skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Charles Stross has a book series about a family of people that can step between different timelines of alternate Earth's that explores this a little.

**SPOILERS** Once the US that's basically our world discovers the existence of "world walkers" when they nuke the Whitehouse, it quickly steps into an authoritarian surveillance hellstate capable of realtime surveiling the population around the country to the point where they can track people entering their timeline because they were on camera exiting a building they were never recorded entering, or were flagged buying a plane/bus ticket from a city they shouldn't have been in according to previous records, or in one case for leaving a coffee shop with a noticeably empty backpack when she'd entered the shop with it completely full, having passed the contents to a world walker she was meeting. That irregularity automatically flagged everyone entering/leaving that building for review in their system and they backtracked all of these people through their paths that day until finding the gap where he'd stepped through to their world. That all happened in a matter of minutes and then quickly homed in on him.

Anyhow,it goes into detail about the lengths they go to to avoid detection by these systems and honestly didn't strike me at as all farfetched. The technology and capacity exists and it's a concentrated effort on part of the government is all it would take to implement it.
Compact Data in a Vector Database
Learn how to compact data in Milvus, the world's most advanced vector database.
Take a look at https://github.com/doctolib/safe-pg-migrations
Misleading headline:

ETIAS registration will be necessary to enter Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. The same goes for trips to the microstates of Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and Vatican City.

Four countries — Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus and Romania — are not Schengen countries yet but are in the process of joining. Once they are admitted to the zone, they will require travelers to have an ETIAS authorization, too.

This is a fairly large chunk of Europe, but it is not the entirety of Europe. Notably it excludes the European nations of Ireland, the UK, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, Moldova, most of the Balkans...
and crypto brings back bearer shares on steroids

not regarding anonymity but in fungibility and capital formation, selling and trading the shares is on another level
> By contrast, think about your doctor: they can't legally sell your private data.

This is not a reasonable comparison. You choose to tell the doctor private information because of patient-doctor confidentiality. The other type of “private information” is collected by observing you in public (e.g. in a Walmart).
Brit here. On your last point, there is no such widespread attitude in the UK towards government. We are historically conservative, but not libertarian. Don't forget two of the most famous and loved British institutions are the BBC and the NHS. I'm not saying such attitudes don't exist, because they do, but it's not "all-prevailing" by any stretch.
The trouble is, they're mostly Microsoft and either Azure or AWS behind the scenes. The UK government as a whole seems to love Microsoft. I just worry it will be out of the frying pan and into the fire...
What about in practice?
> I became fluent in Japanese in my 30s.

Me too, but I will never reach close to native level of proficiency. It's fun but just that.
Social Media accounts - yes, I was surprised to see that on my visa form 2 years ago. It wasn’t there 12 years ago when I got my previous one.

Phone scanning &laptop - it never happened to me, and I’ve been to US 20 times, coming from Poland. But it sucks that this is always in cards :/
Nothing. No one should pay for not being tracked.
I'm not sure if you are assuming it correctly.
You'll know that after loading the first couple of bytes though.
No, only FF on Android supports extensions.
I viewed the article with Firefox and uBlock Origin. No auto-play ads here.
Who do you think the shareholders are? One unified group of cartoonishly evil mustache-twirling villains?

I'd be very pissed off if dividends or bond yields from across the industry dropped 50% overnight.

Of the largest shareholders of major corporations are mutual funds, pension funds and such that fund people who are completely dependent on investment income to live. A policy that causes a 50% change in profits would be a massive shock to those people.
MMR, DTaP, whatever else they’re doing now?
You have to draw a line somewhere with that logic, otherwise you'd have governments running their own fabs.

I'm fully in favour of governments doing everything from hosting up ( hosting, design, dev), with as much as possible open source.

For instance the French government fares well on this front, with most government services being developed in-house, and many parts are open source; in emergencies specific services were delegated to third parties ( e.g. vaccine bookings) so it isn't taken to a religious NIH level. However hosting is delegated to commercial entities.
Just block the script by its checksum, and the issue is solved
We do the same at $CURRENT_TEAM and it works just fine. Kanban + Issues are what we currently need, is easy to reason with and we don't need extra people to manage it.
There are zoning laws and there is mixed zoning. There used to be many smaller shops in residential areas and since the 70s many shops have closed in favour of supermarkets and so on. In the street I lived before, there used to be many different shops such as fish shops, cheese chops, vegetables, small shops selling carpets and so on. When I moved there in 2002, the only shops left were one butcher, one bakery and one that sold cigarettes and magazines and in 2022 they all closed. These were all located in buildings with an appartment on the floors above, where typically the owner lived.

