need WhatsApp to be installed on a real device or a VM for mautrix-whatapp [1] (the bridge) to work. You also need to connect to that real device using WhatsApp web [2].

I know because I've used the bridge.

[1] https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp
[2] https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/whatsapp/authentication.html
> Nothing works as well as whatsapp.

I don't disagree with the rest of your post but Telegram does in fact work as well if not better than whatsapp.
> I feel like we as a tech community should take a step back and consider whether or not we should not be the only ones that decide what should or should not be done

When it comes to encryption, tech activists say tech should take a back seat to policy-makers and let them decide on the rules. When it comes to internet censorship, tech activists says "but my private companies!" and argues that techies decide on the limits of acceptable discourse for the whole world.

What do these stances have in common? That activists are arguing that tech should do what power wants.

There are no principles at work here. There's only a "who, whom" power dynamic. Activists will say whatever is effective in the moment for achieving their immediate aims, and right now, that's being good little sycophants for people with broad, unclear, and definitely undemocratic influence over public affairs.
Related: Fiesta Ware. Maybe worth going through the thrift store with a Geiger counter.

https://www.thoughtco.com/how-radioactive-is-fiesta-ware-608...
There's probably some technicality that allows this, and some engineering difficulty that encourages Spotify to allow podcasts to advertise.

But the real answer here is that advertising corrupts. Ads are almost universally lies, so it's a short step to the unethical actions we see Facebook and Google taking in order to get their ads in front of more people, and get people to buy more that's advertised.

And it's not like we haven't seen this before. It's well known that newspapers would not exactly censor news that was unkind to advertisers, they'd merely put it below the fold, or on page 10, or reframe the news with a softening headline.

I think in 2021, we can agree that advertising sucks, and moreover, it corrupts the media that carry it.
I want this to take off. I'm tired of having to follow trends because people suddenly think there's a new shinyshinytrendy thing around: IRC to ICQ to MSN to Skype to Google Talk to Facebook Messenger to Whatsapp to Signal.

Pidgin is good (I also miss the ancient Trillian, even though it was closed source), but limited to a local device.

There are XMPP Transports as well for these (see https://git.eta.st/eta/whatsxmpp , https://gitlab.com/nicocool84/spectrum2_signald , but sadly https://spectrum.im/ is surprisingly finicky to set up.)

EDIT: for encryption fans, I've been wondering for a long time now: why would you trust ANY 3rd party with your so sensitive data instead of running your own service? Are you not aware of OMEMO for XMPP? (See https://omemo.top/ )
Do you have some numbers on lower maintenance? From a quick look around [1-2] they seem pretty similar to other manufacturers.

[1]: https://caredge.com/toyota/maintenance

[2]: https://caredge.com/tesla/maintenance
> Butterfly Labs was basically using the customer paid rigs to mine Bitcoin for themselves before they shipped customers obsolete devices. They only sent me mine after I called my CC company, disputed the charges & reported the non-delivery as fraud...magically, my rig showed up a week later.

And you don't think Bitmain did the same thing?

Again, I'm not advocating the business models of either corp, and to be honest I think open-hardware is where we should be focusing on our collective attention during this supply chain disruption in order to make some actual progress.

But it's still worth noting that ASIC development was concentrated in Shenzhen with no competitors to speak of prior to Butterfly labs. Still, this is all to say we have don ea poor job despite all the red flags until it all came crashing down and now Mega corps are likely to cash in on this and the infrastructure bill to 're-shore' the same manufacturing they and their predecessors fought like hell to offshore in the 80-90s.
Agreed!

And this:

> journalists are nothing but exploitative

Talk about sweeping generalisations!
> For what it's worth, she says her views on E2E encryption have been misrepresented.

My link above has direct quotes from Haughen regarding E2E encryption.

I don’t understand why people are so eager to project something different on to what she’s directly saying.
What do you mean?

Some people prefer riskier investments. Let them have it.

Other people prefer safer investments, let them have what they want, too.

There's nothing inherently sacred about bonds. It's just a contract that basically says 'either we pay you x dollars on time, or you get to take ownership of the company'.
That's really just #2 because you are not really taking advantage of any of the cloud services besides storage - which is the cheapest and least innovative cloud service.
Literally zero of my degree modules (BEng Software Engineering, Aberystwyth) were non-software engineering.

