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US also praises Saudi and Israeli rule of law and democratic institutions.

North Korea seems a more trustworthy source of news than US nowdays.


Peter Thiel (Palantir) is one of their main investors. that should raise all alarm bellas for a product that advertises itself with "privacy"


Peter Thiel is not personally an investor in Brave. The firm he's a partner in (Founders Fund) has a small seed series investment, which was led by Cyan Banister. Some first floor engineers at Brave have more equity than that small investment constitutes. Repeating falsehoods once you know they are false is lying, so please don't.


> Some first floor engineers at Brave have more equity than that small investment constitutes.

Is "first floor engineers" an SV-ism (or Brave-ism) that indicates something like "early employees"?


It's wider than SV, startup folks anywhere know it. Yes, early employees.


Palantir exists to improve privacy of citizen data within the government. Without it, government workers have massive, untraceable and unaccountable access to private data. (See Snowden for more info.)

I don't like that there's even a need for Palantir, but given the need, I'm glad it exists and I'm glad someone like Thiel is behind it.


I very, very much do not buy this at all.

I don't honestly care all that much about Palantir specifically (pros and cons, though lots of cons), but one thing they do not do by simply existing is help citizens protect their data. They do a lot of things, but not that.

That's just marketing/PR nonsense.


Instead we give that access to Palantir workers? How is that any better?


> Palantir exists to improve privacy of citizen data within the government.

Huh. So the argument to overcome objections to a


Well, that's annoying. Here is what I meant to post, more or less:

Huh. So the argument to overcome objections to a system designed for ingesting, canonicalizing, normalizing, and correlating private data acquired via dubious means from dubious sources is that at least the access to and use of the data is controlled monitored and auditable, reducing the incidence of LOVEINT and similar abuses as compared to ad-hoc systems constructed on the sly?

That's really damning with faint praise, especially since Jevon's Paradox ensures that both the use AND abuse of such data will increase when you reduce the 'costs' of doing so, and that's assuming there is no unsanctioned/off-book/'black' use or egress of the data (which is far from assured, IMO, given what we know about the history of these systems and projects, eg. Total Information Awareness and Trailblazer vs. ThinThread).


Problem is that the US government is best friends with Saudis and UAE and those are American companies.

If bin Salman tells Trump I don't like this tweet Trump would rush to his office and threaten Twitter while letting his own family succumb.


Ridiculous to make this about Trump. Trump can't even do anything about tweets attacking himself, but would somehow be able to pressure twitter to delete tweets attacking bin Salman?


Never. If you surpass a certain technological threshold it will start to get worse rather than better.


What? Why would that be the case?


Funnily enough the language server protocol makes it a charm for all editors (including nvim and emacs) to use the exact same code intelligence as vscode does. And I find the emacs and vim experience even better since I only have to add the lsp and the respective language plugin to a text file and that's it.


+1

https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot is developed by a core Emacs developer who plans to mainline it. It works great.


The problem with anti cheat is that those are literally rootkits.


yup. i wonder if there's room for a different paradigm in the Linux community that works via some alternative like reporting or karma instead of spyware


US spying on their "friends" Germany Austria Switzerland wow that's some news I would have not expected.

Also Washington Post.


Did you just not read the article at all?


Does it prevent the presumed IQ loss? If not then it's not useless but not very relevant either way.


The US has been on Saudi and North Korea level for a while now


Lol, what?




I would bet a guess that privacy in NK is actually better when you're purely looking at a digital point of view.

After all, many people there won't have access to such technology. They'll be off the grid unlike most of us.

Of course that doesn't actually give them privacy, I'm sure that there's plenty of 'friendly' neighbours spying on each other for a few bucks, basically stasi style.

And also this watermarking isn't all that different from our browser fingerprinting and mega data collection. It's just a cultural difference. The NK government wants their citizens to know they're being spied on. Whereas ours is trying to hide it. Thus more focus on the endpoint device rather than the cloud side.


