HN user

ddlatham

4,185 karma

hn@lath.us

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www.wsj.com 1y ago

He Thought an Employee Stole Crypto. The FBI Says It Was a North Korean Scammer

ddlatham
5pts0
frontiervalley.com 1y ago

Frontier Valley: New Special Regulation Zone in Alameda, CA

ddlatham
5pts4
www.wsj.com 1y ago

Trump Grants 75-Day Extension to Reach TikTok Deal

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6pts5
www.natesilver.net 2y ago

Go to a State School

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2pts0
www.nytimes.com 2y ago

The Old New Way to Provide Cheap Housing

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4pts2
www.nytimes.com 2y ago

The 'Georgists' Are Out There, and They Want to Tax Your Land

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10pts3
www.wsj.com 2y ago

Why Teens Hate Android Phones

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1pts2
www.nytimes.com 3y ago

Barred from Grocery Stores by Facial Recognition

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56pts70
www.nytimes.com 3y ago

NASA’s Apollo 11 Moon Quarantine Broke Down

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6pts1
frame.work 3y ago

Framework Laptop 16 Deep Dive – Display

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10pts5
www.nytimes.com 4y ago

A Kid’s Show Juggernaut That Leaves Nothing to Chance

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3pts1
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: How to see the top HN stories ranked without flags?

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19pts12
www.nytimes.com 4y ago

Advertising Acts as Another Vehicle of Protest to Ukraine War

ddlatham
3pts0
www.youtube.com 4y ago

President Zelenskyy's speech to the Russian people

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19pts0
www.mercurynews.com 4y ago

Robot grocery delivery now live in this East Bay city (Pleasanton)

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4pts0
www.wsj.com 4y ago

Russia Threatens Apple and Google over Alexei Navalny App

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4pts0
www.officialdata.org 5y ago

California Property Tax Interactive Map

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4pts0
www.wsj.com 6y ago

Lawmakers Leave Washington Without Renewing Expired Surveillance Powers

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www.wsj.com 6y ago

Coronavirus Cases Strain New York City Hospitals

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19pts2
www.nytimes.com 6y ago

Younger Adults Make Up Big Portion of Coronavirus Hospitalizations in U.S.

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43pts14
sf.gov 6y ago

Stay home except for essential needs

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208pts151
www.nytimes.com 6y ago

Unexplained Drones Are Swarming by Night over Colorado

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6pts0
www.buzzfeednews.com 7y ago

Wikipedia community reacts to an editor being temporarily banned

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71pts97
www.nytimes.com 7y ago

SF Had an Ambitious Plan to Tackle School Segregation. It Made It Worse

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13pts1
www.eff.org 7y ago

Digital Privacy at the U.S. Border: Protecting the Data on Your Devices (2017)

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1pts0
www.newyorker.com 7y ago

The Air Pollution in Our Homes

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2pts0
www.bloomberg.com 7y ago

Crypto CEO Dies Holding Only Passwords to Unlock Millions in Customer Coins

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1pts0
www.wired.com 7y ago

Shouldn't We All Have Seamless Micropayments by Now?

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3pts0
www.nbcnews.com 7y ago

Biggest drop in US fertility rate in recent history

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22pts24
www.theatlantic.com 7y ago

The Case for Getting Rid of Borders – Completely (2015)

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2pts1

One significant difference between this new point-of-sale prompt for a tip, compared to previous customs is that this is now asking for the tip before you receive the product or service on offer. This means that you do not yet know how your service will be, but you are being asked to tip. Also, you now worry that if you do not tip, you risk a negative response - like slower service, or worse.

When we tipped for table service at a restaurant, or a haircut, cab ride, etc, we already had received the service and could tip based on our level of appreciation, without fear of retaliation.