But the UK does all of education differently to the USA, or at least it did when I went thought it: mandatory up to the age of 16 where you got approximately a dozen GCSEs, then two years doing A-levels (3, 3.5, or 4), then you go up to university. The only mandatory requirement to do humanities was in the GCSEs.
Well their use is definitely UB as it creates data races. Godbolt to the rescue... https://godbolt.org/z/3rsK6n31z
Download Destiny 2 for PC 2021 for free
more like GIGO; same as it ever was.
You can get some stuff running on an iPad using iSH [0], but compatibility is iffy and performance even moreso. At one point, I tried bringing a RPi4 along with me to act as a mobile dev server (it'd serve an instance of VSCode over ethernet via a USB-C/ethernet adapter on the iPad, and the iPad would share its Wifi connection to the RPi), but it was clunky to bring two devices with me. Nowadays, I use Blink Shell [1] as a mosh terminal to a remote dev server.

[0]: https://ish.app
[1]: https://blink.sh
Already exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
Since the 1950s!
Some part of me feels like this would be like letting the country decide on vaccines.

I don’t think people have any idea what end-to-end encryption means, they just hear maybe the occasional slogan (“it keeps your messages private”, “it lets terrorists hide from cops”) and assume there’s some valid choice between totally cripple online security and totally cripple people stalking your communications. I don’t even think people understand the implications of what communications means. Why else are we still talking about this issue in abstract terms when the harms are precisely enumerable and the supposed benefits can be completely debunked as fantasy?

All this stuff is so depressing. Free speech online is no longer in vogue, the ACLU, EFF, and other usual heroes of these sorts of battles feel asleep at the wheel. It’s sad to think I might see the death of something so beautiful.
The FAA is also maintaining a core set of ground navigational based stations (VOR) in case of GPS failures. It’s the COBOL of the aviation industry :) There are occasionally parts of the sky that have GPS outages due to military activity anyway.
How they are supposed to detect Eye Balls That Do Not Exist? Looks trivial to do.
There, it's still good:

https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins
If this is supposed to be a real currency, isn’t it awful for privacy?

If your wallet is unique to your person (eyeball) and the public key is ever leaked, everyone can see your account balance and transactions.

Would that be the case or am I missing something?
There were issues with numpy/scipy because of lapack and fortran. I guess they solved it somehow.
I think that's true to an extent; angering all of the media at once is sure to have some bad consequences. But I think the other grievances I mentioned are fairly specific and not just engineered via repeated bad press.

Again, the core of their problem is that they inserted themselves into the middle layer of everything. In doing so, they adopted all the negatives along with the positives. It seems like an untenable position in the long run; you just can't monopolize computing like this.
reMarkable Connect subscription plans
Maybe he doesn't want to have to create an account. Maybe he doesn't want to figure out how to disable cloud saves. Maybe he doesn't want to pay a subscription fee. Maybe he doesn't want emojis, mentions, hash tags and recommendations about what his friends are reading. Maybe he doesn't want a analytics report in his mail describing about how he used the software this week. Maybe he doesn't want "undoubtedly absolutely necessary telemetry" being reported. Maybe the old ways were better.
How about (3) Less consolidation of power

Personally as someone who doesn't use FB and never will, I couldn't care less if Facebook wants to track and monitor every one of their users, monetize their every movement, and ban any message they want. In a free market you'd have thousands of social networks to provide competition with all sorts of different policies and ToS. The real issue is that one company is in a skewed position of power due to a broken marketplace. Fix that problem and all the other problems are irrelevant.
I’m not sure, but I really miss the optimism of PG here on HN. It’s too bad that he retired so early, he was a lot of fun to listen to. I felt the same when Larry Page ,,took back’’ Google from Eric Schmidt who understood that fun and exploration is an important part of software engineering.
It's hard to argue that feature advances have not come with any severe downsides, especially in UX, complexity, reliability, safety, and privacy.
> if you break the glass

Isn't this the ultimate fate of all glass?
That's not true, sometimes issues get seen from notifications, not answered right away, then not revisited because it was forgotten. I've done this a few times.

Sometimes a bump is a "Hey, just incase you forgot" so automatically closing is just "Ok I forgot this, but who cares now" attitude.
I imagine this attack is more difficult than is assumed.

The device itself is likely tamper resistant, has built in DRM and will have a high fidelity camera + signal processor. So you will need a system to write a 200MP image on the surface the size of an eye ball.

Also, since the light passes through a lens in your eye, there are probably optical tricks that can validate the surface is curved like a retina and has been distorted by a lens.

Oh yeah. And the vascularization of the retina means that you can view heart rate pulses. So your image will need to pulsate too.

One could also imagine marrying this with a stereoscopic camera to image detect that a real face is. It could even ask you to smile or frown to validate it's a real face.