You would actually need a permit to transform the former shop into an appartment and this is mostly granted. However if you would take such a place and convert it into a 'dark store' you typically do not even need a permit! The Dutch regulations just did not expect shops to be open 24/7 in small residential areas like this and to need 24/7 supplies from big trucks and 'riders' hanging around all day and night, where typical Dutch stores would close at 6pm
Not according to the "out-of-court settlement" link:

> And it’s worth noting that trying to license the image would have been moot. When asked how much he would’ve charged for a license, Maisel told his lawyer that he would never have granted a license for the pixel art.
Send them an honest letter written by a real human being, introduce yourself and your company to them, and explain why you're sending a message to them.

People tend to really appreciate honesty and authenticity.

That said, you should have a legitimate reason why you're sending them an e-mail message, like they signed up for your mailing list, or they bought something from you and you want to keep in touch with your customers, etc.....

Make sure you don't send them an e-mail message if they didn't explicitly opt-in to receive e-mail messages from you. Otherwise, you are actually a spammer.
Was it meant as a joke?
I think it's a typo/autocorrect and they meant US at the last instance instead of UK.
Exactly like any lawyer firm.
How not? They sold CDs with the derivative version of the photograph on the cover.
EScriptorium: Digital recognition of handwritten documents with machine learning
An obvious GDPR violation. So obvious, that you could think they are getting desperate due to the latest developments around Google Analytics and Google Fonts.

Don't be evil.
You have some examples? I just checked Interstellar and The Martian ($145MM and $108MM budget respectively) but they were very much profitable.
Yes, of course. It is possible. And you could also write everything in C and compile it to Webassembly. I don't know why I often get these pedantic "disagreements" even though this is no disagreement at all.

There are very valid reasons why virtual DOM systems (and similar approaches like Svelte) are so popular: For any not-completely-basic use-case they are easier to manage and faster.

React is a popular and battle-tested choice. Once you get the hang of it, it's a well thought out system, and you can get a lot of advice and wisdom about it for free. Maybe React is so unpopular with the pedantics here because it is so popular in the real world?

And Redux is one way - not the only way - to implement a pattern that is a functional programming alternative to the MVC pattern. An alternative I very much prefer. It is extremely powerful for moderate to complex cases, and then the boilerplate can be kept manageable and appropriate for the required complexity. I found that it is performant, easy to read, easy to extend and easy to debug.

You can do all of that in Javascript, but my experience is that it is in general a lot more painful. It is harder to maintain and harder to bring other people on board. The only time this "I don't use no stinking framework" approach doesn't completely backfire is in smaller projects or when self-rolled frameworks emerge out of the "no framework" code base.

I try to keep my ego out of programming. That also means that dissing on frameworks "just because I can survive without them" isn't productive.
And the ESTA form (which is a Visa in all but name, just more automated), is becoming more dystopian year after year…
And that is not a gut prediction but history. 15 years ago the default was Windows, .NET and SQL Server. 5 years ago it is Linux in the cloud, .NET and PostgreSQL.
Either an MR or a merge into the kernel, yes. But, regardless, the comparison omits open auditing vs a closed one.

With closed systems being able to decide what to disclose and obfuscating their own system, the [power] user is less likely to have actual numbers of anything. Be it how many flaws or how many were discovered internally and placed in the backlog. Then, you throw in some PR requirements into the mix and you'll never have a clear picture of what you're using. Just a sales pitch in a different medium.

This is an important dimension.
Maybe because programming in itself is not valued? Changing things with automation is, thus you need to have the right mix of domain knowledge and solution skills to be successful. As these often are not found in one person (exceptions confirm the rule of course ;-}), you need a number of people collaborating. Appreciation for the "other" side takes time and can only grow with mutual trust backed up by joint success.

Only pretending to know the domain and micro-managing into the "other side" is real and not helpful, as you wrote. This applies to programmers as well, they often mouth about how they know what would be best for the company and in reality just don't know all the constraints and background on the business side. Let alone how much of a social game creating software for others really is.
Thank you for sharing. This matches my experience too.

Empathy starts with listening and continues with making a safe space for someone to share deeper feelings.

Passing judgement, problem solving, or dominating the conversation are anti patterns.

I was lucky to get some management training in active listening at a past job. It felt like common knowledge to me but thru training and practicing at work I was surprised to see how uncommon following the fundamentals are in the workspace.

Often everyone is too “busy” and “results oriented” to communicate clearly and to make time to actually listen to one another.
I much agree with that the complexity is the limiting factor and you probably will need specialized people to model and design not only what the computer does but how the humans and computer co-operate. When you're programming you are not only programming the computer but also the people who use your application(s).

