velavar

It might very well be placebo but it helped me deeply and I can see why women that want to give it their all would try it (and that's why I don't begrudge her counting those jabs). If it helps anyone - my first cycle was without acupuncture and I barely got 4 eggs out of it. I underwent acupuncture for 3 months before my second cycle and that got me 12 eggs.

When each cycle costs about 30k USD, a lot of women with low amh, egg quality or ovarian reserve would try anything to help tweak the odds!

I've previously been recommended "Punished by rewards" by Alfie Kohn

Not cooler than those with an Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath number!

https://news.asu.edu/20160126-creativity-lawrence-krauss-erd...

Working in fraud prevention and I would love to know how to detect a botnet system, beyond the usual velocity checks. A decade of working in this space and I haven't found a reliable, fail-safe way to do this. Genuinely interested to know if there's a suggestion.

That's okay, different people can like different things :)

As for myself, I liked reading about some bits of Chinese history that I was not very familiar with, and it also provides a really good foundation for the reason behind the lead character's far-reaching actions. I also do think the best parts of the story do come later in books 2 and 3 - I like the larger-than-life ideas and the imperfect characters.

This was the year I got my attention under enough control to be able to read voraciously again like I used to in my childhood :)

* I'll always bring up The Three-body problem because I re-read it every year

* Piranesi because of it's fantastical story-telling

* The Covenant of Water - because it's a fantastic medical drama and a sweeping story spanning generations

* Victory City - Salamn Rushdie's latest novel which is surprisingly readable

* The Enchanted Forest/Kaikeyi/Palace of Illusions - because they cover the major Indian epics from the lens of the women characters (think Circe with an Indian background)

* Trust - The same story told from different viewpoints with a setting in the early NY financial world, which makes it extra interesting

I notice that I do tend to favour books with an Indian background because of my nostalgia for it as I live in a foreign land. Maybe I'll branch out more next year!

Folding Ideas had a great video on it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8

I got Loops on Amazon based on someone's recommendation and they work pretty well for me. They're cheap enough to try once and see if they work for you.

What kmoser said :)

I support your argument about Yubikeys - I myself use them for any financial site that allows it. A lot of companies do use them to check for fraudulent logins. But the friction of it is high enough that companies would much rather take the loss than force their customers to authenticate every time a transaction has to be made. Also, I think until it is normalized in the industry, there is a consumer perception of physical keys being too technically difficult to obtain, set up and manage. Not to mention, all the Yubikeys in the world still don't help if one goes and gets phished/socially engineered :)

That's very true. I think my comment was more in response to other comments talking about "surveillance" and "trust", but you're right that if the data collection itself is illegal, there are no two sides about it :)

I haven't worked with Telesign data but I can attempt a guess. Think of how a fraudster uses a phone versus how a legitimate customer uses a phone:

1. The former is likely using a throwaway phone number, the latter is using an established phone number. You can tell the difference with the number of completed calls over time, call duration etc. Burner phones will have bursts of high intensity activity to several different phone numbers whereas legitimate phones will have lots of successfully completed phone calls over a long period of time to repeating phone numbers.

2. The former will likely place calls all over the country or world as they attempt to raid several bank accounts digitally. The latter will probably have more local calls since they're calling their doctors, schools, etc. This is probably where range activity plays a role.

I'm not defending Telesign or how they collect data - I'm merely saying this data has value in account protection.

Ahh that's a great question - it's a very real risk. In my mind, most of the data these companies have is sourced from other companies so all that these vendors do is increase the surface area for the attack vectors. And the (probably naive) hope is that the attackers can't do much with data such as trust scores and the underlying factors.

So true and something I see everyday on my job! it's no wonder then that financial companies have to resort to using data from companies like Telesign to view these red flags and attempt to detect fraud.

Until banks accept that they got defrauded, not you, whatever they do will be too little.

True. Regardless of accepting responsibility, I think they're spending a good bit of money in preventing fraud from happening [1]. Maybe some regulation around banks taking fraud losses would do the trick but the flipside would be that simple financial flows of legitimate customers would become full of friction as banks race to lock down fraud losses. Fraud detection is a really hard fraud problem for even a human, let alone models.

[1] https://bankingjournal.aba.com/2022/01/study-banks-see-rise-...

I work in fraud prevention with vendors such as this. Let me be the devil's advocate here: trust and risk scores such as these are often very useful for identifying account takeovers and stolen identities in the financial and telecom worlds. We often see folks on HN complaining about how banks don't protect them from fraud losses - companies like this are how there is any hope left for some modicum of consumer protection.

You may ask: Then why do banks not protect me from losses better? I say: They're already doing something (invisible as it may be). They can definitely do a better job. But without companies such as Telesign, fraud losses would far, far worse.

You may ask: What if my data gathered is used for nefarious purposes? I say: In my experience, data such as this is not allowed to be used for marketing purposes but strictly for consumer protection. I'm not specifically speaking about TeleSign but similar vendors. The worst that should happen is that you get a transaction declined, or get denied for a credit card etc. But no marketing or any other manipulative practice is allowed, in theory.

Happy to answer any questions you may have :)

Musk — who is no longer CEO of Twitter, but still deeply involved in operations — may also be motivated by a desire to prevent AI tools from searching Twitter.

This seems very unlikely. If they really just wanted to stop just AI tools from searching twitter, it would be very easy to prevent them from doing it at scale by imposing basic rate limiting and device intelligence (or even something like the puzzle LinkedIn makes you solve before viewing someone's profile while not logged in).

