Hacker News Reader

chockablockeron The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk

Recorded talk for the slides in this post.

chockablockeron Child safety org launches AI model trained on real child sex abuse images

Now that such a model exists, I think we can expect lobbying for making this mandatory. For the children...

Once adopted this will lead to an increase in randomly locked out accounts due to model false positives, because looking for something very rare will lead to most items flagged being false positives (Bayes statistics etc.).

This blog had a few interesting articles on the limitations of these technologies https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/971-FB... While this is comparing the currently used hash based approaches a classification model will have similar problems.

chockablockeron The EU Wants Its Own DNS Resolver That Can Block 'Unlawful' Traffic,TorrentFreak

During the early career of Ursula von der Leyen (current EU president) in Germany she was championing a law just like that. It was something like "stop signs" for the internet and was based on DNS based blocks. The law was passed and was quickly overturned once her party won the election. During the campaign she and her party were denouncing everybody opposing the law as being friendly to csam. This feels like a bad re-run of the same script to me.

chockablockeron Ask HN: What are some reasonable right-leaning news sources?

I read a lot of the right wing news on Zerohedge for a balanced media diet. If it's important it'll show up there.

In general I'd suggest looking into reading the news outlets that have produced scoops that turned out to be true after initial denials. Lately that would be the NY Post and the Daily Mail (the sections reporting on the US).

chockablockeron Ask HN: CLI Tool for File Encryption?

gocryptfs uses file-based encryption that is implemented as a mountable FUSE filesystem. Each file in gocryptfs is stored one corresponding encrypted file on the hard disk. Filenames are encrypted as well.

https://nuetzlich.net/gocryptfs/quickstart/

chockablockeron Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

Everybody is moving to mobile and almost nobody uses Firefox on mobile. However, Firefox mobile does support extensions. Is that something that could emphasized? However, Firefox speed on mobile is much slower than Chrome. That should probably be improved upon.

For desktop there's not much of a distinguishing factor left. Chrome is good enough. I like Firefox for the privacy, but is that enough of a distinguishing factor for regular (less privacy conscious) folks?

chockablockeron Big company tale: six months for a list and a button

My personal record is 2 years for a text box to be added to a form. To be fair, that's harder than it may sound. The textbox must be in the web version, the app, the api. It needs to be localized, and data stored must be compliant with GDPR etc. The list goes on. It doesn't help task velocity if the PMs switch, the thing gets de-prioretized, re-prioretized and there still being ongoing discussions that question the purpose of the textbox (maybe we should do videos instead of text). After 2 years I'm happy to report the textbox launched... :-/

chockablockeron MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars

Germany has in the past prosecuted anti-fascists for using a strike-through of a swastica. There were some considerations for changing the law, but I don't recall what happened to it.

https://www.dw.com/en/minister-wants-to-legalize-anti-nazi-s...

chockablockeron Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files

Note that the article doesn't say explicitly whether Google deleted the video from drive, or simply disabled the public sharing of the video. If they only disabled sharing (like they would for spam, pirated materials etc.) this may be understandable.