skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Device fingerprinting is a hack and unreliable in the long run. Third party cookies are being replaced with first party cookies and PII-based tracking methods like UID2, which enables a decentralized network of vendors to generate the same hash for the same email address across nodes, giving advertisers a global understanding of identity. Once third party cookies are gone, expect to see login prompts everywhere
One time I booked something on Expedia, which resulted in an itinerary email to my Gmail account. Lo and behold, minutes later I got a native CTA on the Android home screen to set up some thing or another on Google’s trip product. I dropped Android since, but Gmail is proving harder to shake.
isn't that it's supposed to work? we just need >0 people to blow a whistle if a whistle needs blowing. we don't need to rely on the people fearing for their jobs so long as >0 people are willing to sacrifice their careers/lives when there's some injustice so great it's worth dying for
The only molecular biologist I know is happy to use the term "junk DNA," at least when talking to us non-practitioners. I can't imagine the term is a source of friction.
Covering all birthdays
> just that calling it an overthrow of the entire government is hyperbolic

You know that it is impossible to punish people for a SUCCESSFUL insurrection, right?
When I was a junior engineer, I felt like I wasn't good enough to contribute to anything open-source, and the open source communities around the projects I liked felt quite condescending.

Once I was a senior engineer, every single employment contract specifically had clauses preventing me from contributing to open source projects (except with specific, explicit permission from your manager).
>Web needs to make money.

No, it doesn't. I have no issue with it making money, but that was neither the original purpose of the web nor is it an end goal for everyone using it.

> Giving tools to advertisers while making sure user privacy is preserved is better than free reign of tracking we have before, no?

This statement is unconnected to the first. The way people just link "web", "money" and "advertising" without even stopping to think that there might be alternatives is exactly why everything online is in such a sad state of affairs.
>this is a fine and widely used assumption

Modeling (and possibly economics, especially) is rife with simplifying assumptions that break down in practice. You can find many economists who think modeling individuals as rational agents is a "fine and widely used assumption" while also finding many economists and psychologists showing where this assumption can get you into trouble. There is a big difference between "this assumption is made because it reflects reality" and "this assumption is made because it makes my life as an economic modeler not suck." The latter is still fine, but only if you're upfront about its limitations.
Orion, if you're on Mac: https://kagi.com/orion/
"And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure." - Thomas Jefferson, 1787
I'm guessing a project like Linux would be fine, given more companies willingness to invest in kernel development. And kernel / native development being itself a potentially lucrative niche.

I worry more about the tertiary command line tools we all take for granted that have 1 burned out maintainer on the verge of retirement.
I’ve begrudgingly kept this enabled because if this works users are a lot better off, cannot be manipulated as they are currently, and it frees up the browser makers to break all the ways people are being tracked, pointing advertiser networks to this alternative.
What is the privacy implication of AI training?
When I think back before big monetization, the web was better.

An example, look at TikTok or YouTube. 99.999% garbage, essentially clickbait farms, with zero valuable content.

Influencers? A plague. Political click bait videos? Harmful to democracy. Nutty flat earth, perpetual motion, conspiracy videos? Same.

The rest of the web is the same. Affiliate links are vile, evil things. And endless pages copy pasted to steal hits.

Monetization has destroyed the internet.

I'd much prefer people setting up their own small webpages, their hobbies, etc, with no monetization incentives.
Personally, I'm not much concerned about their energy consumption per se but rather by their energy mix. I would be more than fine if they had all their energy sourced from solar panels and wind turbines.
Pull quotes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote) have been used in magazines for decades; they’re not exactly new.
Huh, the "clickbaitiness" was debunked in the first reply to the first comment.
>The approach allows measurement without disclosing who, specifically, did what with the ad.

Doesn't this break most modern methodologies. Can I do next best action without knowing who did what?
And if you put your house on 26-black and it came up you'd be doing great too.

Take 100 people randomly throwing darts at the companies on the SPY, and a fair few will do better than the SPY overall. Doesn't mean they can expect to beat the market
> Currently the only way is that the sellers of the adverts you read give money to fund Firefox.

According to Wikipedia[1], most of Mozilla is funded by Google, for setting them as the default search engine, rather than by more conventional advertisers.

On a more personal note, I'd prefer if that money went towards improving their FOSS offering instead of giving the now-former CEO a $7M bonus[2], acquiring advertising businesses [3][4], and littering Firefox with these anti-features.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

[3]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...

[4]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pocket/
They're a charitable nonprofit, and the Mozilla license is one of the more permissive ones; they're fine with you freely sharing their work.

