Cynddl

I didn't see any option to contribute to the website. Did I miss something?

I also see you use this website to promote Amazon products, with an Amazon Associate tag. First, your website does not comply with Amazon Associate rules (see the point "5. Identifying Yourself as an Associate"). Second, it may seem like this website, aiming to offer eco-friendly solutions, only try to sell more to people. A poor mix of eco-friendliness and consumerism in this case.

Eco-friendly alternatives to plates are "Compostable Plates", followed by "Bamboo Plates"? This makes little sense. What about reusing plates, second hand market, or donations?

The sustainability and "eco-friendliness" of products is a complex question, and there is often no such thing as a simple list. See for instance the extensive study by DTU on plastic vs. paper vs. cotton bags: https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-... The study shows, e.g., that paper bags need to be used at least 50 times to achieve the same ecological impact as the thin plastic bags (LDPE).

> Nevod is a language and technology that provide pattern-based text search. Nevod is specially aimed to rapidly reveal entities and their relationships in texts written in the natural language. This patent pending technology is unique on the market.

What is this? A website, a tool? Can I run it locally? Is it free software, open source, close source? Where is the information about the patent?

Also, you mention it's easier (why?) and hundred time faster, but I don't see anywhere a comparison with traditional regular expressions.

Do you mean as someone not living in the EU? More than 500M people live there and their primary market, when offering a service or a product, is indeed the European market.

From their research paper at https://vuvuzela.io/static/vuvuzela.pdf:

> Vuvuzela can support 1 million users exchanging text messages (up to 240 bytes each) with an end-to-end latency of 37 seconds, achieving a throughput of 68,000 messages/sec.

Unfortunately, 37 seconds, even for a privacy-aware service, seems too slow to deliver instant messages.

The original article by CNIL has been posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18960564 but this article might bring more context about the fine, incl. the key notion of consent bundling.

The ICO addresses the issue of MAC addresses in: https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/guide-to-the-gene...

> A business uses Wi-Fi analytics data to count the number of visitors per hour across different retail outlets. It is not necessary to know whether an individual has visited an individual store (or multiple stores) before.

> This involves the business processing the Media Access Control (MAC) addresses of mobile devices that broadcast probe requests to its public Wi-Fi hotspots. MAC addresses are intended to be unique to the device (although they can be modified or spoofed using software).

> If an individual can be identified from that MAC address, or other information in the possession of the network operator (the business, in this example), then the data is personal data.

Indeed, collecting unique MAC addresses, potentially from multiple endpoints, can reveal a lot of personal, sensitive, information (location, trips, time you go to the coffee shop or which hospital you visit, etc.).

The only ways to properly collect and store MAC addresses are either using privacy-protecting methods (e.g. cutting the last bits of the MAC address, potentially using bloom filters) or immediately aggregating the collected MAC addresses.

Although there is a remark about the potential legal issues in the US, it should also be noted that capturing and storing MAC addresses without explicit consent is not GDPR compliant, and not legal in Europe.

> Sorry, this content is not available in your region.

I guess Fox 4 KC didn't want to implement the GDPR… But what happens with the GDPR if I, a European citizen in Europe, access this website (blocking EU IP addresses) using a VPN?

The heuristic they use (IP address = country on which the user lives) is not a perfect method to assess whether they need to apply the GDPR regulation.

> What those devices do with that light, however, is changing at an incredible rate. This will produce features that sound ridiculous, or pseudoscience babble on stage, or drained batteries. That’s okay, too. Just as we have experimented with other parts of the camera for the last century and brought them to varying levels of perfection, we have moved onto a new, non-physical “part” which nonetheless has a very important effect on the quality and even possibility of the images we take.

I'm confused. What do “those” devices do or could do except capturing an erzatz, a frozen view of world? What is this new non-physical “part”? Cameras captures photons (from one [1] to many) and display a composite image, post-processing or no.

[1] Photon-efficient imaging with a single-photon camera: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12046

> The treaty in question is the Universal Postal Union, which established that each country should retain all money it has collected for international postage.

Without the Universal Postal Union, how will fees be calculated when shipping from the US or to the US? Does every country have to sign a new agreement that could include yearly collection or payment of taxes?

> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.

Do you know another source for this column?

How does it compare to redbaron? [1]

> RedBaron is a python library and tool powerful enough to be used into IPython solely that intent to make the process of writing code that modify source code as easy and as simple as possible. That include writing custom refactoring, generic refactoring, tools, IDE or directly modifying you source code into IPython with a higher and more powerful abstraction than the advanced texts modification tools that you find in advanced text editors and IDE.

