skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is absurd to claim that the main use of WebRTC is fingerprinting. Especially during the pandemic the world pretty much ran on WebRTC. Real-time media is clearly a pretty core functionality for the web to be a serious application platform, it wasn't just some kind of a trojan horse for tracking.

Now, it is true that a lot of older web APIs do expose too much fingerprinting surface. But the design sensibilities having changed a lot over time, it's just not the case that you can make statements about what browser developers do now based on what designs from a decade or two ago look like. These days privacy is a top issue when it comes to any new browser APIs.

But let's take your question at face value: why aren't thesespecific things behind a permission dialog? Because the permissions would be totally unactionable to a normal user. "This page wants to send you notifications" or "this page wants to use the microphone" is understandable. "This page wants to read pixels from a canvas" isn't. If you go the permission route, the options are to either a) teach users that they need to click through nonsensical permission dialogs, with all the obvious downsides; b) make the notifications so scare or the permissions so inaccessible that the features might as well not exist. And the latter would be bad! Because the legit use cases for e.g. reading from a canvas do exist; they're just pretty rare.

The Privacy Sandbox approach to this is to track and limit how much entropy a site is extracting via these kinds of side channels. So if you legit need to read canvas pixels, you'll have to give up on other features that could leak fingerprinting data. (I personally don't really believe in that approach will work, but it is at least principled. What I'd like to see instead is limiting the use of these APIs to situations where the site has a stable identifier for the user anyway. But that requires getting away from implementing auth with cookies as opaque blobs of data with unknown semantics, and moving to some kind of proper session support where the browsers understands the semantics of signed-in session, and it's made clear to users when they're signing in somewhere and where they're signed in right now. And then you can make a lot better tradeoffs with limiting the fingerprinting surface in the non-signed in cases.)
700 employees and wiki interface havent changed for the better in 10 years? Sounds like Twitters "indispensable" 7500.
I'm not convinced that ChatGPT is anything more than just a fad in the current AI hype cycle, slightly more useful than Google's current answer snippets, but no more. ChatGPT still gets basic facts wrong, because it doesn't "understand" the material, it just relies on statistical correlations in language. But as philosophers and linguists have long known, outward forms of language are NOT the same as "understanding" the underlying concepts, though it can get tantalizingly close in appearance. In fact the impossible gap between language and logic has long been a favourite topic of both Eastern and Western philosophers. Language is hopelessly bad at expressing logical concepts unambiguously and correctly (hence the need for mathematical and logical symbols), and the only reason language works for us is because our brains are amazingly good at picking out the "relevant" meaning of sentences from literally thousands of possible interpretations. This happens at every level of language, from grammar and parsing sentence structure, to high-level conceptualization. But this is not a problem that can (according to current knowledge) be fixed with any deterministic or statistical model, and has been studied intensely for centuries.

And so, this problem with ChatGPT's inaccuracy is not a problem that will be fixed with time. Like self-driving cars, the first 80% of the problem is trivially easy, but the remaining 20% is impossible, even with tens of billions in funding poured into this problem over the last decade. And the problem is, without that remaining 20%, the technology is useless because it needs to be close to 100% reliable for it to be useful at all. How can you verify the correctness of "facts" that ChatGPT so convincingly regurgitates? This is a recursive problem. Solving this problem would be tantamount to solving the hard problem of consciousness.

We are still not anywhere close to Artificial General Intelligence, and one should attempt to at least understand the problems underlying this before thinking that ChatGPT is actually intelligent. See for example, John Vervaeke's study of Relevance Realization and "the impossibility of a general learning algorithm solution" [1].

[1] http://www.ipsi.utoronto.ca/sdis/Relevance-Published.pdf
You can export your data from LastPass and import it in e.g. 1Password. I did that ~2 years ago. No regrets.
Happy holidays everyone!

This is probably the one community I actively participate in.

I love the range of topics, the range of opinions, the quality of most comments and the conduct. When I want to really understand something that's going on, my first stop is to find the HN comment thread for it. That says a lot :)
OP here, and yeah... You nailed it. Absolutely nothing can be presumed about home networks. Most folks seem to think that because their phone shows a good WiFi signal and apps appear to work that all is good.

The stuff we ran into in the suburbs of a major US manufacturing center... Oof. I very quickly learned that a LOT of people really don't have much in the way of internet access at home.

Some other stories:

- The person who complains that a Windows 10 upgrade broke their application and they can no longer work. Real problem? Their home network connection was 2mbit symmetric DSL and the database they were working on would time out sending large results back to them. They seemed embarrassed by their connectivity and concerned about their job due to their internet access. After I managed to find out the real bandwidth and repro the problem, the site was fixed to work on low bandwidth and all was good.

