Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
To be fair, that sounds a lot more reasonable. A CEO represents their company and their actions leading to people boycotting their company is just people voting with their wallet. People have boycotted small businesses due to the opinion of the business owner's children, even after persistent apologies by the business owner. In this case I don't even think there is anything significantly wrong. This isn't much different than a company sanctioned advertisement gone wrong.
Comment · 6 years ago
Not to mention the replies on his tweet are full of people arguing nonsense like "it seems you have something to hide" , and "cancelling means shutting down voices", not realising that people would be much less angry if cancellation meant twitter account cancellation and not losing one's jobs.
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
That wasn't the only argument though. If the data was encrypted with a facebook held private key, the user would still not be able to see it. If it was E2E encrypted with the only key being on the device, people will get mad when they reset their phone and get a new one, only to find their messages are gone.

SMS had the same problems forever, but isn't owned by a company, thus you can't blame xyz company if random apps access your SMS. No company got ever investigated by multiple nation states over that.

You still haven't addressed my main question though, how will a random app scraping your WhatsApp be any less of a scandal than Cambridge Analytica?

Comment · 6 years ago
The number of people who use whatsapp is an order of magnitude or more than the number of people who consciously use Google drive, as in people who know google drive exists. Even the people who have google drive, most of them have much less intimate data on it than in their private messages on WhatsApp.

If we are to take the position that all users are tech literate and should be fully in charge of how their data is used, then even Cambridge analytica wasn't bad. People explicitly gave it access to data that was accessible to them. However, the uproar proves otherwise. People don't like it when they click yes yes and some random app has access to their social media data or messages. This is why Gmail also started requiring independent audit for all gmail apps.

Comment · 6 years ago
While I definitely disagree with the way drive doesn't give access to users for their own data, I think giving access has it's own problems, as you might land in another Cambridge analytica type situation.

1. Shady addictive game requires full access to drive.

2. Shady game downloads all your chats with all contacts

3. FB is on fire since they allowed access to people's chats with others, even those who didn't download the game.

4. People get mad on FB/Google for not protecting their data.

Comment · 6 years ago
Isn't that just for one chat? Can you download all combined?
Comment · 6 years ago
Just like every thing else, this too was amplified by the internet.

If you said something controversial 40 years ago at a grocery shop, shop owner might be mad and refuse to service you, and might even put a bad word for you across the town. In the worst and rarest case, you might have had to leave town.

Now, anyone can record the interaction, put it in front of more people on twitter than the front-page of a big newspaper. And this amplifies things. Not to mention that it remains there forever for the whole wide world.

At this point in many places, you will be more quickly forgiven for taking cash from a shop's register than saying something which is not the prevalent opinion.

Comment · 6 years ago
While mobs have existed since eternity, the internet amplifies mob voices and makes everything you ever said available to a determined adversary. Since it isn't possible to predict what will be acceptable in society 10 years later, it makes sense to blog anonymously, lest the mob comes for you and even your loved ones who may not even share your opinions.
Comment · 6 years ago
Is there a comparison somewhere of how many flash features ES6/7 still lack? Also any performance comparisons between the two.
Comment · 6 years ago
I don't think that will get the NYT to listen. A better idea is that if you are a subscriber, unsubscribe and give this as the reason. As recent history proves, the NYT truly listens to cancellations. A bunch of people running pihole, not so much for sure.
Comment · 6 years ago
It is there with folks who know about those people and feel connected to them. SSC has a lot of it's audience on HN. Hence you see the outrage here. People can't feel similarly outraged by every doxxing since they have limited time, energy, and emotional bandwidth. If people were forced to worry about issues just on their impact, a large number of kids are starving in Africa, and by that logic people shouldn't worry about anything else till they can do something about that.
Comment · 6 years ago
If you can prove whether recursion or even a loop is bounded or not, you have solved the collatz conjecture.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton