skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
43 bits.

It requires 43 bits of defining information to identify a single entity online.

Those bits might be your name and date of birth.

Or they could be your home and work postal code (effective for better than 90% of the population, at least when commuting to work was a thing).

It could be your activity patterns, and what that says about your sleep/wake cycle, and possibly travel patterns.

EFF's Panopticlicck found enough distinctive information within Web browser characteristics to uniquely identify the vast majority of people submitting data to the project.

If you want to duck most casual observation ... then yes, standard precautions can be effective, though it's quite likely you'll slip and leak information at some point. Those clues can wait years, or decades, to be unraveled. Against law enforcement or state-level actors, you'll probably need to try considerably harder, though it's helpful to realise that what such entities have is typically far more data and the motivation to look through it for patterns and correlations, rather than superhuman cracking skills.

An area that's been of interest to me for some time has been the question of just how many investigations might be possible under various security or investigative services. My suspicion is that capabilities are constrained --- that is, there are fewer investigations than one might think --- but that the resources which can be brought to bear are considerable.

As an example, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had a 2019 budget of $9.6 billion, with 13,412 special agents and 20,420 support professionals, as of 2009.

By news stories, the January 6, 2021 investigation has been the largest in the Bureau's history, with 350--400 arrests and 1,300--1,500 grand jury subpoenas.

I haven't seen data on how many investigations the FBI conducts annually, or how many cases are submitted for prosecution, but suspect it's on the order of thousands. The Bureau no longer seems to produce blunt gun-in-your-face reports typical of the Hoover era as with the 1969 annual report showing a chart of convictions by fiscal year (over 13,150 for 1969, here: https://archive.org/details/FBIAnnualReport1969/page/n5/mode...), though I suspect levels are at least roughly similar. That was an average of three arrests per agent, and the 1969 report states 2.8 million name searches were conducted that year, along with 2.6 million pieces of mail and 241,000 telephone and telegraph communications.
If the threat was posted via Tor, how did they know it was posted by someone on their campus network?

The timing could have been conincedental. Even if he was the only person online on campus at the time, it proves nothing.
It kind of is though, because Algeria was a part of France until 1962, and there are millions of people of Algerian descent who have French citizenship.
Indians make less than 1/4th of an American salary. Your point?
Any kind of “workaround” for telling the truth to customs officials.
A good place to start is just to STFU.

This isn't strictly true but men tend to want to offer solutions to problems. In these sorts of situations, people often aren't looking for solutions. They're just looking to get something off their chest. So just STFU and listen and resist the urge (if you have it) to "fix" the problem.

I would guess this is what you're doing if people are feeling anxious about opening up this way with you because those solutions aren't what they are looking for and it just creates more stress. The person can feel attacked, like they're being forced to justify how they feel.
Playing on mobile, it would be cool if the accelerometer rotated all the pieces at once.
FBI Annual Report (1969)
Among numerous other elements, I find the contrast with more recent Bureau reports ... interesting.

Compare 2019: https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/the-fbi-story-2019-web.p...
Like living there?
That is exactly the problem with the "Dev Hegemony" book; it spends the first half of the book showing how the current system naturally evolves from very human flaws like ambition and pride, then tries to spend the second half of the book going "Yeah but what if we all start treating each other as equals (except non-programmer, they get to be non-owner employees only)". World peace would also be an easy problem to solve if you can get everyone to just get along, but without a practical way of getting there it's just a pipe dream.
2017 is when I first noticed this... Ghost in the Shell, Valerian, Blade Runner 2049
Plumbers that you personally hire to your house are similar to software consultants. They're often more than "just" plumbers - they're small business owners, so they do a lot of things besides plumbing (e.g. marketing, business management, etc). Again, similar to software contractors.

But take plumbers working construction on a 30-story building. They're usually part of a team, and work together with dozens if not hundreds of other professionals. Do you think they don't have meetings where they get together with the other teams, discuss problems, progress etc?

I'm not defending stand-ups here, btw. Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don't. But if your measure of "developers are treated badly" is "developers are asked to be in a 10-minute meeting to talk about their work progress", I think you're missing the forest for the trees in terms of what are and aren't good working conditions.
would love to hear your feedback! thoughts?
I mean I figure all I need to do is find one dev I get on well with to become a partner. In-fact someone floated it with me a few years ago and I was lukewarm because I didn't think I was ready (kind of regret it).
with work from hone,everyones responsible for cleaning toilets, rather than having a dedicated cleaner
https://archive.is/CCow4
I do like the style of kona if I need an example to confuse people about how C looks like, https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona/tree/master/src
How effective is tracking in increasing user experience over less invasive techniques, e.g. like asking users?
You make it sound as if Americans wouldn't also be losing a lot of visa free privileges around the world. We absolutely would.
I have started gymnastics over a year ago and I feel that I have fewer problems with my neck. My lower upper body feels stronger and has better support for sitting through long stretches.