Describing and designing and validating asynchronous processes is especially complicated.
Yes, wearing a glass certainly feels good, just like eating something you like, or a favorite smell.

Being able to see much clearer than before is definitely a nice feeling.
> would use the C preprocessor to create his own language and then write the implementation of his language in that self-defined language

Yeah that sounds like the easiest way to make your colleagues hate you

I "love" how we had more languages in the 70s (usually created as a one-off project for people with not so much user friendliness in mind) think m4, awk, tcl, etc
It’s old, definitely retro, but I always thought vintage meant older than that. Like how vintage cars are 50+ years old. To that end you wouldn’t call the Dreamcast “vintage gaming” (like you might with Pong machines) but you’d definitely still call it retro.

Maybe my comment comes more from a place of “oh shit I’m old” rather than a strong objection to the authors comments…
And don't let your parents/those willing to trust seach engines click on any official looking link they see. They might pay usd75 for a third party to 'help' make the application.

Of those I know who have fallen for it most were able to get their money back.

E.g. (not the first link for me but still up there on duckduckgo)

"https://estaapplication.com.au

Official USA ESTA Application for UK & Australian Citizens ..."
Fascinating to read through this, I feel sorry for people who can't use powershell.
Worth noting that YARP (or as someone has eloquently described it as PRAY) here was another Microsoft project which basically killed a previous open source project which did the same thing:

https://github.com/proxykit/ProxyKit
> our ineffectual administration

It always saddens me to see EU citizens talk in absolutes like that. With some exceptions, and by comparison, we have some of the best governments in the world, and, for all its faults, the EU has been a huge net positive. Perpetuating these overly negative stereotypes just aids populists in replacing our good governance with the other kind that we see all over the world.
Yes, but if US ever finds out, it could get pretty nasty. US entry ban is pretty limiting career move for programmer.
The elaborate con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency
Critical period hypothesis is somewhat debated in linguistics. Children and Adults just learn differently. Children have far less inhibitions and more time. The second part of your comment sounds like pseudoscience. I learned German in my late 20s and speak to native speakers every day, where I live bilingual is the norm and a whole lot of people acquire second, third or forth languages as adults.
> can't find the troff virus citation

Reading http://www.di-srv.unisa.it/~ads/corso-security/www/HTML/VIRU... using my very rudimentary understanding of Italian, I think that would be

P. Beyls, “Is Unix resistant to computer viruses?” Proceedings of the European UNIX systems UserGroup, pp 229-238, Münich, Germany, April 23-27 1990

I can’t find that online.

Amazon knows of the 1988 and 1989 proceedings, but not of those for 1990, and neither of those is available (https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AEuropean+UNI...)
Doesn't exactly this behavior create echo chambers and lead to polarization?
The latest version of the ESTA form make it almost impossible to know that these fields are not mandatory. Dark pattern can also be mastered by administration.
> We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor.

I highly disagree with this.

For some reason, many devs seem to think they are somehow better than everyone else, that they are the most important part of any team, that no on besides them can have any insight on timelines, or budget, on which features are or aren't important.

News flash - all of the above is none-sense. Developers are a profession that provides a specific skill, a highly valued one, but one that is a part of building things in most cases. There's nothing demeaning or wrong about devs having managers, whether or not they happen to also have been developers themselves. Some great software managers were never developers, and some great developers are horrible managers, just like in every other profession.

> It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this.

Every skilled profession has people who are managed. Doctors, lawyers, they all have managers, and most of them interact with the public, who can override their expert opinions.
> This is a fairly large chunk of Europe, but it is not the entirety of Europe. Notably it excludes the European nations of Ireland, the UK, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, Moldova, most of the Balkans...

I think they call it "Schengen-land", named after an obscure town in Luxembourg.

Didn't realize that Russia was a part of Europe. I thought the dream was the opposite, to make Europe a part of Russia.
You can twist your way into thinking any very bad thing or practice isn’t so. We can extend your line of thinking to murder and rape— does that sound acceptable too?

No, this guy was much worse and more harmful than the norms of our society and those that propagate those norms.
In the long run, wars make us safer and richer
It's not only that we need to code the business logic in a programming language. To a degree we must also design those business processes. That is programming too, programming your people.
The nod to culture war bs is pretty funny, but this is also a deep and interesting problem. In this talk Hinton relates it to conv nets (and their shortcomings). The shoe example is also great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5Vxk9twXlE
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/9/21-1042_article

> one scenario is that their immune system mounted a strong nasal/mucosal response in the upper respiratory system, based on exposure to prior coronaviruses.

