skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great question!

The long version (if it’s patronising please skim forward, I’m writing as an explainer for anyone else that comes along):

E-mail was originally a means to communicate informally between two participants over the Internet.

In this early version of the system the message would leave your machine, go to your Mail server, then the recipients mail server, then their inbox. This would complete the transmission and a copy would exist at both ends.

Companies providing ostensibly free online e-mail inboxes have slick sign-up funnels that on the surface seem to be offering a very similar system as the one above, with very little in the way of regulation around either the sign-up funnel or the mailbox (and which do not explain the catastrophic life consequences that can occur as a result of losing access to your mailbox).

These new mailboxes work differently from those of the early Internet, though:

1) Your mail is sent to your mail server. A copy may or may not be retained locally.

2) Your mail server transmits the message to the recipients mail server as before.

3) The recipient receives a notification of the e-mail and may or may not retain a copy locally.

This infrastructure is ubiquitous and now not quite 30 years after the early Internet we have an issue where you’ll be required to have an e-mail address for almost all public services and common accounts that have little to no online component. Your entire life, more or less, may pass through that inbox.

If one day you lose access to the account (in that you insert your password and the provider says no), you will lose access to your entire e-mail history.

You may attempt to reset some passwords for essential services, but you can’t, because they’re sending e-mails to verify your identity - which you’ll never be able to receive.

You move on, create a new account, and attempt to start over. However, e-mails - potentially important e-mails containing personal information - continue to be delivered to a mailbox that you can’t access ever again. Maybe you miss some important alerts.

Perhaps it was a gmail account that had your entire photo and video history in google photos. That’s now gone too. With your passwords, if you’re using chrome passwords.

You rebuild, and a couple of years pass, and perhaps someone else gets access to your account (either through a hack, or a rogue employee with access rights, or someone who guessed a badly thought out password).

You never find out that the account was accessed, so have no-one to complain to, and maybe you end up with savings or 401K/pensions getting emptied. Which in a lot of cases wouldn’t be discovered until they’re due to be collected.

Some of the above might sound far-fetched, but you’d be surprised how much having access to an email inbox is accepted proof-of-identity in 2022.

Hence the need for regulation.
Funny timing. We hit send on the email batch at 16:43 UTC. Initial HN post looks to be from 16:44 UTC.
I'll have my 70 year old parents on another continent install counterstrike so we can text each other. Thanks for the suggestion.
Even that depends on what you're doing. Most scientists aren't running apps that require several 9's of availability, connect to an irreplaceable customer database, etc.

An outage, or even permanent loss of hardware, might not be a big problem if you're running easily repeatable computations on data of which you have multiple copies. At worst, you might have to copy some data from an external hard drive and redo a few weeks' worth of computations.
Sorry, I thought I was following the guidelines correctly:

> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

(I also didn’t realize that the content didn’t match. Mea culpa.)
You don't know what you've got till it is gone.. A classic theme unfortunately.
Author here! I worked for the computing infrastructure for a DNA sequencing facility, and I run a computational biology infrastructure company (trytoolchest.com, YC W22). Both are built on AWS, so I do think AWS in scientific computing has its use-cases – mostly in places where you can't saturate a queue or you want a fast cycle time.

Spot instances are still pretty expensive for a steady queue (2x of Hetzer monthly costs, for reference), and you still have to pay AWS data transfer egress costs – which are at least 30x more expensive than a colo or on-prem, if you're saturating a 1 Gbps link.

This post was born from frustration at AWS for their pricing and offerings after trying to get people to switch to AWS in scientific computing for years :)
Brands Review Data Privacy Policies After $1.2M Sephora Settlement
Japanese Knotweed: The alien shrub that can't be stopped
As a shareholder, I’d never vote to continue employee-unfriendly policies in a knowledge work company. There are too many shareholders that merely rubberstamp the decisions that come up at AGMs.
Gmail is a perfect fit in theory. Google provides a product, workspace, where you can hand out gmail addresses and reset them at need. Given that the cost of providing such accounts is actually less because the support burden falls on the city it might be possible to convince Google to provide them at less than the standard cost.
Internal memos say Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse is suffering a 'quality' problem
There is a difference.

Most people (who use go for network IO bound services) will not notice.
> There is no solution.

How an an explicit web of trust not a solution?

Imagine a system where you can keep a local database of people/sites/pages you know and how much you trust them, selectively expose parts of that database to your immediate friends and/or the web as a whole, and lookup/query the databases exposed by contacts.

"My friend F1 assigns a trust score of 0.9 to website W1, and I assign a trust score of 0.9 to F1, so I trust this site 0.81 and I'm willing to make financial transactions on it without further research (but not give it my SSN)."