Lots of ways to harden this technology to the point where even intelligence agencies would struggle to defeat it.
That news was in my second link.

I enjoyed this video which reflects my pessimism of Las Vegas Loop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvK2i9Jxy5c

I think there are better options for public transport.
> It absolutely isn’t. Look at Mozilla’s bugzilla instead: You’ll find plenty of bugs open for years and eventually fixed.

So? Its still stale issue. Stale issue get fixes some times, but most of the time they don't. So its a metric. If you need good examples, Redmine is probably greatest example as in any major release they have something that lived 10+ years as a ticket.

>Plus, stale bots don’t take Reactions into consideration.

That is not true. As soon as somebody comments on my Github repo after the bot announce that issue is going to be closed soon, it resets the period to 6mo again. So this is configuration setting. I have not seen so far that somebody says something else except equivalent of "its still not resolved" just to reset the period. So now I have tickets with that last couple of years with last several comments that it is not resolved :S. Totally meaningless.

> Just because no one is working on a bug it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Just because ticket is closed it doesn't mean bug is resolved. I usually have some form of meta label like resultion-wontfix, resolution-done, resolution-stale...

> It’s hilarious to see because they do it to themselves.

Its because they didn't get it. When you repeat the same meaningless thing over and over you should question the methodology.
How to use Daniel Vassallo’s portfolio of small bets idea to start a business
This wasn't really a _huge_ problem if you didn't need fast graphics until the 2016 15"es. With the switch to Ice Lake, they had to add a discrete GPU even to the base model of the 15" (due to lack of appropriate GPUs in Intel's bigger mobile chips in that generation), and things got very bad.

I've got a personal 13" 2016 MBP, and a work 15" one. The 13" is _fine_; it doesn't show significant thermal throttling in normal use. The 15"... not so much.
Think about those who are entrepreneurs that are solely dependent on internet connection. It's hard for them as this is their way of living.
This hit like a train.

I was Jack in highschool, addicted to heroin, destroying my family for 4 years. In and out of rehab. At one point my mother chased me through her house with me holding a needle full of heroin over her head, she had caught me using in the bathroom, I didn't want to let the hit go.

My mother died a little over a month ago, brain cancer, from diagnosis to death it happened in 5 months. Reading this brought back a lot of my guilt and reminded me of how futile my family felt trying to help.

Last week a highschool friend died, fentanyl od, he was never into opiates in highschool. I had no idea how serious it was. I had seen him at a wedding a couple months back and he mentioned that he got into fentanyl pressed pills for a period, he said he felt bad for judging me so hard in highschool, he never thought he... I cut him off and said "but your clean now right?" And he gave me this disappointed look, and said yeah. I just moved to a different subject, now I think he might have been asking for help, like how did you kick?

In the throes of addiction, the only thing that made any difference was that I decided one day to buy an ounce of mushrooms. I brewed them all into a tea and put it in my fridge. I drank mushroom tea for basically a week straight. I didn't do anything special, friends visited, we played video games and talked, but eventually I reflected, for the first time I actually saw myself from the outside, I saw what I was doing to my family and friends and it was like a switch flipped in my mind. Physical or mental addiction didn't matter anymore, it just didn't make sense to use. It's all I can really say that helped me, when you are an addict the best cure is gaining perspective because it is so hard to pull your head out of that hole.
IndexedDB is a joke of a database. Yes, it can store data, and you can create a very simple index, so it's _technically_ a database… But its ability to express queries is borderline useless for all but simplest use cases, it's slow, and it's very inconvenient to use. So solutions exist that range from giving IDB a simpler, more modern API, all the way to using IDB as a dumb storage medium to a fast in-memory database.
They are light on details, but it seems like the overall datacenter look is the same: servers have network cards, which are plugged into switch boxes.

Only this time all the logic is on the network card, and the connector has 12 separate optical fibers. And the “switch box” is fully passive, just shuffling the connections from different machines around.

This is obviously very expensive, and so that’s private why it is marketed to HPC people.
> The key is to elect multiple people

Coalitions are already used in many political systems worldwide. But they do not solve the theoretical problem caused by the special cases in ordinal preference, where "for every candidate another has larger preference".

> allow people to split their single vote fractionally

Let us note that there are many other strategies... Weighed voting, layers of electors... And let us note that in general they usually have theoretical and practical weaknesses.
There's an argument that if enough people aren't willing to pay for a product to keep it in existence, it never deserved to exist in the first place. Ads are often a surreptitious way of monetizing users' personal info under the guise of giving them something for "free".

