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Yeah, pointing to the problem is quite easier than figuring out a solution.

As far as I'm concerned, I actually read the popups and having to click okay about five or six times in a row would make me second-guess my decision. Would that work for everyone? Most of the people? Some of the people? I don't know that answer.

I'm not even sure if such a barrier should be technological or legal.

My answer would be both. I highly doubt it's in hardware manufacturer's interest to figure out a technological solution, but if there's some legal incentive for them to at least try, they'll figure out a technological solution.

The idea that ROMs from questionable sources make your device safer sounds very strange to me.

It's about owning your hardware, not safety. A person that's willing to go through the hassle knows the consequences of such actions and how to deal with them.

Do "normal people" need to do that? Absolutely not. Should it be easy to do that? Absolutely not. But for those of us that really want to own our hardware, there should be a way of doing so without relying on exploits.

As with any Apple product ever, this is not a "completely new tech product". This is a long established market that Apple believes they can do better than everyone else.

For an exorbant price of course, but that stage is some years into the future.

It's literally mentioned and linked to in the first paragraph.

Predictable audience? Absolutely not.

It's easy for a story or two to go viral (as in, slightly easier than on other platforms). What's not easy is to retain that viewership. Similarly to YouTube, you could put weeks worth of effort into one article just for it to flunk spectacularly simply because the recommendation algorithm didn't like it in the first 12 hours or so since you've clicked "publish".

In any case, thanks for mentioning it. Thoroughly enjoyed Story of Your Life and Others and had no idea he released a second short story collection a few months ago.

It's going straight to the top of my to-read list.

and no, sending a reset command via apps is not feasible (what if you've lost the account password and you've accidentally paired it to your neighbours wifi?)

Hubs save all the pain with smart lighting system. No need for an account, system works locally. If you wanna control them remotely, you can (but you don't have to). Connected to the wrong wifi? Reset a hub instead of individual bulbs. You pair bulbs with hubs and have just one device spamming traffic to your router.

Ikea and Philips Hue seem to be the only systems that got this solution down properly.

I couldn't agree more. I can't help but feel like the Venn's diagram between people who suggest "move to a more rural area" and people who never lived in a rural area for a prolonged period of time is a full circle.

It sure doesn't help that there's a bunch of articles about people who "found happiness" by moving to a rural area like a year ago. You may see some benefit in the short term (yes, one year is a short term), but on a long term it will fuck you up.

The answer is so simple it's brilliant: you need a permission from the local police in order to organize a protest on a specific location at a specific time. In most of the cases, that works fine.

In a small number of cases when the authorities really don't want you to organize a protest, they'll keep denying you one location after the other using bullshit excuses until the date when the protest is set to happen. Then they can crack it down for "unlawful assembly".

Note that I'm not from Russia, but I am from a country that looks up to Russia for some forsaken reason and we have experienced protests getting killed in this fashion.

Almost as if that was the point of me including the words "but its price is not publicly available" in my comment.

GitHub does offer self-hostable enterprise edition, but its price is not publicly available.

I have never touched their air purifier, but I did three other gadgets (TV box, some indoor camera, some light bulbs).

If privacy is your concern, I wouldn't recommend them. If stability is your concern, I wouldn't recommend them.

The light bulb works with an app only (probably to remove the need for a separate hub), the camera could be rooted to work offline-only (which is why I bought it, but I gave up after a couple of shots and it's currently sitting in my drawer), and the TV box is by far the noisiest device in my local network. It's like 60% of all DNS requests blocked by my Pi-hole.

Their devices are also the most unstable devices I own, to the point where I'm considering just throwing them in the trash and re-investing in another camera and a TV box. I've already replaced the bulb I've purchased with a Philips Hue system. Quite more expensive, but truly works locally.

I don't drink much, but a $5 wrench would probably work on me.

Did you add any friends lately? Do you know those "greetings" that Facebook pushes into Messenger whenever you add a new friend on Facebook?

I've recently noticed on my SO's phone that Messenger counts them as "unread messages", and the only way to clear them is to a) send that greeting, or b) clear them from a desktop.