"My friend F2 trusts random R1 0.7, who trusts random R2 0.5, who trusts random R3 0.4, who is pushing this new cryptocurrency - maybe I should talk with F2 about R1 and R2 before doing anything with this..."

"My friend F3 distrusts site W2 with a score of -0.7, I'm not going to shop there."

"My friend F4 is a history expert and distrusts this Wikipedia page on history with a score of -0.5, so it's probably not reliable."

What would be wrong with this system?
So was I also talking about data loss. Not everything can be replicated, but backups can and were made.

For the rest, there’s insurance. Most calculations done in a research setting are dependent upon that research surviving. If there’s a fire and the whole building goes down, those calculations are probably worthless now too.

Hell, most companies probably can’t survive their own building/factory burning down.
Repeat after me:

Security and privacy are not the same thing.

Among many other differences: security is a binary (can an attacker gain access to information) but privacy is a spectrum (what kinds of information do I want to leak).
When I was looking at AWS for personal use, I first thought it was oddly expensive even when factoring in not having to buy the hardware. When I looked at just what the electricity cost to run it myself would be, I think that addition alone turned out AWS was actually cheaper. This is without factoring in cooling / dedicated space / maintenance.
pretty much every ineffective strategy has been rationalized at some point.

email implies internet, 2FA implies realtime internet. The lack implies very poor at the very least up to and including homelessness.

"this one company uses 2FA, we should bitch at them until they remove that need" doesn't actually help anything.

This person who posted the tweet could offer their personal phone, email, and internet for these homeless friends they have. Why don't they? I bet they'll say it's because it doesn't solve the "real" problem.

Yeah, neither does asking google to spend money on removing 2FA for the homeless.
Language is a communication method evolved by intelligent beings, not a (primary) constituent of intelligence. From neurology it's pretty clear that the basic architecture of human minds is functional interconnected neural networks and not symbolic processing. My belief is that world-modeling and prediction is the vast majority of what intelligence is, which is quite close to what the LLMs are doing. World models can be in many representations (symbolic, logic gates, neural networks) but what matters is how accurate they are with respect to reality, and how well the model state is mapped from sensory input and back into real-world outputs. Symbolic human language relies on each person's internal world model and is learned by interacting with other humans who share a common language and similar enough world models, not the other way around (learning the world model as an aspect of the language itself). Children learn which language inputs and outputs are beneficial and enjoyable to them using their native intelligence and can strengthen their world model with questions and answers that inform their model without having to directly experience what they are asking about.

People who don't believe the LLMs have a world model are wrong because they are mistaking a physically weak world model for no world model. GPT-3 doesn't understand physics well enough to embed models of the referents of language into a unified model that has accurate gravity and motion dynamics, so it maintains a much more dreamlike model where objects exist in scenes and have relationships to each other but those relationships are governed by literary relationships instead of physical ones and so contradictions and superpositions and causality violations are allowed in the model. As multimodal transformers like Gato get trained on more combined language and sensory input their world models will become much more physically and causally accurate which will be reflected in their accuracy on NLP tasks.
Yes, I have an undergrad that hit financial markets and financial statement accounting analysis and an advanced degree in CS.

The dual experience is invaluable, especially for maintaining a base level of sanity in a business as a technical employee. Why things work how they do will make a lot more sense.
No. One can just remember a good password for gmail, and either use other passwords elsewhere (maybe bad, re-used, ones, or maybe good ones, not relevant if we're talking about gmail), or just always authenticate elsewhere using your gmail account.

Remembering one good password is not too onerous. Easier, it seems, that keeping any physical object in your possession if you're homeless. (I would assume that most losses are not due to cognitive failure, but instead are things like thefts when one is asleep.)
Congress is much older than the general population.

Older people tend to have shorter term thinking, basically not worrying about what happens after they die soon. Leaves a big mess for younger people to deal with when they are themselves older so they then just push off the problem to the next generation and the vicious cycle continues till everything is bad everywhere.
Why Dates and Times Seem to Lose Their Meaning
Paywall removed:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/brands-review-data-privacy-poli...
This. I eat tuna at most once a month.

You also excrete a lot of metals via vigorous sweating (as well as urine and stool). All the more reason to do sustained cardio (or sauna) plus drink lots of water and eat lots of fibrous food. I.e. having a well rounded 'generically healthy' lifestyle (though I am suggesting a lot more sweating than most Americans are used to).
Your 70 year old parents don't care about security of communication. Whatever http(without 's') chat is quite enough for them. They were talking on analog, unencrypted line for whole their life. Why should they care now? PRISM anyone ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM )?
That's almost exactly what Google has done. Here's how you turn off 2FA on your account:

1. Go to myaccount.google.com

2. Press "Security"

3. Press "2 step verification"

4. Enter your password

5. Press "Turn off"

6. Confirm the dialog that says "Turning off 2-Step Verification will remove the extra security on your account, and you’ll only use your password to sign in."
I feel the same. The phrase "human capital" is one of the most loathsome I've ever encountered.
You would be amazed at the frequency with which “real” academics, journalists, lawyers, judges’ clerks, etc. plagiarize Wikipedia.

Teachers telling students they can’t under any circumstances cite Wikipedia trains this behavior.
Loder has 130k Twitter followers without any claim to fame besides Twitter, so he knows exactly what he's doing. If he had vented about his friends cutting themselves with a knife that's too sharp, he would have been ridiculed, but in this case he can hide behind the Google hate bandwagon.
It isn't a flawed characterization. It is called the Favorite Betrayer[0] (also known as Strong Spoiler Effect) and has been seen in practice. We should also talk about rank's failure of the Monotonicity Criterion[1][2] because that's relevant here too.

To claim it is impossible in practice is to deny history.

[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion

[1] https://electionscience.org/library/monotonicity/

[2] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Monotonicity
Regardless of whether the 10,000 hour rule is true, it seems you are conflating becoming an expert with successfully switching careers. I know more people than not who are successful in their careers despite being non-experts.
this is on the money. How good you need to be to do a job for a career - if that career is not performing in some insanely competitive field like sports or music - is so, so, so much lower than what we are talking about when discussing the practice history of elite performers.

If you learn to practice correctly, and get a good teacher, you will be amazing to most people in 2000 hours - 3 years of consistent two hours a day of good practice produces a shit ton of expertise.
I don't love React but the examples you mentioned make web component look bad. It's as bad (bloat) as React.

---

EDIT: add links of evidence

https://github.com/adobe/spectrum-web-components/discussions...

https://github.com/shoelace-style/shoelace/issues/525

I've seen many people in this space often forget to utilize `import` and `export`, that is not trying to write composable modules so that it's treeshake-able.
Oh, but they are going to protect everyone by creating their own built-in VPN [0] to "protect your online activity no matter what app or web browser you use." /s

[0] https://store.google.com/ca/product/pixel_7_pro?hl=en-GB
I’ve got a feeling this comment won’t age well…
I got both. Managing a low complexity worker and a high complexity worker requires vastly different styles. Managing a factory production line is very different (down to Left Hand and Right Hand specific tasks!) than managing infinitely configurable software.

Netflix is not a McDonalds, and a McDonalds isn't a Ford assembly plant.

The problem I see is that morons apply the wrong methodology to a business. Typically former 19 year old McDonald's Managers (TM) apply authoritative control to a scrum shop which should be decentralized and delegated by design.
Given the context interpreted the original post as implying that the end of those services was in short term timeframe. And apparently so did the poster im defending.

That may not have been what the original poster intended but if that’s the case then they should use less ambiguous language.
Cutting salaries or jobs can incur other costs. Lost productivity (worse morale, you fired the person who knew the thing and now everyone else has to try to figure it out, whatever), overtime pay for those who remain, that kind of thing.

It's like if you're spending money on ineffective ads that only produce a return of 50% of what you put in. You notice this and stop the spending. You're only saving half your spending, because the other half was offset by the extra sales already.

[EDIT] Point is, it's conceivable that cutting spending could, even, reduce profit—it's not a given that spending less means greater profit, and certainly not that it means greater profit in the amount of the cut spending.
I suppose you're talking about push notifications to save battery life instead of an app that is constantly polling for new messages?

I don't think all notifications are push notifications, and those that are would be https encrypted between the host and client, so any e2ee message would have to be decrypted on device before showing a notification, google should not have access to this, but of course it comes back to whether you should trust anything software tells you.
FYI your light/dark mode icon is off-center for me. Fedora 36/Firefox.

Also at some window heights, the "Deployed with Reflame in x ms" box obscures the "Have questions? Let's chat!" text without generating a scrollbar.
> Are homeless people's email accounts getting hacked three times per year?

The aversion to 2FA makes them seem like easy targets if I'm looking for addresses to use for spam.

> maybe getting hacked is worse, or maybe loosing access is worse, but the user should have the right to make that decision

Getting hacked makes losing access considerably more likely. This ain't one or the other.
I really dislike that about the app too. In fairness, I think the goal was to replace Apple Message and SMS which require a phone number but it is also self defeating in a sense because it breaks the privacy and plausible deniability Signal is supposed to offer by tying an app instance to a particular piece of hardware.