As a start try hand-stands (against a wall) and cartwheels. It’s fun and if you haven’t done them in a while you quickly get better at it. Most days after a session, I feel muscles in areas I never thought I had them. Being more flexible because of the stretching is another nice side effect. Best full-body workout I can think of.
Blade Runner 2049 made their money back, it is just it wasn't a big success.
27x1 would again be the smallest 2d area.
the laws are teethless if they are not enforced, and playing hot potatoe with responsibilities like is the case with Max Schrems makes it all laughable.

dont blame the lawmaker for participants bad behaviour?

well, ok. allright.

but i DO blame the responsible authorities for licking the misbehaving participants' boots
If you're sending in bulk, then you're much more likely to be a spammer.

If you've got a legitimate business reason to be contacting these people, like they've bought products or services from you in the past, then you most likely do not need to be sending messages in bulk.

If you're the operator of a large scale mailing list (on the order of python.org), then you might be sending messages in bulk, but still not a spammer. In that case, tuning large mailing lists to avoid being classified as a spammer is still a topic of investigation. I know that the folks at python.org have to deal with this problem on a regular basis.
One way that I've always found ways to skew this is to not restrict yourself strictly to 'programming' however you define it. Always treat the problem as a one-off where everything is 'in bounds' for the solution space. This approach lets me solve problems where the top 5% have not found a solution because they were looking at certain pure problems and not the practical ones at hand.
The plumber at your home is exactly like a freelance developer though? The plumbing equivalent of working as a dev for a bigco would probably be assembling engines in a factory or something like that, and factories most definitely have start-of-shift meetings. Even if it's just "pay extra attention to workplace safety y'all, the inspection might come by today".
Per the docs here [1], that is not true. You continue to load gtag.js off the googletagmanager.com domain; subsequent events can flow to a custom domain.

[1] https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...
Exactly! A company's goal is profit and most of the time, that does not align with the customer's goals. Amazon's goal is to sell me the highest margin item, I want the best value or highest quality.

I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we grant them the right to make a small % of profit while doing it. Not the other way around!
As a web/fullstack with over 10 years of experience and based in EU, I don't have this impression at all. Actively applying and interviewing, still receiving absurd requests to resolve various quizzes, teasers, and assignments. Potential salaries top at miserable 70-80k EUR in countries where monthly salary deductions reach 40%. It's better for me to basically seat idle and work on some personal projects.
as far as expressing things in plain english goes, id think of the various voiceboxes. i can get the computer to turn my lights on and off using plain english, along with some other things
The complaints procedure entails reporting each and every misplaced bicycle/moped to the rental company. Complaining works in that they do act on it (the thing is moved out of the way), and that they can then prove to the municipality that their complaints procedure works. But it is also (perhaps counter intuitively) completely pointless. These things are moved about all the time, being rented and used or just redistributed. I.e., if you do nothing, a misplaced moped will be moved as well — and another one parked right in the middle of the sidewalk a little later.

The problem is not that any specific moped is blocking the sidewalk for days on end, it is that there always some or several mopeds doing so — the mopeds involved vary, the problem doesn't.

Actually penalizing riders who misplace them might work, but there is no indication that the complaints procedures actually leads to these companies doing that (it is not a transparent process). They will pick out the worst offenders of course, but the people who rent these things are their paying customers; the rental companies have no economic incentive to actually punish the rider who put it there, quite the opposite!
It's not Europeans who are trying to do that, it's careless journalists like the author of this article. I'm European, and for me if you talk about Europe, you are still referring to the continent (which however has its own issues, as it takes up only a part of the land mass known as Eurasia, which leads to some countries like Russia and Turkey being partly located in Europe). Any other entity that gets conflated with "Europe" (the EU, the Schengen Area etc.) should be referred to by that name...
In this chap’s defence (defense?), the USAF did find itself in hot water over a culture of enforced theism at the Air Force Academy so some sensitivity to the issue might be reasonable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Academ...
Judging is fine. It's input from your brain regarding the patterns of the other person. Judging is important especially because it could be right. You miss out on information if you try to suppress, or ignore it. Not judging isn't really actually natural.

What you do with it, THAT's what can create problems. Emotionally immature people who judge and act on that, those are stupid.

I don't care if the person next to me is a jew, black, chinese, a fucking nazi, as long as he doesn't bother me or piss off anyone else.