[1] https://github.com/PyCQA/redbaron

How does this compare to FastLED [1] on the same ESP8266 (and ESP32) platform? FastLED is free and open source, and support almost all LED drivers out there. Writing animations with FastLED might not be as easy as with Pixelblaze, but similarly only requires a few lines of code.

[1] https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED

> The control solution was 100 ml of cool potable water and the L-theanine solution was prepared by dissolving 0.5 mg powdered L-theanine (Taiyo Kaguka Co. Ltd., Yokkaichi, Japan) per Kg participant body weight in a tea infusion (total L-theanine 50mg/serving).

So, there was a statistically significant difference in brain activity between participants who drank cool water and participants who drank (hot?) tea with added L-theanine. Curious setting.

> Timsort is a sorting algorithm that is efficient for real-world data and not created in an academic laboratory.

It's always a bit sad to see academia as an ivory tower where researchers generate unusable knowledge. Academia is not only about finding theoretical pure solutions but often also about finding solutions to real-world problems. For instance, machine learning, logic design, networking algorithms, cryptography, all deeply depend on work done in academia (and not just “theoretical” work).

Bitwarden has auto-fill disabled by default, and only enables it with a warning (“Use at your own risk”).

How does this tool compare to other (libre) anonymization software programs, such as ARX [1]? From what I understand, there are only basic routines so to sample records and coarsen a few attributes (e.g. ZIP code, dates) implemented so far.

This might also not be sufficient to truly anonymize data, as a large body of research has shown so far [2,3,4]

[1] https://arx.deidentifier.org

[2] https://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/57-6-3.pdf

[3] http://randomwalker.info/publications/no-silver-bullet-de-id...

[4] http://arxiv.org/abs/1712.05627

The mobile version of Wikipedia works perfectly fine in a browser. I personally prefer it for readability.

“Most common types of thermal paper contain BPA or BPS” That's not valid everywhere.

The European Union decided in 2016 to forbid the use of BPA in thermal paper. [1] BPA is currently still used but will be completely banned in 2020. And, even if BPS will be allowed, EU surveys seem to show that alternatives to BPA/BPS are being considered for thermal paper.

[1] https://echa.europa.eu/hot-topics/bisphenol-a

In France, there is also no general Freedom of Information law, except for some administrative documents.

Direct link to the research paper (might have less context): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.06752.pdf

The name is a bit confusing, as Grasshopper [1] is also a coding tool for beginners, designed for 3D algorithmic modelling.

[1]: http://www.grasshopper3d.com/

Differential privacy appears regularly on Hacker News, with either theoretical articles or projects that aim to implement it. Yet often there is a huge gap between both.

For example, Apple has touted about its use of differential privacy, but researchers [1] have shown that the privacy budget is reset every day and the parameters, buried inside the code, lack a proper derivation. Similarly, Uber seems to use DP for internal analytics. However, the proposed model does not seem really robust and does not provide accurate results at all [2]. One should always carefully review claims associated with implementations of differential privacy.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02753

[2] https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018...

Yes, I did leave that out, as I think it's still an issue. A synthetic model performing better is a little dubious, since the modeled distribution has less information than the original one. Overall, the discrepancy seems more important to notice than the actual performance.

I'm highly dubious of the ability for synthetic data to model accurately datasets without introducing unexpected bias, esp. to account for causality.

If you dig through the original paper, the conclusion is on the line with that:

“For 7 out of 15 comparisons, we found no significant difference between the accuracy of features developed on the control dataset vs. those developed on some version of the synthesized data; that is, the result of the test was False.”

So, on the tests they developed, the proposed method doesn't work 8 times out of 15…

A bit of extrapolation here. In short, a few websites dedicated to make easy money on Facebook by copying articles have started to use unicode to obfuscate the title. They automatically replace latin characters with similar letters.

This makes their title harder to be detected by either Facebook, fact checking websites, or DMCA/copyright bots. Nothing related to Russia here.

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270681

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8445724

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1904957

Has anyone here recommendations for research papers on how advertisement works in practice? And how it affects different people?

While the argument used in the article (“you've seen it a lot = you'll buy it”) seems reasonable, it also hides many factors (I'm not gonna buy a new car if I don't know how to drive, even if I see ads for cars every day).