Almost every communication app requires a phone number now. The claim is that this limits spam which is probably true but I suspect there is tremendous value in having real phone numbers and the ability to do pervasive tracking. We know mobile phone providers sell data on phones. The best that can be said about the Signal org is they are non profit but this is not very reassuring especially given the threat model of people who might be using Signal.
I enjoyed The Tipping Point and was excited to read Blink but did not enjoy it nearly from the beginning. It was simply too much cognitive dissonance for me to continue when your point 2a kept being explained.

Admittedly I did not finish the book so point 3 does seem valuable to me in a way I probably under-appreciated.
Life was extremely rigid not that long ago. People knew their place and did not break the rules.

I am not sure if this is better or worse than my idiot downstairs neighbors that would party every weekend til 3am with zero regard for any of their neighbors. Then they are banging on the ceiling at 4pm on a Wednesday because we were moving furniture around for 15 minutes.
Instead of a person, then, call it ten people at different companies, so that all ten won't lose their jobs at once barring an event so catastrophic money will be meaningless.

The point is, absolute numbers aren't nearly as relevant as per GDP numbers.
>The people who explicitly ask for less security get less security.

The problem with that is less security is almost always more usable than more security, which leads to the greater amount of people being in that state, which is not just a danger to the user making the choice, it is a danger to others.
> Well, I don't know for sure that I'm right about that. But: take the garden of eden story. It's a metaphor for coming of age. They realize they are naked. They are expelled from the garden (childhood) and must go out into the world where they face toil and hardship. They eat the forbidden fruit (sex). I think it's pretty clearly a parable.

This interpretation may have merit if it were a book written today, but it seems very unlikely to have been the intended one for the mid -100's BC audience as it wouldn't match the coming of age experience for children of that time. Children would be expected to know of sex very quickly. The Bible is also pretty clearly pro-sex for husbands and wives. The important takeaway of this story is, imo, that life is hard because people were bad.

The texts also reference specific rivers, placing the garden of eden somewhere in the ballpark of modern day Iraq. And much of the aesthetics like the garden itself may simply be a rehash of Mesopotamian mythology

> Take Noah's ark. Noah plans and looks towards the future and toils when everyone else is being lazy and is therefore safe when everyone else gets drowned, despite being laughed at and dismissed. It's a similar story to the grasshopper and the ant.

So old testament noah lived for almost a thousand years, and spent a couple hundred of them preparing for the flood, being told what to do by God or angels. He wasn't looking toward the future, he was exclusively told by god that the flood was coming. Other people weren't lazy, they just didn't believe him.

Bonus: When he gets off the boat, he feels bad and asks why god was such a dick, and god tells him that if he had asked for mercy in the first place, god wouldn't have destroyed the world, so it's noah's fault. And noah agrees.

> There's a reason these stories continue to resonate centuries later, but I don't think it has anything to do with whether they are literally true.

I think it has a lot to do with influential community leaders telling you have to literally believe in the texts.
Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me skeptical of the things I read on there.

It's always frustrating for me to see things in Wikipedia I know are wrong because I was in the room when a particular decision was made, or because I personally made the decision.

I gave up making corrections because they would always get reverted by someone in another country who wasn't even born when the event happened. Simply because there wasn't a random blogger live streaming it, and nobody's written a book about it, my knowledge remains my own.

Wikipedia is the ultimate example of deleting the world's history because it can't be linked to.
I recall that the problem was broader than 2FA. They also re-verify accounts that have been idle, or that are being accessed from a new location. Or issues if you've forgotten the password and don't have a phone.
New system retrofits diesel engines to run on 90% hydrogen
what are you doing to worry about hip fracture? are you a rock climber?
despite all the advantages of a strictly vegetarian diet, like better stamina, endurance etc. worrying about calcium intake is a bit mislead. as there is a big difference of having a slight lower bone density than omnivores and getting worried about having your bones broke.

it is like the argument of omega-3 content of flaxseeds and chia being poor translated into useful chains of acid like DHA… all you have is to increase your intake on the ballpark of 160% rather than 100% from animal sources… which translate in having to eat the enormous amount of 3 tbsp of chia per day, so you can overcome the “inefficiency”

plus not even getting into who are the vegan people being researched on osteoporosis rate. there is vegans who survive out of pasta and soda (which contributes for osteoporosis) and those who eat a superb healthy varied diet; plus vegans who do not exercise (which contributes for osteoporosis) and those who do ETC.
Most discussion happening over on the post about the main news report on the case here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33119858
>In this case, we actually aren't being ambitious enough. Why are we having a system where we give out phones every 12 weeks to each homeless person? We'd probably save money for the program by developing some sort of dedicated device designed to be harder to steal or lose. Maybe a high-autonomy low-powered KaiOS smartphone that can be attached as a strap? It's not like the current devices are working.

You're putting the cart before the horse. The far simpler solution is for the government to provide the homeless with email. Now the auth can work however you want.
Uncle bubble ;)