danielhughes

I was surprised to learn from your comment that em dashes were left out of ASCII, because I thought I've been using them extensively in my writing. Perhaps I'm just relying heavily on the hyphen key. I mention that because it's likely instances of true em dash use (e.g. in the high-quality text you cite) and hyphen usage by people like me are close enough together in a vector space that the general pattern of a little horizontal line in the middle of a sentence is perceived as a common writing style by the LLMs.

I find myself constantly editing my natural writing style to sound less like an AI so this discussion of em dash use is a sore spot. Personally I think many people overrate their ability to recognize AI-generated copy without a good feedback loop of their own false positives (or false negatives for that matter).

Pretty sure that’s no longer the case. You need to register your “campaign” to send any SMS messages. I put campaign in quotes because the process seems to ignore the fact that people might have use cases that are unrelated to marketing.

https://help.twilio.com/articles/1260803965530

I think Twilio requires its customers to go through the process of registering with the CTIA before allowing use of the SMS API. I abandoned a project because the process was too burdensome. Political campaigns are exempt though.

British Airways had a famous advertising campaign that did something similar. If I remember correctly they used a digital billboard somewhere in London that showed a little boy pointing to the sky. The text refreshed throughout the day to display the details of the flight passing overhead.

Correct so a lot of the comments are not relevant to the article. But to clarify, Medicare does not cover Americans who choose to live abroad.

That’s correct but Medicare is not a viable option for Americans living abroad because it does not cover overseas healthcare.

Demdex is a DMP from Adobe that is used by companies to manage their first-party data so this particular example with Chase is very likely not an example of third-party ad serving abuse. Chase would have presumably put Adobe through a security review during an RFP process and would have no reason to harvest their own customers' login credentials. Their use case is probably something benign like wanting to segment customers for targeting based on their site usage patterns. Chase has different login pages but the one I'm looking at doesn't appear to have any third-party JS loading from advertisers.

I've often read headlines noting that the tax-prep lobby spends huge sums to preserve the status quo. But the numbers quoted in the article as evidence don't appear to support that claim. $6.6m seems low relative to these figures https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2018&inde... *

*I can't vouch for this site or its data

Relevant quote from the Tech Crunch article: "One reason why folks Congress could be pushing this through is all of the money that H&R Block and Intuit spent to lobby Senators and Representatives. ProPublica estimates that the tax prep industry has spent $6.6 million to advocate for the IRS filing deal. The Ways and Means chair, Neal, received $16,000 in contributions from the two companies in the last two election cycles, according to the ProPublica report."

Here's a little background on the color choices for those who aren't from Hong Kong

https://yp.scmp.com/news/features/article/104875/why-are-hon...

Nice work. You should consider making the state field optional. There is a large expat community who still need to file US taxes (but not state taxes).

Even with newspapers advertisers don't simply accept the circulation numbers that the publishers report. They pay third parties to provide independent numbers. It's not just about whether the ad appears but rather knowing how many people saw it.

Here's a link to the book in PDF and plain text https://archive.org/details/MathematicsAndTheImagination

Therefore the iPhone share of total search ad spend is about $3B. This link puts the overall market (inclusive of Android) at roughly $9B in 2014. That makes sense if you assume iOS to represent roughly 1/3 of devices.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Mobile-Account-More-than-Ha...

What is it about Arc that causes the unexpired link issue? I know very little about Arc. But I understand it to be a language whereas the issue you describe appears to be the function of some implementation decision. Can you please elaborate?

This appears to be a clone of Bounce Exchange. The tactic works. Some of my clients have deployed it and site conversions went up dramatically. I personally don't love the user experience but it's hard to argue with the results.

The local targeting of ads is actually a minor point. Six minutes per hour of the ads you see are local ads, twelve minutes are national ads sold by the parent network. Also, Aero shows you the local affiliate stream so you're still seeing the local ads. At its core this case is about content rights.

The forced password change seems to be popular with enterprise software managed by a corporate IT department. A favorite policy they enforce is something like the following..."You must change your password every 30 days. Your new password must be different than your last 8. It must contain at least one number and a mix of upper and lower case letters. It cannot be more than N characters in length." It's kind of ridiculous and counter productive in that it destroys an otherwise sensible strategy like the one you proposed (referring to your first comment) and in its place you get employees doing silly things like making their passwords Password1, Password2, Password3, etc with each successive forced reset.

What do you do when the site requires that you change your password? Do you use a different secret phrase? And if so how do you keep track of those?

How many devices do you use 1Password on? I tend work on two macs, a windows PC, an Android phone, an iPhone and an iPad. Maybe that's a bit excessive but it's certainly common to have at least a few devices. I keep getting turned off by 1Password's licensing model which requires separate software purchases for each device. It's not the total cost that bothers me but rather that the model suggests to me that using 1Password across a lot of devices is going to be a hassle. I'm curious if that is your experience.

Even if your upvotes are not getting counted, you may still want to consider upvoting articles that you like so that they get added to saved stories. Click your name in the upper right corner and then click saved stories. Everything that you've ever upvoted should appear there. That may explain why the arrow still appears for you.

Sure the NSA can do that. But this kind of monitoring is accessible enough that even the smallest agencies and local governments can enjoy the same powers to abuse our privacy.

I work in the advertising industry and can say with confidence that for most companies the value of this sort of data is far outweighed by the negative backlash. Look for example at the way retailers initially flirted with in-store tracking and now are abandoning that technology. That fact coupled with the likely legislative reaction leads me to think that this practice won't last long.

What concerns me most is the prospect of governments doing this sort of snooping. It will probably begin with a justification that the data are valuable for managing traffic patterns and for urban planning (or other seemingly harmless purposes). But then ultimately it will be used by the government for other purposes.

It might actually be a good thing if in the short term a few companies abuse the technology to the point that the public wakes up to the amount of information broadcast by their wireless devices. Perhaps it will motivate the industry to add more security as a default setting (iCloud VPN anyone?).

It would be nice if phone manufacturers would simply separate the power and data ports into two. Designers probably cringe at that suggestion because it would interrupt the sleek form factor but isn't it the best possible solution to this security risk?

A crowd-sourced alternative to Rosetta Stone http://www.babelmatch.com

Two things I love about these videos:

1) They're far simpler and easier to follow than anything I've found in the official Angular docs 2) He includes a brief section on testing. I'm a self-taught developer and work exclusively on my own projects. And I rely pretty heavily on tutorials. It's so rare to find a tutorial that spends any time at all on testing.

I interpreted the repeated use of "direct access" as a response to the media reports yesterday that used that same phrase. My memory could be mistaken but I seem to recall hearing reporters use that phrase over and over. So it would stand to reason that Google and other companies would use the same phrase in their press releases. That would be a simple explanation of the consistent language. That said, I wish Congress would appoint a special prosecutor so that we can get to the bottom of all this.

Just launched http://www.babelmatch.com. It's a crowd-sourced alternative to language-learning programs like Rosetta Stone.

Here's a link to the app discussed in the article for those who are interested https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/babelmatch/id646606322?mt=8&...

The iOS 6 requirement was initially because I was using some features in the Facebook SDK. But I dropped those features entirely. I honestly can't remember if there's any code left in the app that requires iOS 6. Thanks for the positive feedback! I hope you find the app useful.

This is my first iOS app. It's a bit of an experiment in crowd sourcing. Right now there's lots of content in Cantonese and English. If you want to play around with the app I suggest trying one of those languages first. And then switch over to whatever language it is that you want to learn.