Another scenario is they got a small dose and their innate immune system worked. A bigger dose would just restart the process from scratch. I'm not claiming the vaccine is a miracle cure, but it's layer #1 of a defense in depth strategy. In any case, studies have shown infection + vaccine is even better.
The three pillars of great incident response
Is it safe to assume you've never had to deal with those downright malevolent dark patterns and button labyrinths, designed to make it extremely unlikely for anyone in the general population to actually reject tracking?
It's... not focused on social connection? It's a fucking third person shooter.
My bad, but those pages though work on IPv6 though.
Kind of, but not entirely. Some EU countries' citizens are excluded from the US ESTA ( Bulgaria, Romania) and need to apply for a visa with ridiculous questions ( list all countries you've visited in the last 5 years (if you live in the EU that's a stupid question, i had to go through my Google Maps history to have the full list), and crazy stuff like "are you coming to prostitute yourself in the US") and in-person interviews at an American embassy. There's no reciprocity for that kind of special treatment.

Edited to add: and of course they request fingerprints and photos ( of course in a special format nobody else uses). I'm still pissed i had to give up that information and it ended up for nothing ( i didn't end up visiting the US, and now i no longer need that visa)
VPN providers can also be compelled to share all logs, even if they say they don’t log your info or activity, there are court cases that prove there are weaknesses in VPN providers, whether it was the method of payment you signed up with or if they logged your meta data on sign up, location services and telemetry from a mobile app backend etc.

Privacy is never a guaranteed thing when you introduce ubiquitous computing to the mix, even things outside of computers can profile you like being captured in CCTV around the time when your signals are picked up from a computer/smartphone phoning home or unusual internet activity, like the scene out of Mr. Robot.
I'm one of the uneducated and I enrolled in a biomedical science degree.

As I said i'm not an expert, just a first year student getting my mind blown.

But in my classes, we look at catalogs of genetic vectors:

here's a top google hit
https://en.vectorbuilder.com/

These vectors contain a number of indicator genes, such as antibiotic resistance, so you can use the antibiotic to kill the bacteria that didn't take up your vector.

The vectors have a prepared insertion site to take your gene, that's right in the middle of another gene that produces a colored product.

If the your resultant bacteria produces the colored product, you know you gene didn't make it into the insertion site or it would have broken that gene.

There's vast catalogues of this stuff.

Then when you want to do full genetic sequence to see where your gene has inserted, that's pretty much automated for you.

https://www.thermofisher.com/au/en/home/life-science/sequenc...

You want to compare the genetic sequence to other organisms, there are online search engines for that:

https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi

If your experience is anything like mine, once you start searching for this, google ads is going to lure you into the rabbit hole with offers to 'automate your agrigenomic high throughput whole sequence workflow' and 'rapid de novo genome assembly'

Some of the stuff google is trying to sell me, seems only slightly more non-fictional than 'mystery flesh pit national park', which is of course a searchable phrase.
Still requires you to lie on the ESTA form, which is not necessarily a good idea. (i.e. if you lie and get caught, that's worse than going through the visa process)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonglen
I'm no expert but from what I've gleaned from various articles around the web and some recent questions to my optician is that myopia is caused by how light rays focus inside our eyes. Rays that don't focus correctly at the back of the eye (perhaps outside the macula?) create a feedback loop that causes the eye to grow longer. Unfortunately there's no opposite effect to make the eye shorter. So naturally there's a predisposition for everyone to become short sighted with this mechanism (perhaps a primary cause of coronavision?):

"It is believed that the trigger for the eye to continue growing beyond its optimal length is in the way rays of light entering the visual system are focused on the back of the eye. In myopia, these rays or images focus in front of the retina causing a blurred image. Spectacles or contact lenses for myopia help focus these rays of light directly onto the retina in the central area correcting the vision, however, in the peripheral areas of the eye the rays of light are focused on theory “behind” the retina. It is believed this is a stimulus for the eye to grow. Myopia control or myopia management spectacles lenses and contact lenses are designed with more than one point of focus and therefore diminish this stimulus for the eye to grow."

Above quoted from:

https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/myopia-management-looki...
Stupid question: What value, if any, does "Google Tag Manager" offer the end user? By "end user" I do not mean website operator or advertiser.

I never ran this stuff. There is no Javascript engine available, there is no DNS and the local forwarding proxy does not forward traffic to Google domains. I am not asleep at the wheel and probably not the target end user. But I always wondered why any end user would want to allow this garbage, assuming they exercised a conscious choice.
Put it all in storage, beyond what you can take on a plane.

Forget to pay the bill. Problem solved.
Intel: Sapphire Rapids with HBM Is 2X Faster Than AMD's Milan-X
Kraken: Turn-key OCR system optimised for historical and non-Latin script
It makes it easier to gather support to change the situation. Good luck if you are in the minority with the problem.