Yes, even fucking nazis. There's actually decent (it's a long stretch, but yeah) nazis out there and I tolerate them as "normal people" as long as they don't start talking about it, trying to spread their bullshit.

Would it be weird sitting next to one? Yeah! Do I have to respect his rights as long as he doesn't - directly or indirectly - try interfering with mine/others? Yeah!
i would call it societal; society still needs to grasp in what way they are being exploited. it's still not clear to most people
Let me start with stating the obvious: it's really great you want to improve this skill! The world needs much more of it.

Non-violent communication and Active Listening come to mind immediately - I'd recommend a course for the former over books. There's a lineage of coaches in that field who are really great.

I've written an intro to active listening, not a book, but hopefully can inspire you: https://leadership.garden/active-listening-boosts-careers/
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” - Thomas Watson president of IBM

Yes it may be a long way to reach AI that writes good code. But predictions like this underestimate the factor of time.
Life hack: Don't watch Netflix. Find a constructive hobby. Or watch classic movies you haven't see, make a list and go through them, order doesn't matter (though chronological order will make sense if one wants to get an understanding of artistic and commercial changes in directing and scriptwriting over time).
Radical candour is a great book for learning about this sort of thing regardless of setting.

https://www.radicalcandor.com/
People crave the feeling of being understood without judgement. To me, being compassionate is to show people real understanding.

Few techniques that I found helpful:

- Actively listening. Keeping any input you might have till the end.

- Repeat what you understood back to people - mirroring.

- Ask open-ended questions. Just be genuinely curious. Don't show any judgement.

- Be vulnerable first for them to open up and share their vulnerability.

- Often the solution is just listening. Suggest solutions only when explicitly asked for.

As mentioned by others, Non-violent Communication is an amazing book about the subject.

A comment about the book NVC. Often people get stuck in the implementation details of the book's recommended way of communicating. When X happens I feel Y, could you Z? But there is so much more to it than that.

One needs to be self-aware. To know more precisely:

a) What actually happened, seeing reality as it is without their interpretation.

b) What they are feeling

c) What needs do they have

d) Concrete actions to resolve a conflict

How these things are communicated is important but still, but the awareness of these components is often overseen.

That is why meditation is often recommended. It is easier to be a better communicator if you are more aware of your feelings, thoughts, and your current environment. Really being present.
and don't appear on any travel manifests other countries share, and don't turn up on any other tracking, and ...
Care to look up the top grossing movie of that year? There is plenty of successful sci-fi including Star Wars, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Transformers, The Hunger Games, and Avatar. Every genre can produce flops, but many of the most profitable movie franchises have been sci-fi movies.
After strontium atoms coming from an oven (usually at 400-ish degrees) reaches the main chamber, they're trapped via both optically (via lasers) and magnetically (there's coils surrounding the chamber), which we called magneto-optical trap, or MOT. For strontium, there're two stages of MOT, one is a blue (461nm) MOT which cools and traps hotter atoms into temperature of ~mK, and the second stage is the red (689nm) MOT that further cools the atoms into ~uK range. A MOT typically consists of 3 laser beams at different directions, and retroreflected on the other side after hitting the atoms (so 6 beams effectively). Some MOT can be done with less lasers. All 3 pairs of lasers (and 2 MOT, so 6 pairs) have to align perfectly so that they all hit the same point of intersection within the chamber.

To align these lasers, one method is to shine another 461nm pulse to the chamber and check for fluorescence signal via a photodiode or camera located on the other side of the chamber. Since the beams are generally much larger than the atomic cloud itself, as long as you hit something, it is easy to optimize the signal. For a blue MOT with very high atom number, you can even see a small blue bulb suspending in the mid-air inside the chamber, which could serve as a rough reference to start with.

So now atoms are trapped into the red MOT, you then turn off the red lasers while having the lattice laser (at 813nm) on, so the atoms are loaded into the optical lattice. Using the same method, you take a fluorescence image at the end of the experimental sequence to check if there's any signal. Note that the position of the red MOT depends on both the laser alignment and magnetic fields, so one can either (1) align the lattice beam, in this case, a vertical beam from top to bottom and retroreflected or (2) adjust the magnetic fields to fine-tune the red MOT position. It's an iteration of fine adjustments and looking at images.

Another way to align the lattice to the atoms is instead of shining lattice beams to the atoms, you first send red light through the same fiber. When they hit the atoms in the red MOT, the red light will excite the atoms so you won't see anything now with the fluorescence imaging (as they no longer in the ground state that responds to the blue transition). We call this "the killing beam" as the name suggest. Once you know the rough alignment, switch it back to lattice laser and do the optimizations until you see atoms loaded into the lattice (the distribution and spread of the atom ensemble are different when viewed with camera for atoms that are still in red MOT vs loaded into lattice).
I think we're definitely better at non-developers at software development. Yet we literally have outside people dictating to us when they think it's appropriate for refactoring to happen. Or when it's time to update a dependency.