I totally agree that police at the moment would not likely respect the finer points of that law and may well detain you. I would not advise testing them. However, it's not likely that the DA would eventually be able to convict you. I was sharing what I found interesting about the actual law in question, which was a different impression than when I first read the claim that loitering at a school was illegal (which is technically true!) It's not actually illegal to watch kids play (with no other criminal purpose), even if we both agree that in practice you're likely to get a negative response.

I found that surprising. According to the first Google result[1], it is true that loitering near a school is illegal, BUT loitering doesn't mean just being there. It means being there with an unlawful purpose; they give an example of someone waiting to abduct a child. Watching kids play isn't otherwise a crime, so wouldn't qualify.

I definitely sympathize with the author. As a male, I would expect an even stronger reaction to hanging around watching kids with no clear intent. As others have pointed out, even if you're not committing a crime you can be in for an unpleasant response. It's sad that there are creeps out there. It's sad that as a result, certain innocent behaviors make others nervous (rationally or irrationally). It also gives me a small taste of what it's like to be judged by my category/appearance.

[1]https://www.losangelescriminallawyer.pro/california-penal-co...

Because the hours of sunlight are limited, and many people prefer having the sun set in the afternoon over having it rise after the day's routine is well under way. Many people prefer it the other way around. There are some inconveniences both ways, but we'll make it work one way or the other.

How will this impact Russia's will to continue to supply gas and oil to Europe? Is Europe paying them in euros or some other currency? Where is it "stored"? If Russia's money is frozen, what use is it? Or even if it's not frozen, but they cannot use it to buy goods and services in exchange, then why would they bother selling the oil and gas?

How will this impact Russia's will to continue to supply gas and oil to Europe? Is Europe paying them in euros or some other currency? Where is it "stored"? If Russia's money is frozen, what use is it? Or even if it's not frozen, but they cannot use it to buy goods and services in exchange, then why would they bother selling the oil and gas?

I think that's a great example of the "smoothing" that I was alluding to, though not in a format accessible to most programmers. However it is still just using a function of upvotes and downvotes. I think true rating can be much better when you also incorporate number of opportunities to vote. Because having the opportunity to vote (by viewing an item, or purchasing it, or whatnot) and choosing not to vote is still a really useful piece of data about the quality of an item. Especially when you are comparing old items that have had millions of opportunities against new items with only thousands.

I'm the author of #6 on the same list. It's definitely interesting to see it has been used thousands of times on GitHub, and who knows how many more in proprietary code. I don't think it's buggy, but I now think it could definitely be improved.

I think this shows an example of a big problem with StackOverflow compared to its initial vision. I remember listening to Jeff and Joel's podcast, and hearing the vision of applying the Wikipedia model to tech Q&A. The idea was that answers would continue to improve over time.

For the most part, they don't. I'm not quite sure if it's an issue of incentives or culture. Probably some of both. I think that having a person's name attached to their answer, along with a visible score really gives a sense of ownership. As a result, other people don't feel enabled to come along and tweak the answer to improve it.

Then, once an answer is listed at the top, it is given more opportunity for upvotes, so other improved answers don't seem to bubble up. This is a larger issue with most websites that sort by ratings. Generally they sort items based on the total number of votes, including hacker news itself. Instead, to measure the quality of an item, we should look at the number of votes, divided by the number of views. It may be tough to measure the number of views of an item, but we should be able to get a rough estimate based on the position on a page, for example.

If the top comment on a HN discussion is getting 100 views in a minute and 10 upvotes, but the 10th comment down gets 20 views and 5 upvotes, the 10th comment is likely a better quality comment. It should be sorted above the top ranked comment! There would still need to be some smoothing and promotion of new comments to get them enough views to measure their quality as well.

Such a policy on StackOverflow would also help newer, but better answers sort to the top.

I agree that defining where the boundary should be is tricky in practice, and it's a good point that this was hardly a unanimous decision, not to mention overruling the appealed ruling.