- Users presuming that data on their work-provided mobile phone was unlimited. They'd use it for work, but also their kids' school-from-home, and whatever video streaming... And when you try to push a few hundred GB a month through a mobile, it gets throttled. Key here was when they finally mentioned that they "have bought two other phones but they all have the problem too" as I was able to figure out what was going on.

- Then the guy who was working from "home" but after a lot of digging I saw him VPN'ing from southwest Asia. Guy, I don't care that you hurried back to your home country when COVID hit so you could be with your family. Please just be honest with me when I'm trying to help you get working, because we have solutions for this too. (Eg: Remote work via virtualized desktop instead of trying to load big CAD models locally.)

Hell, the number of sysadmin-type IT folks who are double or triple NATing, with bargain-basement "range extenders" in every room of their house, who then exclaim BUT I AM NOT A NETWORK PERSON when I suggest that is why their wireless at home flaps like crazy is unbelievable. Or probably not for you. ;)
Tesla reports two new fatal crashes involving Autopilot or FSD Beta
> A local vault is better than a cloud vault, but if that local vault software is written by a commercial company there's still that risk.

Depending on your device and platform there's still "that risk" even if its open source. If you're compromised, you're compromised.
Merry Christmas everyone! HN is a place that I visit multiple times every day! Trying to contribute a bit more as well!
"Year of the linux desktop" has transformed from a mock into just a self-referential meme joke as nontechnical end-users moved away from desktop computers and the Windows competition started to slide into irrelevance.

The corpo world Windows market is still there, and "enthusiast" windows gaming is there, but personal computing for was mostly taken over by mobile / iPad / chromebook competition. And most of gaming of course is on mobile and consoles. The remaining corpo world use supplies mass market PC hardware to run desktop Linux on and we should keep an eye on its viability.

(Linux is of course a completely mainstream platform in the dev / maker / engineering world, windows only slightly ahead eg in stack overflow dev survey, has been working well and steadily improving for less technical users for 2-3 decades)
Here I was expecting a pragmatic nerd approach to producing reliably good cups of coffee :(.
The Belgian Official Journal
20 years ago, on December 24, 2002, it was decided to replace the paper version of the Belgian official journal by its online version, starting in 2003. Here is how Belgian citizens can access theirs laws and other official texts: http://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be. (It's also available in HTTPS.)

I believe it looks exactly the same since 1997, when that site was originally introduced, and wanted to share it. The text can be searched using a form where you have to first click the "Search" button, then the "List" button to actually go to the result page. On a given result, you can download its PDF version by clicking the "Image" button.

It looks like the site is a bunch of Perl CGI scripts but I have no idea how documents are authored, or how the PDF generation is done.

It's available only in French, Dutch, and German. While German is an official language in Belgium, the German version is only a translation, not an official text.
708 is generally used for HD and 608 for SD. Until we rid the world of standard definition broadcasting, 608 is here to stay.
The first part of your answer is incorrect about programming in a general sense (not the particular software programming most of HN does). I push it so far back as to call it programming in a computer science sense, which is very simply just proof theory encoded into a system.

There is a reason Turing is considered one of the greatest minds to ever live. He didn’t just invent a concept. He invented a completely new branch of science. We would’ve gotten there eventually but his idea to solve the Entscheidungsproblem using his machine was such a step ahead of the times that we christened him the father of an entire science.
If the "standard" for poor is changing over time, then the goal of eradicating poverty can never be achieved. For me, it has to be static: Basic shelter, food, health, and safety. It's a set of criteria that I believe most reasonable and non-idealistic people can agree on to be a universal starting point.

The fact that we're not providing the above basics universally to all citizens right now, as a matter of priority above all else, is a damning critique of government and one of the main reasons that set me down the path of anarcho-capitalist thought.
What resources did you use to get experience, was it through networking with someone else or cold apply?
How much delay is acceptable for a 0.001% point yearly mortality reduction on a busy rail line? Certainly not an hour. So there is some tradeof.

Notably the lives OP was talking about included his own. I think that matters quite a bit. Risking your own life for better speed is a different ballgame than deciding the risk other people run is fine.
Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan had a system designed for a 1 in 100 year accident.
It happened after 8 years. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016087/
PS, this is a great video about the typhoon that caused the disaster.

Disasters are Black Swan Events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
in Talebsbook he explains (ok it's a theory) that rare events happen commonly.