I'm very confused as to why they may not want unlogged-in human lurkers who are still seeing and clicking on ads when on the Twitter website.

I get what you mean but sometimes it's really difficult for a bank to tell if it's really you or someone pretending to be you. Funnily enough, if we all "walked in" physically to a bank, it would be much easier for them to tell :). But now, they have to rely on phone numbers and emails and SSNs to tell them if it's really you. They don't have much of a choice - would you have any suggestions on what they could use?

Going to a branch physically is impractical these days - how many of us have even been to a branch that houses our brokerage or 401k accounts for instance? And so many mainstream Fintech apps like Stripe and Robinhood don't even have branches.

Too many finance companies depend on National ID number, date-of-birth and Driver's License numbers to verify the identities of applicants for bank accounts, loans, credit cards etc. At this point, assume that all your personal information is out there. There are some steps you can take to make it a little more secure for yourself. In an ideal world, the fintechs and banks would protect you better, but we do not live in that world.

* If you are in the US, go to one of the credit bureau sites (Transunion/Experian/Equifax) and sign up for a fraud alert. You'll need to provide your current phone number and what this does is this: no fintech/bank is supposed to create an account or issue credit in your name unless they have verified the activity with this phone number.

* If you have previously been a victim of fraud, sign up on one of the aforementioned bureaus for an Extended Fraud Alert.

* Isolate your email tied to your finance accounts from regular email that you give out on website signups, doctors' offices, etc. Only your bank/brokerage needs to know that this email exists

* If you can afford to, pay to track leakage of this information on the dark web or password sharing forums

* Use a password manager

* Use 2FA on all your accounts and use an authenticator app if possible. It's not ideal but it's better than the SMS/email 2FA

* If your telecom provider supports it, ask them about how you can protect yourself from sim-swapping and porting. Add a PIN to your phone provider account if you can.

Something that blew my mind after I spent a few years learning art is that: everyone makes bad art.. even the best artists. For every good painting an artist produces, there are several that have been trashed or painted over. Sketchbooks are often encouraged in the artist community in order to allow ourselves to do bad art that doesn't have to see the light of day.

And finally, when a customer buys a piece of art, they're not just paying for that piece but also for the time that the artist spent finding themselves :)

Is it me or is the bot's output in the section "Give a Bot a Fish" incorrect? It states that the most recent receipt is from Mar 5th, 2023 but there are two receipts after that date. This is what worries me about using ChatGPT - the possibility of errors in financial matters, which won't go down well I fear.

Seconded. My father who also had AS 25 years ago, had to get on sulpha drugs to stop disease progression. In comparison, I consider biologics a walk in the park and truly consider myself lucky to have access to them. I luckily haven't had symptoms of AS (yet) but the auto-immune problems I've had include recurrent uveitis. I was similarly reluctant to get on biologics but having been on it a while now, I truly consider it a miracle drug - especially when the alternative is losing my eyesight.

Similar sufferer of recurrent uveitis here (spent 10 years doing several tests none of which ever explained what I have, only excepting HLA-B27 which occurs with several of these auto-immune diseases). The only thing that helps me now is Humira. I wonder if gut bacteria has anything to do with my condition and how I can even go about digging into this :/

That was my first thought too. Different stitches such as knits and purls could serve very well as dots and dashes. Maybe that could've been too easily spotted.

This is awesome - exactly the thing I was looking for! Apologies if I missed it but what are the fees for using this service?

> everyday BNPL orders, including groceries, accounted for barely 1% of all purchases in 2021.

Presumably the share for groceries alone didn't increase meaningfully in 2022, or that would have been noted for effect, so we're looking at less than 1.4% of all BNPL payments for groceries.

It could just mean that BNPL as a product was not much used a couple of years ago, no? It could just mean that these folks would merely then put their groceries on a revolving credit card (which in many ways is worse). It doesn't necessarily mean folks are shifting to riskier forms of debt?

It's hard to strike the right balance here. The points raised by Hindenburgh are many and it will take time to study and respond to them.

Stay quiet for too long and folks will assume the article is right since you haven't responded. Respond too fast and your analysis will likely not stand up to scrutiny because it was set up too soon. It makes sense that they put out a first statement here - it remains to be seen if they will follow it up with a more detailed pushback.

You're right. It can't just be about paying for insurance but also has to include undergoing and passing regular stress tests. Just because one buys fire insurance shouldn't give them a free pass to fill their house up with large amounts of flammable material and sparking wires.

This is good advice but I fear it's only a matter of time before scammers realize this and turn up as dates that are quite believable similar to your average Joe/Jane.

I don't think that folks so much "moved" to SMS 2FA as much as were with it from the start. SMS 2FA is so ingrained in the finance/fintech industry that it's pretty rare for me to see a financial company offer the option to set up an Authenticator 2FA. Also, there is always some part of the consumer population that is still not on a smartphone and even if they are, they may not be "app-savvy" where they know how to install or use an authenticator app. For this reason, I think most finance companies will steer clear of the Authenticator app and go directly for SMS 2FA or worse, email 2FA.

Do you think that this is because they don't really need to anymore with all the nice GUI/tools around? Is there an advantage to bring able to do something on a command line vs other ways?

Asking because I'm at a bit of a crossroads - I have a good handle on about 5% of the command line knowledge which gets me through 80% of the stuff I need to do. I'm wondering if learning to use more commands is worth the effort when I can already get the task done without using the command line?