In other words, they're getting pretty desperate to drive the engagements up, and this is something that probably wasn't implemented in third-party clients.

Note that this is different than a "message" on a mobile browser. Last time I've checked (admittedly, quite some time ago), there was one "message" that never gets cleared, regardless of what you do.

Yeah, it's just the title. I was on top for like 16h or so because I had a catchy title and some way of supporting that title within the content.

Comments were far different. Almost all of them were negative and highly unconstructive. I don't mind criticism, but I really mind criticism from which I can't learn anything. One HN reader actually took the time to write a constructive comment. I don't know who it was nor did I thank him at the time, but that one constructive criticism was way more helpful than all the traffic boost I got.

Where did I claim it's the only thing needed to stop a person like that?

You gotta start somewhere. This is a nice and easy way to do that's completely within the reach of the tech community. There are no laws requiring that, just a sign of a good will.

If it were up to me, Cloudflare would block at least 30 other websites, starting with Gab. Unfortunately, it takes a shooting or two for them to realize that they have a problem with a client of theirs.

Maybe to you and me, but we're not its target audience. Its target audience is other 8chan users, some of which might be just a step away from committing such atrocities themselves.

Yeah, I agree with the other comment.

"For us, in order to be able to cover our server costs, we ask our users to contribute a tiny amount if they find the app useful. Donate to see the detox counter again."

As far as this message goes, I'd just remove the word "server". We all know that's not the only cost associated, so pointing it out as the only cost seems... dishonest? Maybe you'd want to link the word "costs" to a web page that elaborates on the costs a bit. Not with concrete numbers, but more like percentages: 60% on the time maintaining it, 10% for the server and domain(s) etc.

As far as the funding model goes, I feel like pay-what-you-want would be a good strategy for this use case, but that's up to you to decide. I'm certainly bad at monetizing my projects, so I'm in no position to make suggestions.

That's just shifting the problem one inconvenience further. How do you purchase cryptocurrencies without Visa/MasterCard/PayPal?

A public blockchain is a mere write only database

Precisely. It does nothing to address who can write to it. Ideally, it should be people who are eligible to vote (citizens of the country that are over 18 years old). That's a difficult problem to solve even with paper ballots (especially in a country that doesn't have national IDs), and pretty much impossible to solve with any sort of a digital solution.

...that everyone can see.

...or nobody can, as you'd see by reading the article that was submitted.

Every transaction is available to 7 billion people.

7 billion people can see how to vote as well. You're not asking 7 billion people to vote, but a small subset of 7 billion people.

The problem is that they'd require a payment method to rent the server somewhere else or to use a non-US company that doesn't offer a generous free plan. The most prominent payment providers (Visa, MasterCard, PayPal) are all US-based.

(and is not required to follow US sanctions due to trade agreements, that'll be hard).

I really don't know much about sanctions against Syria and Crimea, but Iranian developers could use every country that hasn't withdrawn from the Iran deal: EU, UK (separate signature, regardless of Brexit), Russia, China.

You mean like this one? https://www2.meethue.com/en-us/support/dimmer-switch

I know about it. I have it. I've used it as a trigger before. I've replaced it with NFCs because they are less of a hassle to repurpose. The dimmer still serves its original purpose, while NFC tags are used for everything else.

You'd think so, but NFCs are far easier to program and re-program.

One of the NFC tags on my work desk triggers "focus mode". Lights change to bright white, a (non-local) radio station starts playing in the background, and the volume gets auto-adjusted to something bearable. That saves me like 20 clicks or so on two remotes.

It's all about those small victories that save me a few minutes each day, all without a need to route cables throughout the apartment. When I want to re-purpose an NFC tag, it takes me maybe 30 seconds to do so (instead of having to re-route the cables throughout my home). Physical buttons can do one task and one task only. NFC tags can trigger as many tasks on as many devices as I want them to.

If my Internet goes down, things still work. If I don't want to use my phone, I don't have to (I can achieve the same things from my laptop). I don't have to worry about turning shit off when I leave my home, Home Assistant does that for me (if an nmap scan doesn't detect any trusted device on my network). If a company whose gadget I'm using goes bankrupt, things are still perfectly usable.