I've seen a few honest apps that have an ad-supported free version and have a ads-removed paid-for version. Facebook and co would never offer that as their entire business model is based on exploiting uninformed users.
Hopefully learn that getting everything to rely on an Internet connection was the dumbest thing to happen this century.

Brb, my notepad needs to update.
Yup. And looks like element One is a direct competition to beeper
> how long until we see ads embedded in songs

"Spillin' Ace on my sick J's"
If you have evidence of her working as a secret intelligence agency undercover operative, then I'll be incorporate that into views on this issue.

However, I think I'd still be glad that the information she leaked is now public, just like I'd be glad if a plot by intelligence agencies to systematically censor social media was made public, just like I've been glad when prior abuses by the government have been made public. Get it all out in the open.
With how much the military has been practicing for situations where GNSS will be jammed in the past few years it seems... overly optimistic to coerce the entire industry to ditch the magnetic compass at this point.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17987/usaf-is-jamming-...

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/15194/russia-jammed-ph...

FAA issued NOTAMs (Notices To Airmen) reveal a lot of deliberate GNSS jamming across the US around military bases, it's not just limited to the Nelis area:
https://notaminfo.com/explain?id=1630592

Also Russia enjoys just messing with GPS to annoy NATO exercises, so you never know when you might fly through an area of active GNSS denial:
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/information/gps-jamming-ex...
But what would be the value in leaving hundreds of open reports and nobody looking after them?

Or do you mean some good bug reports are going to be missed because of this?

Because in general if an issue is even moderately important, we'll hear about it via multiple channels - the issue tracker, the forum, Discord, etc. so we'll eventually be aware of it and there will be a proper bug report on the issue tracker. Either we'll select a good one among the duplicates, or we'll create one.
I used Wordstar to type up my school reports and newsletters (well into mid 90s) in an actual IBM PC with 640k RAM and no hard drive. I wasn't aware of the 40-page limit. Although it is entirely possible that I never had to encountere it.
I'm sure he's really enjoyed all of those meetings with lawyers and various depositions and what not. There's probably nothing better he could have been doing with that time instead. You're totally right.
who's them?
> I don't think these are conflicting views: (1) Less monitoring on private messages (2) More monitoring on public posts

The same people argue that FB needs to censor more public content and wringing their hands in public over just how awful it is that in places like India, WhatsApp message forwards can spread memes that respectable people like western journalists and tech activists don't like.

It's a "who, whom" thing. There's no principled stance differentiating private from public with respect to control and censorship. It's become respectable in western political discourse to demand totalitarian control over the spread of ideas. Today's activists will do or say whatever it takes in the moment to bring the boots closer to human faces forever. Anyone who values human dignity needs to oppose this movement.
Well a passport can always be faked. If the world became a totalitarian dystopia and you were a freedom fighter that had to elude detection, you can always use a fake passport. Faking biometrics is much harder if they already have your data.
You can self-host. I suspect they use this: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
Yeah, people do all kind of dumb things once you leave them options. The wrong thing is to extrapolate from it.

That option is certainly valuable in some context, but not in general.
I don't think it's that complicated or nefarious. Law enforcement are humans just like us, mostly trying to do their jobs with as little effort as possible. Encrypted communication makes their jobs harder in some cases, so they don't like it.

> What's perhaps most interesting to me is that the prevalence of encryption seems to have done very little to stop the FBI from catching people.

I don't think we can know this. Or maybe you have some data? But more importantly there's a big gap between "catching" someone and "convicting" someone. Having the content of specific communications can make a big difference in actually proving guilt.
I think it’s important to point out the nuance. Observational winds (eg METAR) are recorded in true. Reported winds (ATIS, ASOS, AWOS) are given in magnetic. [1]

The adage goes “If you read it, it’s true. If you heard it, it’s magnetic.”

[1] https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Order/7900_5D.pdf Chapter 7.4
Right because the money they could get from people who'd actually pay for Facebook is a small fraction, a rounding error of a fraction, of the money they get from stealing all your data and selling your psychological profile to advertisers. Parasites.
Surely someone can write this fellow a program to convert to ASCII and a USB floppy drive to move the files, or better yet, an SD card IDE drive for his old PC.
I doubt it, but I guess its possible that is his only true north. If it is, he is going about it in a Machiavellian or Caesar like manner where he does not care about the impact he has while attaining those goals. But I also think it's possible that his actions are those of someone who is power hungry and does not care about what happens in his wake.