They currently already get 7M/year in donations for no purpose. I imagine they'd get a lot more if that money would fund Firefox, and how many core/paid developers do they really need if they have people that know that they're doing?
I agree somewhat, but what about poorer regions of the world like parts of Africa or Asia, what is the solution for them? Most of the people there would not or could not pay for every website to use. It would be unfortunate if the web is inaccessible for most people.
Every single week I have to refuse enabling back up for my pictures on my Google pixel. I refuse it today, next week I open the app and the UI shows the back up option enabled with a button "continue using the app with back up".

Somebody took the time to talk down my comment about this being a strategy to give their AI more training data. I continue believing that if they have your data they will use it.
I find open source software to be very intimidating. It feels like the contributors to these projects are experts in whatever language theyve written them in, and any contribution I might submit will get smacked down in PR for some arcane technical reason, likely with a rude comment
My own view on this is that a hardened allocator API should separate the functions of an allocation identifier/cookie and the actual pointer to the allocated memory:

func alloc(numBytes: usize) -> (ptr: void *, cookie: uword) | Error
func free(cookie: uword, numBytes: usize) -> void

where free() maybe also should take ptr, strictly for validation purposes.

A design like this encourages segregation of allocator metadata and the allocated memory, though it is possible to achieve such a design with the classic C malloc/free API.

However, a design like this is even more helpful against use-after-free because cookies can be unique for the lifetime of a program, whereas pointers naturally get reused when a block of memory is reallocated. So the traditional API can never be fully resilient against UAF, whereas an API like this can.

The underlying observation here is that malloc/free couples two different things (access to memory and identifying a previously made allocation) in a way that creates an API which is far less able to mitigate misuse in a safe way. IMO, these functions should be separated in new designs.
Do they get money from selling this?
Indeed. The concentration of such a huge power consumption might make it easier (policy-wise) to take compensatory measures.
I use Librefox [1] on desktop and Mull [2] on Android. They're both basically patch sets applied to Firefox that remove tracking, proprietary blobs, and come with better defaults for privacy.

[1] https://github.com/intika/Librefox

[2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/
I honestly am very concerned you are releasing this with clearly... no understanding of the Internet abuse space. To be honest, good luck, you will need it. Make sure your cloud service allows what you're doing, make sure you have cost controls in place, and make sure you already have a relationship with a good lawyer.

(Trials usually both restrict features like this and require valid payment info is already entered, having websites all ask for people's phone numbers is way more privacy-invasive than asking for their email, and of course... you can keep your inbox clean without disposable email.)
My 2 €cents from a limited and outdated experience with visual programming tools:

1. Screens have limited size and resolution, and the limits get hit rather fast. The problem can be pushed away by zooming, by maybe an order of magnitude, but for a long living project growing in size and complexity, it will not be enough.

2. In text, near everything is just a grep (fzf,...) away. With the power of regex, if needed. Do the no-code folks nowadays implement a equally powerful search functionality? I had very bad experience with this.

3. Debugging: although the limited possibilities of plugging graphical items together is like an enhanced strict type safety, I'm sure that errors somehow happen. How is the debugging implemented in the visual tools?

4. To store/restore the visual model, the tool developer needs to develop a binary/textual/SQL/... representation and unique source of truth for it. I think the step from that to a good textual DSL is smaller than to a GUI. And the user can more or less effortless use all the powerful tools already developed for shells, IDEs, editors, ....

So in my opinion most of the visual programming things are wasted time and wasted effort.
That’s the great thing about saving, even if you do it suboptimally, it still is a lot better than the opposite.

And in hindsight it’s almost always suboptimal.
Why does it matter whether e.g. a hospital runs on renewable energy or not? Why is "industry" good but "data centers" are bad?

If some companies care enough about their image to pay extra to buy green energy, that's good! It makes that production more profitable, and encourages more such production to be built faster. Why are you trying to disincentivize that with "greenwashing" slurs?
I care much more about allowing my content to be used at all, despite any privacy concerns. I simply don't want one single AI model to train on my content.
Yeah, I spotted that the other day and commented on the previous story about this.

It definitely works for other titles, but not for this new opt-out privacy related setting. How very convenient...
> Particularily when one of them IS an online advertising company and another one is almost exclusively funded by said advertising company.

The second one also recently purchased an online advertising company, Anonym [0], placing them directly in the advertising game. They might have done so initially because they felt they needed this feature, but now their finances are tied up with the success of this platform in addition to Google's continued payouts.

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...
True that. One thing that does work are targeted embargoes, if you do not want certain tech to spread to far and wide.

General sanctions so, well, trickey isn't it?
It is seriously unfortunate that C++ managed to standardize std::string, a not-very-good owning container type, but not (until much, much later) std::string_view, the non-owning slice type you need far more often.

Even if Rust had chosen to make &str literally just mean &[u8] rather than promising it is UTF-8 text, the fact &str existed in Rust 1.0 was a huge win. Every API that doesn't care who owns the textual data can ask you for this non-owning slice type, where in C++ it had to either insist on caring about ownership (std::string) or resort to 1970s hacks and take char * with zero terminated strings.

And then in modern C++ std::string cares about and preserves the stupid C-style zero termination anyway, so you're paying for it even if you never use it.
This could/should(?) be fixed by taxing CO2 emissions. I'm not sure what it works in e.g. the US, but some countries have this stupid idea that electricity prices have a build in CO2 tax, but applied to all consumptions, not just that produced by CO2 emitting sources.

Let's say Microsoft could save 25% on their electricity bill by consuming power from wind farms, I think they'd work out a way to do more AI training when the wind is blowing and scale down when more power is delivered from coal.
I want wealth taxes for redistribution mostly. So yeah.
It will make you very high. Not necessarily in the same manner or experience that "normal cannabis" does but most of those products do contain synthetic terpenes and isomers of delta-9 or what they market as "delta-10" or other product names. Paired with CBD in the admixture they can approximate the natural cannabis experience
I'd prefer that we priced in the externalities of emissions from pollution. If we should burn less coal then that can be acheived by taxing coal until it's again a net positive to society.
Wouldn’t the most risk-efficient strategy both depend on a large number of factors and also, in any case, start off with a higher allocation of equities and move over time to a higher allocation of bonds?

The stock market has never not outperformed bonds over a 45 year period, maybe even half that, so if you’re 20 and putting 40% of your savings in an account you can’t touch until your 65, you’re kind of just chucking money down a well right?
> taxes are borne by a combination of customers/employees/owners

And any green tax would be trivial for Google to add as a line item on invoices: it’s so defensible.
All other things being equal, Id prefer to use a tool written in a language with which I’m already comfortable. It’s nice to find a tool that meets my requirements _and_ I can easily read the source code.
The standard library string handling stuff is atrocious and it surprises me that wholesale replacement of that stuff isn't more common.
Love how they misspelled Piantadosi as Paintadosi :)
Rust leaps forward in language popularity index
Seals, Lions, Platypus, Dolphins, and Koalas are also mammals that produce milk for their infants. All of their milk is bad for humans. While cow milk is better for us then the milk of most animals, it's not human milk. So why would it be healthier than (essentially) water with some plants in it?

Also, 70% of the human population is allergic to cow milk (as opposed to 0.4% being allergic to soy).

Anyway, there's tons of data public about it that you can easily find, just wanted to respond to your "millions of years" argument.
> our grandchildren will be able to live

Our grandchildren will be able to live regardless of where these companies source their power from.
Is an airplane the same thing as a car? After all, they both have wheels.
Are you forgetting what happened after the 2020 election? This “both sides” shit is a bunch of fucking baloney.
Primarily renewables:

https://bep.brookfield.com/press-releases/bep/brookfield-and...
Remember when every company and government all had 2020 plans? Someone should collect all those plans and follow up and see how many was actually implemented, split on "by chance" or "deliberate action".
Scientists create program that paints structure of molecules in Mondrian style
> most of the proposed solutions are along the lines of 'have more babies so labor will go on being cheap" rather than try to think of way to make the economy work for the population you have

I see both. (Also, loosening immigration.) In any case, the first step to reforming the system is exploring where it will break.
The Ties Between Google and Amazon's Project Nimbus and Israel's Military
A material portion of the blame should be placed squarely at the feet of those attitudes similar to the one expressed in this Mastodon thread which I recently saw resurface and hate just as much as the first time I saw it: https://hachyderm.io/@stargirl/109697057391904145

This “I was allowed to try something, but it’s dumb for anyone else to do so” attitude is one of a collection that quite rightfully turns off, hell, not just newcomers, but anyone apart from the old guard.

Truth be told, enough time has passed for many open source communities to have shaken out such that the last ones standing are just the only people toxic enough to outlast everyone else.

Many jaded socially inept OSS greybeards would do the community a service by not subjecting it to their general…grumpiness. Thank you for your service, but drop the messiah complex. Things have a way of working themselves out.
I was under the impression that click data is stored in your browser under Webkit's Private Click Measurement. Am I misunderstanding?

For example, here's a 2021 blog post describing the protocol

https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-meas...
Point me to the Firefox donation box or subscription (not the Mozilla donations, which don't fund Firefox, or a subscription to an unrelated service that has overhead of its own) and I'll start a monthly payment today.