See also Terry Pratchet "one in a million chances happen nine times out of ten"
Absolutely true, it was nothing but my own failure to not follow whatever "best practices" (how I dislike that phrase) others talked me into. It's lonely to be the only technical guy in the C suite of a tech company, but that's the job. And it's important - I've seen what happens when there's nobody there.
CoreFreq Gives Peek at CPU Performance Info on Linux
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I was a lurker for over ten years but recently made an account. I've always learnt something new from here, and not just related to computing. I owe a significant part of my career to some of the ideas that were sparked from reading links on HN over the years and I've grown fond of this site and the community that sustains it.
Modules don't expose file level dependencies which is what you want as a build system.
What death risk are you talking about? Seems like an interesting anecdote.
> It's perfectly possible to think that some ways of generating wealth for yourself are immoral, without thinking that all such ways are immoral.

Ironically, SBF's mom wrote about that and even made a claim that if se has any sense self awareness would make her question her entire career given how her son and his colleagues turned out [0]:

> The reality is that we are all at best compromised agents, whether by biology, social circumstance, or brute luck. The differences among us are differences of degree that do not admit of categorical division into the normal and the abnormal. A morally serious inquiry into the requisite meaning of free will needs to face some basic facts about this society—for starters, that in the United States parental income and education are the most powerful predictors of whether a three-year-old will end up in the boardroom or in prison; that most abusive parents were themselves victims of abuse and neglect; that the norms of one’s peer group when growing up are powerful determinants of behavior; and that traits of emotional reactivity and impulsiveness, which have a large genetic component, are among the more robust predictors of criminal behavior. Such an inquiry would also need to address what evidence would suffice to conclude that Smith could have behaved differently. Is it enough that someone in a similar situation once pulled herself up by her own bootstraps? That the average person does? And how can we be sure that the situations are in fact similar in relevant ways?

0: https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blam...
I don't think their point was that "[all] people who love programming are great at it".

So far, from the people I have met, I would agree that having a love for the craft distinguishes very good programmers from exceptionally good ones.

There's only so much you can do against someone who is talented and enjoys spending even more time learning something.
None of it makes the slightest bit of sense.

Netflix subtitles are HDR maximum white. On a modern TV while watching dark scenes like in the House of Dragons, it's like trying to look into a cave while someone is shining an LED torch in your face.

Oh, and they won't let you chose arbitrary subtitle languages.

Someone at Netflix wrote the code -- it wasn't an accident! -- to deliberately restrict the available languages to English for the the Hearing Impaired plus four of the most common local languages.

Not speaking one of those four? Tough titties.

Would you like to see English subtitles without "Bang!", "Loud breathing", and "Somber music"?

Haha.. no.

Someone made decisions at Netflix that made sense to them, and no one else.
A: The gain in this case is relative to the energy that was put into the reaction. The 2.05 million Joules of energy used to initiate the reaction was greater than the 17 kilojoules of energy produced in the reaction, making it a net gain. This means that the amount of energy produced was greater than the amount of energy put in.

That seems wrong no ?
You misspelled Finland :)
how would crypto help dns?
It doesn't look like they are being hindered.
Tell that to my two previous managers. They were more or less forced into a management role. One left, the other retired.
I don't do anything others couldn't, technically - just whatever is peripheral but necessary. There are multiple single points of failure in our team and part of the job has been to reduce that by getting everyone to do stuff that's not in their comfort zone. We still have an undesirable bus-factor and it's not me that's the main source of it.
An common use of "emergency" in a similar manner, if I have stomach issues and need to use the toilet now, I will call the situation an emergency even if I haven't yet soiled my pants. If I reach the bathroom in time, the emergency ends with no major incident.
This reintroduces phishing vulnerabilities that current password managers don't have, leaks metadata (which is exactly what's been verified to have happened with lastpass), requires separate management of your gpg keys, and lastly, hosting in git doesn't sync. If two devices change the same password file, you can't merge that.
Oh, and for when I was running a larger ship with multiple teams, I would just focus on one team at a time, do all of the above there (with the other half of my time dedicated to more high level company wide work), then switch teams after a few months.

Probably not the best way to do it, and it might not scale beyond 230 people (since I never tried), but it's what I ended up with and it works well for me.
Yeah, the hobbyists that used to make niche sites on subjects they loved have all moved to youtube for publishing their content.

They were the people who made the web truly great back in the day.
Private Equity Gave Your Bank Password to Hackers
Trilobites did pretty well. Crocodiles and Greenland sharks are still trucking. Innovation is fun and is strong on the steep bit of the S-curve but it’s not intrinsically superior.
Ah, the “I’m too smart for this conversation” line. You should look up the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I just came up with silly calibration strategy for speedometer. When the train is on a curve of known radious you can get true speed from measured lateral acceleration.
Heh, well, that was the main reason it took over a year for me to get around to doing any serious damage with it. The focus was out originally and my graflok is slightly broken so it took some fettling and frequent checking with a vernier to ensure that everything was indeed lined up. Now it seems to be better, but I'm sticking to f8-f22. Instax is approximately ISO 800-1000 so finding a high enough shutter speed to use wide open with a high speed lens will inevitably make focus crazy critical. Framing is fine, the adapter handles that.
Self-driving convoying essentially boils down to doing this.
The problem in your approach is fully locking the brakes rather than slightly decelerating the car.