Countries don't have direct representation, political blocs do.

Each country picks its own members (at minimum, six of them in the European Parliament), those members congregate into political blocs, those blocs make proposals, build a majority within EUs regulatory bodies, and adopt changes.

The difference between Germany and the UK is that German parties recognize this process and follow it. UK's (right-wing) parties, on the other hand, go on a tantrum locally whenever something doesn't go their way on an EU level, because they believe they're in a privileged position and that their vote means more within the EU. It doesn't.

My aim isn't to convince "leave" campaign that they should stay. On the contrary, I agree with the comment that said good riddance. Their tantrums stopped the progress of the EU far too many times.

If you think that the electoral college in the US is terrible, please, look up how Boris Johnson got to the position of the Prime Minister. The process was so undemocratic than it can't be considered anything but a complete joke. Brexit will finally happen, EU will move forward, and we'll all sit back and watch the UK's economy crash and burn. In over two years, they haven't even figured out what Brexit actually means, so the thoughts of them figuring it out within the next four months is laughable at best. There's not gonna be enough popcorns in the world for that shitshow.

It's almost as if the EU has 28 members, none of which should have an authoritative say in any of the things the bloc does.

Want something changed? Build a support within a bloc. Don't pretend your opinion is any more valuable than an opinion of any of the other 27 members.

I use NFC tags as a trigger. I simply hover my phone over a tag and an action happens in the background. It feels much better than dealing with separate apps and always-on microphones.

If IoT wants to move away from the current status as expensive, unreliable gimmicks, companies need to stop focusing on the idea of separate smart things and start thinking in terms of smart homes

Why would they do that? They do want to offer you a smart home, but a home that's entirely under their control, using either their own gadgets or compatible ones (so that they could charge other companies for the compatibility stickers).

There are plenty of protocols, and plenty of apps that support a protocol or two, but not every. Home Assistant and this project from Mozilla attempt to bridge that gap. I don't understand what Mozilla sees in an attempt to fight an established open source project like Home Assistant, but they probably have a reason or two. Such reasons are not yet obvious to me, so I'm going to continue using Home Assistant for my purposes. Every device I've purchased works locally, so I have one device that hosts the server, one interface that controls it (Progressive Web App, to be more precise), and NFC tags plastered over my apartment that trigger stuff without the need to even look at that one interface.

That's the sweet spot for me and it really feels like the future is already here. My choice of gadgets is rather limited (since I refuse to purchase any IoT device that can't be made to work locally), but so far I've yet to face a problem that I'm unable to find a solution for.

The goal of this is to be hosted on a router. I'm assuming it wouldn't go around NAT as much as replace NAT by replacing router's firmware.

You've guessed correctly that this is one of the most painful parts of the setup. I use a different open source product for the same purpose (Home Assistant), and it allows me to go around NAT manually (use dynamic DNS service, open up the port on a router, route it to a local device, issue a Let's Encrypt certificate) or pay them a few bucks per month to ease the pain.

Why would you agree to have work communications on your phone in the first place?

Assuming you work at a desk job (like a programmer), keep work-related items off of your phone. If your superiors complain, tell them you don't want to be responsible for leaking company secrets if you happen to lose your phone. If there's an emergency, your teammates could signal you that your help is necessary via SMS, and you can use a separate device to help them out.

Don't sell your soul to your employer. I always establish this limit when starting a new position. My phone is for personal use only, and no work-related communication (business email, Slack etc.) would ever go near it.

He's far from being the first one to claim that. That's where doing nothing leads us, and so far, we (as in, the society) seem incapable of tackling this problem. It's already too late to stop it, and we seem incapable to contain it as well.

For the overview of the argument, I'd recommend a paper called "Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy". Direct link: http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf

It was an invite-only torrent tracker. What set it apart was its size. Any song you could think of, in any format you could think of. You could find lossless music that there's 0 chance that you could find anywhere else (legally or not).