(Before you spend too long looking: there isn't one. Mozilla doesn't want me to pay for Firefox, they want to get their funding other ways.)
This makes sense as their market cap and revenues are also larger than many countries.

Max Barry wrote a book in 2003 called Jennifer Government [0] about a near future where companies were so big they had their own armies and intelligence agencies. It seems like we’re getting close to that point.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government
He meant a nice life
All observations of individual galaxies occur at a specific point in time. We can’t use light speed delay to see the evolution of individual galaxies only completely different galaxies at some other point in time. As such each galaxy gets its own value for the amount of dark matter.

At minimum this is a ~200 billion parameter model, and more if you’re looking at smaller structures.
How would it help with use-after-free?
Models can easily regurgitate back training data verbatim, so anything private can be in theory accessed by anyone without proper access to that file
While we're on the subject, how about how the position of the headlights on these vehicles that aims squarely at the side and rear view mirrors of passenger cars, distracting and dazzling the drivers for no reason other than to intimidate and discourage them from being in the very important way of these vehicles' drivers.

and even worse, the headlamps blast the retinas of infants in rear facing car seats, who don't have the option to flip their mirror to the dim setting, or even turn their head away from the glare.

I have profound contempt for people who buy and enjoy hostility optimized vehicles like thesd, unless absolutely compelled to do so for work.
The ship has sailed on carbon taxes. It's good policy but voters don't like it, so politicians will never do it. Voters have shown to be okay with direct subsidies and permitting reform, so that's what we must do out of sheer pragmatism.
It's great to consume OSS but there are little to none advantages in contributing.

This privilege is left to FANG developers who need to release some OSS project to build a career and highlight the name of their employer.

OSS was a miracle, it worked out of the sheer will of some amazing and ideologically motivated developers, in defiance of market laws.
It's doomed to become smaller and smaller until AGI will revolutionise the field.
In fact, they will likely be able to live a better life if everyone was free to choose an energy source that makes economical sense to them.
This logic just doesn't hold up, regardless of where the intentions behind the decision land. All those energy consumers are going to use the energy one way or another. Prioritizing nuclear+renewables just means that those energy production receive a premium for their production, which hopefully encourages further investment in building out more in renewables, which in turn continuously brings down the cost of consumption until it returns to equilibrium.

Maybe there's an argument in there somewhere around the lossiness of transmission, but I have no idea what it would be.
Not really. C#'s Task/Task<T> are based on background execution. Once something is awaited, control is returned to the caller. OTOH, Rust's Future<T> is, by default, based on polling/stepping, a bit like IEnumerable<T> in C#; If you never poll/await the Future<T>, it never executes. Executor libraries like Tokio allow running futures in the background, but that's not built-in.
That ain't new. East India company had essentially private armies.
If you use ocaml you get near instant compile times and types, which is excellent for quick feedback.
I was wondering if the Supreme Court had legalized all drugs recently when they discovered that the executive branch agencies lack the power to create detailed regulations. Surely that would include the DEA’s power to schedule drugs, wouldn’t it?
Can somebody else confirm this? This stuff was and sometimes still is freely available in Europe, and so is CBD in various forms.

At the end I don't care what chemicals do get mixed but trips from THC substitutes are not the same and not only for me subpar to the point of ignoring it (closer to being dizzy from alcohol than fun creative weed, also tolerance seems to be built much faster).
>How do you aim to pay for them?

They should raise taxes, especially for large coorparations and in higher income brackets.
GPS-denied navigation is the search term. It works well enough for driving through a tunnel, because eventually you get a known location to correct previous estimates. For a fully-indoor environment it's very difficult to get good results and the technique depends on the use-case.

"Indoor GPS" using bluetooth beacons is technically possible but the space is filled with proprietary protocols/apps that try to make money by serving ads. It unfortunately doesn't seem to be evolving into a more useful extension of google maps.
Should I remove this blog from Google Search?
All the Activations (and a brief history of deep learning)
My cited and pdf linked notes on activation functions used in deep learning and their historical progression
LibreWolf is essentially a custom build of Firefox with stuff like this disabled or removed.
Carnegie Steel had the Pinkertons
I like the idea of using:

trusted { … }
I heard that null is a valid value for objects in Nim for most situations. Is that correct ?

I like languages that disallow null by default (e.g. Rust, OCaml etc) because it seems to be a huge source of errors.
How does it work to be a dictator for only a day? Are you ok with that like if kamala harris could be a dictator for a day if the democrats win?
Understanding Apache Paimon's Consistency Model
Escapade on schedule for launch this fall – SpaceNews
Well there’s always the advantage that you can feel good about making something better while improving your skills.