On the other hand, the underlying law, the CFAA, is about more than just workplace issues like this issue. Interpreting it broadly could mean that violating some terms of use could be a criminal offense, and I am glad that the court avoided that interpretation. It's better having this law be more specific to the intent of criminalizing "hacking" and leaving other laws or policies to deal with how one might abuse computers or networks that one is otherwise entitled to access.

Looks like it has now been updated and returns images of various tanks and male athletes, but still no images of what seems most relevant to the phrase - the iconic Tiananmen Square photograph that goes by that name.

Perhaps it would be helpful to consider an offline analogy. Suppose there were no computers involved and all the information was stored in files in a locked room.

Now Van Buren is given a key to access the filing room for his duties, and then uses his key to go in and look up the file on some license plate in exchange for money.

Clearly, this is a terrible breach of trust and authority. It should be against policy. He should be fired. Likely there should also be criminal statutes about police or government employees selling or abusing government records.

But he's not guilty of breaking and entering. He was given access to that data, even if this is not what he was supposed to be going in there for.

As one of the justices noted, if merely misusing computer access that you were otherwise allowed to access were a criminal offense, then potentially "an employee sending a personal email or checking sports scores on a work device" could be criminal, rather than just breaking a company policy.

It looks like the main reason why the first Ask HN story ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 ) disappeared was because it was flagged.

But that's just the surface reason. The deeper reason is because of HN's design which seems to weight flags much more heavily than up votes. This means that a non-trivial minority can successfully drag a story off the homepage, even if a majority believes it is important and worthy of discussion, and even if the comments are actually constructive.

Unfortunately we are not able to see what the count of flags are, and I don't know the scoring algorithm to see what portion of minority is needed to make a story disappear, or if it is even greater than a fixed portion (i.e. whether flag count may have a greater than linear effect, compared to linear support from up votes).

I have heard the rationale of attempting to avoid flame wars and heated discussion of controversial topics, but I'm not sure that it's the only way or worth the price of making things important to most of the community disappear. So far, follow up submissions seem to still be on the home page, but as I write this comment, I can see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 already drop from the top position down to #6 and I wonder if it will disappear also.

I hope that HN may reconsider what options are available to keep discussion constructive and useful while still allowing important topics to be seen and discussed without being buried by a minority.

Edit - 2 additional notes a few minutes later:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 has now dropped more than halfway off the front page.

- Whoever downvoted this comment, please consider responding as well.

In the hours that followed, RSA’s executives debated how to go public. One person in legal suggested they didn’t actually need to tell their customers, Sam Curry remembers. Coviello slammed a fist on the table: They would not only admit to the breach, he insisted, but get on the phone with every single customer to discuss how those companies could protect themselves. Joe Tucci, the CEO of parent company EMC, quickly suggested they bite the bullet and replace all 40 million-plus SecurID tokens. But RSA didn’t have nearly that many tokens available—in fact, the breach would force it to shut down manufacturing. For weeks after the hack, the company would only be able to restart production in a diminished capacity.

As the recovery effort got under way, one executive suggested they call it Project Phoenix. Coviello immediately nixed the name. “Bullshit,” he remembers saying. “We're not rising from the ashes. We're going to call this project Apollo 13. We're going to land the ship without injury.”

This is the sort of response that would increase my trust to choose this company in the future. This is not easy. Our human instincts naturally kick in to minimize our faults and protect ourselves. Choosing to put the customer first at risk of your own reputation is hard, but the right choice, even for your reputation in the end.

The setting controls whether Flurry can retrieve the advertising id (IDFA) which allows for cross-app identification. Without that, Flurry can still count devices using an app, but cannot identify if they are the same across apps. So they can easily sample what portion of an apps users allow access to the IDFA.

I remember it was slow to load up at the beginning, but that since it held all my music, I wasn't constantly switching what music was on the device, only occasionally loading a small new set of files, so the slow transfer didn't make much difference to me. Perhaps others had a different case where the transfer speed mattered more.