I'd also guess that after 2 years of your system most people would manage to keep their distance. Would probably work great except for merging.
In GP's example, capitalism has made food production cheaper and less labor intensive so that more people can get it, relatively.

But for me, your example is capitalism in the sense that people do it of their own free will. They give up their time and resources to help others without coercion or compulsion. Capitalism is freedom to me, and a natural state that exists outside of the state where people can interact freely with one another. What they do with it is another question entirely.

Others, however, equate capitalism with greed and evil though.
OP here.

That's where WPAD conversations get interesting... I imagine that for a whole bunch of folks something like default-path-to-internet is sufficient, or having everything hit the proxy and then hairpin some things back internally.

But when you start getting into really big private environments there are all sorts of edge cases that Proxy Auto-Config (PAC) files really help with. For those who aren't aware, PAC files are a single JavaScript function that implement tests on the requested URL (and a few other things) and return either DIRECT or PROXY for where that request should go. And this all runs on the client.

It's like a super-robust exception list that's centrally hosted and the OS handles caching it, checking for changes, etc. Changes to it can be made centrally and the clients will generally use the new one within a maximum of 20 minutes. Trying to manage a proxy exception list on each client is... hard.

Think situations like having numerous proxy servers all throughout the world, users that move around the world, and you don't want to change the client config to access different proxy servers. Or some sites that needs to go through some proxy servers, some through others (eg: for compliance or technical reasons), some direct even though they have a public-ish URL, or not wanting to bounce high-traffic internal sites off the proxies at all. It's basically client-side app layer selective routing to proxies and it's great.

WPAD is just a way to automatically discover the PAC file. While it can be hijacked on a malicious network to point devices through nefarious proxies, if the company stuff is set up right, there's nothing any of those URLs could grab. Or better, tack on some always-on VPN or whatnot when not on the trusted network and all the better.

IMO the DHCP way of doing it is kinda cool, but DNS is so much simplier and that's why it's widely supported. DNS is just DNS... Anything that can query DNS can implement WPAD logic, which is why it's supported on pretty much every browser platform and macOS and Windows and such.

DHCP requires the dhcpcd to get the setting, somehow pass it to each app that needs it, etc. It requires a lot more integration. Windows does it, but only for things that use the Windows HTTP libraries (WinHTTP). macOS could, but I understand why they don't bother...

Linux... Could... But proxy support on most Linuxes sucks. HTTP_PROXY/HTTPS_PROXY is awful if authenticating proxies are used (plaintext creds in an environment variable?!?), basically no PAC file support at all, no transparent Kerberos auth... Blah.
No one is going to wait to debate how to do TCP, DNS, or SMTP in an RFC process while not sending bits over the wire.

Most of the core IETF RFCs/BCPs are standardization of things already created. “Prior implementation and testing” is an explicit goal of the IETF process, so I guess you could argue that you’re following that process automatically by creating the initial non-standardized implementation.
> 3 days ago, I installed Haiku on bare metal: an old PC from ~2004. I was not aware that a new version was planned at that time, but the upgrade was completely smooth.

If there is one thing to say about Haiku, their slow and steady approach has resulted in a remarkably solid Kernel and base system. It is extremely light and has a well-built and consistent environment. I've always hoped more engineers would hop on the bandwagon to accelerate development, but what the team has achieved is notable in comparison to other alternative/"hobby" OSes.
No, because I cannot save arbitrary secrets there and I cannot share passwords with the team.
For size I read there are ways to reduce and/or compress BDDs in literature. As for trading, I get this is a neat programming exercise, but maybe it's better to put in the article a disclaimer on it not being a real trading strategy? Set aside skepticism on trading strategies as a whole.
>Maybe the real lesson is that Christmas can be every day of the year.

The Filipinos take that literally!
My wife and I went there on our honeymoon, and they already had the carols and decorations out in September!
There are no closed form solutions to uncomputable problems. You can encode them in math. You can also encode them in a program. The result is the same.

In fact, the absolute limit of computability is so interesting that people have explored it in the abstract sense. For reference, see busy beaver numbers on Wikipedia or Scott aaronson’s awesome essay on finding the bigger number.
you may check out SEP Sesam, its cross platform and has an community license.
Yes, outdoors has been horrible, haven't nailed this yet I feel. Indoors is fine. I'm not at all familiar with Instax wide and it's been twenty-plus years since I touched Instax mini, I suspect odd response curves but it's not going to be cheap to test. Fun, though.
House arrest is completely diff. experience, seems like barely a punishment