skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Genuine LOL.

Uncle Sam asking the 2 great censors of the west to get rid of the most popular app in their stores, so that the east will cease competing with said Uncle on who gets to brainwash their citizens. Gold.

Whichever way this goes, one of these parties loses big, which is a good thing for us humans.
So it is no different or in fact even worse than Facebook, as expected and as found in this security analysis. [0]

From [0]:

> The above code taken from the TikTok APK, shows the collection of cellphone data, specifically the IMEI of the cell phone. The IMEI number of a phone is literally created to identify the phone.

> We at Penetrum believe that everyone should have the right to know what data is being harvested by companies and would like to give our readers a clearer understanding of what happens when you download the mobile application TikTok. From our understanding and our analysis it seems that TikTok does an excessive amount of tracking on it’s users, and that the data collected is partially if not fully stored on Chinese servers with the ISP Alibaba.

So essentially, a 900GB data breach at Alibaba suggests that TikTok user tracking data which ties hundreds of millions of users has been exposed out in the open to be used by criminals, and scammers. This is nothing new or surprising as I have already questioned a TikTok fanatic about the excessive tracking in this app but decided to deflect with more whataboutsims. [1]

On top of that denial from their own users, all this tracking was made possible due to TikTok's spyware and their mass collection programme, with the additional fact that TikTok staff in China DID have access to US data after lying and denying it. [2]

So something that is even worse than Facebook is hardly 'The best thing to have happened to the Internet.' [3] Especially when TikTok was found to do even more invasive tracking than Facebook with sending biometrics, IMEI numbers and voice prints, and is required to give up and funnel all this data and traffic to the China and the CCP meaning it is another honeypot surveillance tool luring in the sheep to willingly give up all their data and they cannot be trusted.

TikTok should get either a massive fine in the billions just like Facebook did or it should be totally banned until it is verified to rid of its invasive data collection just like what India did recently. Failing to comply, it should get both.

[0] https://penetrum.com/tiktok/Penetrum_TikTok_Security_Analysi...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28137000

[2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28135484

[4] https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-the-wa...
is there anything comparable to bitcoin in history (and no, not tulips)?

a technology that had some merit, but also a lot of doubters/haters?

seems BTC, and crypto is some novel historical event. i can't really compare it to anything.
You can buy modchips online that remove the speed limit. I did this for my ebike which was limited to 25km/h. With the modchip installed it can go much faster.
Show HN: I solved the problem of multiple tools in data infrastructure
Whats missing from GitHub/SourceHut "wikis" that would make them actual wikis? At least with GitHub wikis you can edit them from the web like the wikis that came before GitHub.
I want to digress.

«Beginning in 2006, the state, focused on how to incentivize people to take up solar power, showered subsidies on homeowners who installed photovoltaic panels but had no comprehensive plan to dispose of them. Now, panels purchased under those programs are nearing the end of their typical 25-to-30-year life cycle. Many are already winding up in landfills, where in some cases, they could potentially contaminate groundwater with toxic heavy metals such as lead, selenium and cadmium.»

«Beginning in 2006» plus «typical 25-30 years life cycle», is «already» for «many» of them. And the headline says «now».

I'm so tired of articles whose math doesn't add up and without any explanation. I'm not saying there can be no explanation, good or bad, or that the substantive issue isn't real, I'm just so tired of there being no explanation when the numbers don't add up.
I mean that's the question right?

46B to control the POTUS? Or at least be his golden child?

Also 3 months ago I would have given the election to the prior. Things are more mixed now. But if Musk delivers him Twitter? All bets are off.
I believe it is "five sigma" which carries this stigma (because many value-at-risk models saw the market moves in 2008 as a 5 sigma event).
Not the FCC, this is one FCC commissioner's statement. He's not the chair, nor is he part of the majority party, so you can probably read this as a political statement.

Republicans had a chance to ban TikTok during the last administration. They did not do it.
Don't forget low level embedded programmers, Kernel developers, and many who live in the world of coding in C/ASM.

I recall numerous instances in my undergraduate career where professors and the students passionate in these fields would actively persuade people who didn't get exposes to the stuff from even trying.

I remember one professor teaching an elective class on the Linux kernel and how he would try his best to scare people into dropping the class early on. We lost 25% of the class after the first lecture (and the only girl). To be fair the class was hardcore for the typical level of CS students you'd see in my school. It was painful but fun. I just wonder about the people who got scared away, maybe some of them could have really embraced the Kernel and become contributors.