Being better than North Korea is a pretty low bar

I would expect from the greatest democracy and country in the World to be in the top three, not a little bit better than those at the bottom


My point is NK is a lot worse, not “a little bit”.


As any other country did something similar to what US did?

Can you name one which isn't already bad?

Like, I don't know, Spain? Germany? Argentina? South Africa?

The greatest democracy and country in the World shouldn't even be in the same business of North Korea style

And yet...


There’s plenty of stuff America does wrong, present tense and past, without needing to make hyperbolic comparisons to NK.


It's not hyperbolic

How many countries NK invaded?

How many coup d'état that established long and painful military dictatorships around the World it supported and/or financed?

At least nobody calls NK the greatest democracy and country in the world or the land of the free...


On the other hand, how many styles of haircut are you legally allowed in the USA? Can you leave if you want to? Can you criticise the government without you and your family being shot?

Never mind Apples and Oranges, you’re comparing a rabid kitten (NK: you don’t want to be a cell inside it, but the animal is containable) with a healthy chimpanzee in the jungle you’re walking though (USA: violent and acts like it owns the place, so being one of its cells is safer than being a cell in many of the things around it).


Good answer, but hyronically in USA you have 6 chances in 100 thousands to be murdered, in NK it's 6 in a million.

Looks like the chimpanzee cells are not safer after all.


What’s your source? Wikipedia puts their intentional homicide rates at 4.96 and 4.40 per 100k respectively.


Homicide rate in NK (4.4 / 100k)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/intentional-homicides-per...

Homicide rates from firearms NK (0.11 / 100k)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-from-firea...

Homicide rate in USA (6.1 / 100k)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate?tab=chart&s...

Homicide rates from firearms USA (4.63 / 100k)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-from-firea...

So USA is more dangerous than NK in general and the chances of getting shot and killed (quoting "Can you criticise the government without you and your family being shot?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032711) are 42 times worse in USA than in NK.

It means that for every person shot and killed in NK there are 42 in USA.

I was wrong anyway, it's not 6 chances in 1 million but ~1 chance in a million to get shot and killed in NK.

Compare it now to some other western country, for example Italy, my country:

homicide rate: 0.7 / 100k

homicide rate by firearms: 0.3 / 100k

Italy is quite average for the west, all the other western countries have similar stats, more or less.

What's wrong with the US?


Ah, you’re referring to murder specifically by guns yet regardless of motivation.

Yeah, no. The figure here would be for those executed by the state for political crimes, though that will be hard to measure in both cases and I’d prefer to include in that count things like “unlawfully killed by cops who didn’t like you because you uncovered evidence of systematic racism” because I feel de-facto truths are more important than de-jure claims.

Then you get messy things like prison labour, and systematic policies of punishing entire communities for crimes (or protests) of a few from that community, and I don’t even know if you’re able to demonstrate any of these without being piled on by people defending any given example as unrelated/justified/propaganda/all of the above.

In fairness to you, this is a lot messier than my original comment. :)


> yet regardless of motivation.

Regardless of the motivation USA is more dangerous than Somalia (4.31/100k) - of course there are other reasons to be scared there,being killed is only one among many - but still it is kinda bad IMO.

If we count, for example, people killed by the police, there have been 1,004 killings in USA in 2019, 3 every million, 34 every 10 million residents. compared to Germany, whose police is said to be quite violent, it's 30 times more (Germany is around 1 per 10 million residents) and 170 times worse than Japan (0.2 per 10 millions)

All in all, as much as I know numbers don't tell the whole truth, something needs to change over there .


But Tor is legal in EU


since when?


Since its creation.


Citation please


What do you mean, "citation please"? Things are permitted unless forbidden by law, so it's up to you to quote a EU-binding law that forbids Tor. I can't prove a negative.


Sorry man, i totallly read that as ‘illegal in the EU’


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