This is a lot different from than "no on besides them can have any insight on timelines, or budget, on which features are or aren't important.". I definitely value the input of other professionals when it comes to their field of expertise. All I want is the same in return.
> there is independent media/press in germany

Barely. Besides the obvious state controlled public broadcasting many publishing houses are owned by mainstream parties and their foundations. The biggest socialist party SPD for example owns more than 40 newspapers. They are de-facto state media. Also the state spends about a quarter billion Euros (!) subsidising publishers that otherwise would go bankrupt. You can't expect the recipients of that money to be neutral.

> the article was not produced by any government entity

It is clearly published by a government entity. Public broadcasting is not a neutral party.
Microsoft employees here. No actually. It's probably via word of mouth that they realized people are reinventing the wheel.
Oh, indeed, that's how I came to find it -- from the article! haha :)
NVC is a relatively complicated framework because it calls on people to distinguish between what they think is obviously true ("you must be thinking this!") from what is actually true ("you did this, this and this and I felt that") in a more objective world.

But at the end of the day it is a framework for clear, effective communication that guides the practitioner to:

1) Ask for things that they might be given.

2) To investigate how other people are responding to what they observe.

If NVC doesn't work with a communication partner, the next best option is not to communicate. Other strategies are basically forced to either ask for things that can't be given and to ignore other people's responses. Neither of those is a clever approach to relationships.

Non sequiter, but addressing a common mistake, it isn't "Nice, Nonviolent Communication". In theory it'd be possible to tell someone that you're about to murder them while still applying the NVC principles. It is misnamed.
There was the "Val Linker"[1] (also for the Amiga, though I can't seem to find that version), written in a kind of Pascal-ish C, powered by macros..
Snippet:

void get_order_token()
BeginDeclarations
EndDeclarations
BeginCode
While token_break_char Is ' '
BeginWhile
order_token_get_char();
EndWhile;
copy_string(token, null_string);
If IsIdentifier(token_break_char)
Then
While IsIdentifier(token_break_char)
BeginWhile
concat_char_to_string(token, token_break_char);
order_token_get_char();
EndWhile;
lowercase_string(token);
Else
If token_break_char Is '['
Then
While token_break_char IsNot ']'
BeginWhile
concat_char_to_string(token, token_break_char);
order_token_get_char();
EndWhile;
order_token_get_char();
If case_ignore.val
Then
lowercase_string(token);
EndIf;
Else
concat_char_to_string(token, token_break_char);
order_token_get_char();
EndIf;
EndIf;
return;
EndCode

*1 https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/simteln...
To be fair, we have had a decades long problem with European genocide-doers settling in the US. There have been regular deportations of former nazis up until just a few years ago.

There must be tens or hundreds of thousands of Europeans who have done terrorism/genocide/espionage earlier in their life and are now reintegrated into society to the point that they might want to visit Disney World.

May as well ask.
Ah, that is why cars still use chariot wheels.
I suspect this might end up as a slightly trickier scenario because when you get down to the details it’s hard at a technical level to make a distinction between a server log file and a tool like analytics which takes those same bits of data and mostly just organises and displays it in an intuitive way with charts and a nice UI.
Would you consider doing string processing in C rather than in Awk or Tcl?
No issues at all with Kiwi Browser + uBlock Origin + Bypass Paywalls
They shouldn't be allowed, and they aren't allowed. Actually the new digital services act [0] is shaping up to clarify these, but IIRC there have also been first cases decided in courts.

[0]: https://edri.org/our-work/the-eu-parliament-takes-strong-sta...
No because the script contents can change from site to site. Maintaining an index for every site would get you closer, but individual sites can trivially tweak things to break fingerprinting as often as they want. Even on every request.
US law makers are trying to mimic GDPR?

are you certain? would be certainly nice, but i dont believe there is a majority in the US that would support such a change. I mean there are probably more individual people interested in doing that than not, but I bet in comparison there are more individual $$$ being invested in keeping data privacy laws as lax as possible
> I am shocked he has to put his own money into this movie. It must be really off the wall for a studio to not invest in that.

Coppola had to mortgage everything to do Apocalypse Now, and that was following the very successful Godfather II. This is probably why he's so confident about making a big bet on himself again while doing an "off the wall" film. It worked out well previously.

(Megalopolis honestly sounds like a much lower risk thing than sending late seventies Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando into the jungle...)