To this day I see hostility among the low level crowd in my dealing with people in the industry. They think that because what they do is more complicated that writing a bog standard web app that they are special and should be left in their caves not to be disturbed.

On a different note: I feel this is playing at least a small part in hindering Linux adoption. I have dealt with the community on and off for over 10 years and just the level of negativity that comes out of that community has got to be putting off at least some people wanting to tip their toes in the water. We need to MLLGA: Make Low Level Great Again! At that starts with really welcoming normies with open arms and patience while they get over the initial hurdles.
They already do that. China is notoriously strict about information control, hence minimal presence of western social media and tech companies on their market.

Like when Google refused to comply with censorship. They've got clipped almost immediately[0] and haven't recovered to this day. And no, there was no appeal, no political process or way to get around it.

If anything, America is lagging behind rest of the world in regulation, and is letting foreign companies get away with things that would get them banned in rest of the world.
Another example would be ongoing EU crusade against media piracy.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#2010%E2%80%932016...
individual vs collective action
That...seems completely reasonable to me.
This is of course different from China, because in US you can vote against it.

(People seriously believe this, lol.)
> Sorry, I vehemently disagree. I remember my parents explaining abortion to me as a child, and I thought it was pretty barbaric. My parents are less 'pro-life' than I am.

I'm not saying children aren't inclined to be repulsed by abortion, I'm saying they wouldn't empathize with a fertilized embryo any more than they'd empathize with a sperm cell. In fact they're probably a lot more likely to empathize with the sperm cell since it's moving around.

> Personally, I don't use birth control, because I think it's too dangerous.

I don't think I understand this.

> Sure. Christopher Hitchens was pro-life.

Thank you for this, it was interesting hearing his perspective. I really dislike his perspective, but it's interesting to hear anyway; it's the sort of example I was looking for.

What I dislike is how totally definitional his position seems. We musn't destroy fertilized embryos because they are humans, and they are humans because... we are defining humans to be fertilized embryos and beyond? Why not ask the question in the first place: Why is it wrong to kill? If it's because of the lost potential life that would have been lived had the killing not occurred, then we must outlaw all forms of birth control. If it's because of the termination of the neurological functions of a human or human-like brain, then there's nothing wrong with destroying embryos. But what is the ethical argument for the cutoff being fertilization? "Potential life" clearly does not work; potential lives are prevented all the time. "Imminent life" doesn't work either; sperm on their way to an egg are imminent life until they hit latex. The moment when "the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte" is very interesting, but so are many other stages that precede it and follow it. I don't see why that stage strikes an ethical chord except in the minds of people who can't separate arbitrary term definition from reality.

What if we defined sexual intercourse this way? Let's find the biological moment where sexual intercourse has technically occurred, and rest our moral judgement on that biological definition. So, for example, rape with a condom is a whole separate class of crime, because sexual intercourse never occurred. Nevermind that the real impact to thinking, feeling people is almost totally disconnected from that specific biological definition we've picked.

In addition to my questions from the previous comment, here's another thing I'd ask Christopher Hitchens (if he were still alive) or those who agree with him on this subject: Is it wrong to have sex with a woman born with a condition that allows her eggs to be fertilized, but leaves no chance for them to ever implant, thereby invariably killing one or two fertilized "humans" every month she has sex? Or, in abstract terms: Is it really the fertilized embryo entity that we care about? Or is it in fact the imminent life? And if it is the imminent life, then why is pulling out okay (or is it)?
We have newer leaks about data collections that seem genuine but that particular post you've linked to has been debunked. He even promoted a subreddit where he was unable to provide proof for _any_ of his claims. Nothing ever happened. Some things just didn't make any sense like the app making regular http requests. Google doesn't allow that and they haven't allowed it for years. It's literally impossible for that to be the case, for example.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tiktok_reversing/comments/i8gig3/be...
Huge difference, I agree. Also, old news.
From the link:

*

- Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)

- Other apps you have installed (I've even seen some I've deleted show up in their analytics payload - maybe using as cached value?)

- Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)

- Whether or not you're rooted/jailbroken

- Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds - this is enabled by default if you ever location-tag a post IIRC

- They set up a local proxy server on your device for "transcoding media", but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication

The scariest part of all of this is that much of the logging they're doing is remotely configurable, and unless you reverse every single one of their...

*

Not trying to be flippant, but that list just sounds like google play services to me. In fact, I assumed play services collects way more data.

Also, tiktok surely must be collecting some engagement / interaction analytics... That list doesn't seem complete or legitimate.
From author, being in the data and startup ecosystem for some time now, have been trying to extract value from data, but the first step was always to get the infrastructure right and when I tried to do that, always got stuck in selecting the right tool for each step of Ingestion, storage, transformation and BI among 100's of available tools. And even after spending time and energy, chances of ending up choosing tools which are difficult to scale well with each other in a reliable and maintainable way are still very high !! This tool is an attempt to solve for this problem of getting started on extracting insights from data.
i think the issue here is doubts that tiktok isn't sharing some (or all) of it's data with prism/nsa or whatever the successor(s) is.
That would be illegal and prone to surface at one point or another, the best policy is to not keep logs on any service that touts itself as anonymous.
Tell HN: Optimization is only premature when the expected profit is negative
Many optimizations are dismissed as irrelevant and "premature". But, for enterprises with finite cash to throw at hardware, fewer optimizations are premature than is often assumed.

Use less memory, use less CPU, and you can get more instances running on a single machine.

RiiR, switch to a unikernel, etc. same thing.

But only real optimization counts---real reductions in resource usage. Not things you believe _should_ make things faster or lighter; only things that _do_.

But if the optimization costs you more in developer time than will be reclaimed in operations costs over the _entire lifetime of the code_... then it is premature.

Estimating this, though, is a challenge.

Just stating the obvious, I suppose.
> I paid them what I thought was fair for a Bay Area coding role

The 'fair' pay in the Bay area is sustained/inflated by the vast amounts of VC money with a _huge_ appetite for risk. I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is absolutely unique, you just don't have those finance conditions anywhere else in the world, bar maybe New York.

Also all the quoted companies in your comment will have physical goods with way way smaller profit margins compared to most Bay area products.

My point is that it is not strange at all if you follow the money.
> a browser plugin that pretty prints json, it's RESTful?

Only if its a hypermedia rendering (for a example it renders hypertext so the end-user can interact with the system).
Well, that makes sense. An ebike is really a light motorcycle, and needs similar safety systems. Harleys from the 1920s look like modern fat-tire ebikes.[1]

[1] https://www.hdforums.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/1920sHar...
Mind sharing your Snapchat username (or email me at vinay.kola@snap.com)? I can raise this to the right folks.
I mean I get your sentiment on one hand. On the other hand, I have people in my family who knew what life is like under European (British) imperialism and being considered sub-human.
> I really do not accept that, I want to have friends from wherever, go with whoever and do business with whom I deem appropriate without asking permission to anyone.

Ask yourself what Ukranian citizens would answer to that question.
>if you're an American in America who doesn't travel abroad what is the threat TikTok poses when compared to the FAANGs?

They could intentionally influence the public opinion about anything, e.g., elections.
If perl has taught us anything... 3 ways to do something is worse than 1.
I've had my personal site for about two years now and I've found it quite valuable to maintain. (I started out with one or two articles on dev.to before moving to my own self-hosted site at https://chidiwilliams.com.)

While I haven't gotten any jobs or major opportunities from it, someone once emailed me saying one of my posts helped them prepare for (and ace) an interview at Google. Plus, I've randomly run into people who, after hearing my name, tell me they've read and liked some of my posts.
Author says that the json is not self-describing, but the html example is... That's true if "self describing" means "describes html structure".

Perhaps modern use of the term REST is officially incorrect, but I think most REST clients really need to understand what they are receiving. How many rest clients merely show the result (as-is) to the human user? No, most clients are themselves programs which need to consume the response and make further decisions.

Imaging having to parse out the official REST HTML response to get the balance of the account. I hope the source is only in one language, because I would hate to have to build my own reverse-localization system just to make sense of the REST response I just consumed.

I was really trying to grasp why someone would build such a tall soapbox to complain about the incorrect use of a term, when the correct use would mean building arguably near-useless APIs. But then I took a look at what the htmx site is all about. It's about everything-as-html. "Note that when you are using htmx, on the server side you typically respond with HTML, not JSON. This keeps you firmly within the original web programming model, using Hypertext As The Engine Of Application State without even needing to really understand that concept."

Looking at the rest of their site, I'm finding it very difficult to see the value proposition over the current approach of JSON APIs.
what are you taking about, security-wise?
> By all means, if you disapprove of the way a university does things, don't enroll.

By the time you find out, it is too late. See also "The Market for Lemons".

> You can be an engineer without college.

Electrical engineer is AFAICT a protected term in some places and not others, so you legally can't do that everywhere.

> You're free to start your own university,

University is a protected term in many places, so again, you can't "freely" do that. This is to protect against the information asymmetry that the potential students have, precisely because of the aforementioned lemon market issues if they don't, and even then it's not perfect.

> if your teaching is truly better and more rewarding to your students the free market will make you a rich man.

Except the potential students don't have any way to determine that until at a minimum of 15 years after you start, even if they're unusually highly informed and highly motivated. And university tuition fees in many places are fixed, so you don't get more reward than any other teacher.
I meant that as in "I don't use their apps" and it doesn't affect me whether they're available on the app stores or not.
The problem with my bike was after 27km/h the motor would cut out. you could pedal harder to go faster although it'd feel like pedalling through mud without the motor.

Once I removed the speed limit, it is limited by my pedalling and the gearing speed combined with the limit of the motor. it feels natural like a bike.
Your typing cadence may be another bit of identifying personal info. Not to mention they could be lying or "not know" what their tech is really doing. Wouldn't be the first time.
Wow that is really cool. Here's the GitHub link without Twitter tracking, BTW: https://github.com/chip-red-pill/MicrocodeDecryptor

Especially considering how they gained this knowledge:

"Using vulnerabilities in Intel TXE we had activated undocumented debugging mode called red unlock and extracted dumps of microcode directly from the CPU. We found the keys and algorithm inside."

And looking further down, some X86 instructions (that people would usually call low-level) actually trigger execution of an entire ELF binary inside the CPU (implemented in XuCode). Just wow.
I did a mechanical engineering degree and ended up programming (way better pay) which I already could do before uni. I don't regret it though - it's much much easier to learn programming on your own than other kinds of engineering.

E.g. if you got a job doing low level programming, like firmware development or even chip design (basically still programming) your EE knowledge would be very helpful.
The US government is a foreign government for 96% of the people, not to mention that its own citizens don't control it much.
This is, in my opinion, great advice. I work at a non-profit cultural institution as sole IT admin and I have never been happier with my job. I couldn’t imagine going back to the startup world.
France isn't the outlier. In those "pockets" of longevity you've mentioned there actually is a common thread: moderate to little consumption of refined carbohydrates.

This is what dietary science got all wrong since the 50s. The problem isn't butter, it's bread with butter. It's not cheese, it's pasta with cheese.

Carbohydrates and fats together are bad for you. But guess what, you should eliminate carbs first, not fat. Fat is good, it's energy, it's essential for hormones. Carbs, especially simple or refined ones, are just fuel that either you burn NOW or it's quickly stored during period of famines. With an added feedback loop of wanting to consume more to be better prepared for the winter. Fructose being obesogenic is by design.

We know this now, yet we keep hearing the same bullshit around fat is bad, eat another bread roll from pop sci rags. My local shop only sells low fat yogurt and skinless chicken thighs.
I actually think it's naive. Sure if military personnel or state department use TikTok that can create security risks, but the same is true with any other social media network.

The additional data that TikTok tries to gather from the mobile OSs is insignificant compared to what you can get from videos that people take willingly.

Russian soldiers use VK, that doesn't stop OSINT researchers tracking them down on there.
> They ban them because they won’t censor factual information and won’t promote disinformation.

Different censorship, different disinformation - but we have that in the west as well. The EU is several steps ahead in this race thanks to their Digital Services Act (making it criminal to spread some information, and threatening service providers with million-Euro-fines if they don't delete quickly enough [as in: within hours]), but the US has its very own 'Disinformation Governance Board' located with DHS, which is in all but name a Ministry of Truth. You are supposed to use the Internet to earn money and consume and spend, not to question the narrative.

There are no good countries. All nation-states suck. Some are better at marketing their alleged superiority to their less-intelligent (and thanks to controlling the education system: kept less-intelligent) population through "patriotism", though.
This article really is about getting people to use their overloaded HTML libraries.
related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
I recall that in the wake of the end of the Cold War, the US began hiring former Soviet nuclear/bio/chem weapons experts to prevent them from selling their services to various regimes. This could be a good time for govt and military to scoop up talent, tuis time in crypto and other new fields.
Small teams? Here is to small teams! Vim, Git, Hacker News, Photopea - many of my favorite, most used programs are created by a team of one!

Larger programs? Look at Linux and its "everything is a file" philosophy. Linux is one of the largest codebases out there.

SQLite will be around for a while, but not as long as text files. Who knows how long you can easily access present day sqlite files without fiddling with SQLite version numbers.
And the format does not offer the easy access to the data that text files do.

I'm not saying nobody should ever use a DB. But files are often the superior approach.