ccooffee

For a secure communications app, the website is awfully light on details of that security. This could just be a mis-alignment issue (i.e. website aimed at "average users" who may find technical jargon a reason to avoid the app). But my initial question of "why would I use this over Signal or GPG emails?" doesn't seem answerable from the website.

The security page says:

> 3. Verified and Secure -- Widely reviewed Open Source Public Key Cryptography and App itself can be fully audited and accredited.

As a bit of feedback, this description needs some cleanup. The word "can" in here is a scary word. Has the app been audited and accredited? If it has, make that clear. (Perhaps include information about when the app was audited and by whom.) If it has not been audited and accredited, this advertising blurb is a super red flag. "We could do some security stuff in the future but have not yet" wouldn't go onto the website, but you've wrapped the statement in enough jargon that unsophisticated users may be misled.

Submitting an article but substituting in a title to make the story about yourself goes against the submission guidelines [0]. The article doesn't have a particularly informative title, but piecing together the subtitle gives: "Team creates guidelines to reduce staph infections after surgery (2013)".

That said, the paper that this UIowa article references [1] is a meta-analysis of 39 previous studies. It doesn't seem fair to credit Schweizer et al with creating the guidelines. But that's university press shops for ya.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23766464/

In non-tournament settings, every dollar you win at poker comes out of the pockets of another player at the table. It's truly a zero-sum game, as adding up the gains and losses of players at the table will result in zero.

In contrast, tournament games (chess, golf, tennis, WSOP, esports, etc) may have significant entry fees, but at a professional level the total winnings are significantly more than the sum of all entry fees. Generally the excess money comes from corporate sponsors or viewership fees. The entry fees can result in some players walking away with less money than they started, but I don't think this is common outside of tournament-play poker.

The most popular professional sports (soccer, football, baseball, etc) have players on salaries. Those players often also get performance bonuses, either for entire-team results (winning the championship) or personal results (number of games played, statistical thresholds, etc). But they're all getting paid _something_ win or lose.

Aside: does the phrase "grasping hand" have a particular meaning in robotics jargon? (Or is there a different reason to avoid that terminology?)

To me a "gripping hand" is intuitively something that continuously holds an item. It might require human intervention to work, such as positioning my camera onto a universal tripod mount. A "grasping hand" (or "grabbing hand") would be something that transitions from empty-handed to holding an item.

From reading through the supplementary materials for the paper [0], it seems that the authors are aware of this flaw and they found a way to make it hydrophobic. The approach they tested involved soaking the ceramic in a bath with a commercially available fluorosilane [1] that is used to make things superhydrophobic. Fig. S20 in the supplementary materials has a chart that shows the treated ceramic being very good ("solar reflectivity...remains at ~99.0%") but not quite as stellar as the untreated ceramic.

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adi4725

[1] https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/aldrich/667420

I assume GP is referring to

Title: "Over the Air, Under the Radar: Attacking and Securing the Pixel Modem" Summary/Slides: https://www.blackhat.com/us-23/briefings/schedule/#over-the-... YouTube (48 minute): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrkB_enz2Pk

Dr. Blum is also a great professor for smaller undergraduate classes. I took his "theoretical cryptography" class, which was a semi-random walk through the history of creating and breaking crypto-systems. It was a small class (8-12 people), and his whiteboard lessons were great. That said, it took some getting used to the environment. The first problemset he assigned in that class started with the question "1. Think about the scientific method"; the "no right answer, but many wrong answers" approach was typical of most of his assignments. His extremely open-ended approach to learning was a breath of fresh air compared to other undergrad CS classes which seemed geared for memorization not understanding.

Multiple times throughout that course, the class collaboratively created a cryptosystem. Dr. Blum would inevitably see the cracks in them instantly, and then teach the principles so we could rigorously show weakness. None of our cryptosystems were any good, being a handful of novice undergraduates, but _collaboratively_ tackling hard problems in small pieces definitely helped me in my career afterwards.

The terms of the settlement[0-pdf] are kind of interesting.

Drivers in New York City proper are entitled to $17/hr for sick pay. If I'm reading it correctly, that is also the minimum wage that drivers must be compensated at.

However, drivers who begin trips in New York State _but not inside NYC_ are guaranteed pay at $26/hr [see paragraph 30 of settlement]. If I'm reading this right, drivers in Buffalo, Syracuse, Utica, Albany, etc. are all going to reap significantly higher pay from Uber while living in much lower cost-of-living areas.

[0-pdf] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/settlements-agreements...

I wouldn't call that a final solution to the paradox, though.

(Put on your tinfoil hats.)

Maybe the Earth-Moon system was engineered. The solar system came together from a nebular cloud 4.6 billion years ago. The great impactor hypothesis points to the mega-collision around 4.5 billion years ago. During the early days of the solar system, the system was very chaotic. By applying tiny-but-very-precisely-calculated forces in that system, you could cause an impact. Sure, it's many orders of magnitude above what humans have accomplished, but the gravity slingshots that got the Voyager missions out of the solar system are the same principle.

I'm amazed by this. Platform-independence _with the same binary_ is such a neat solution that would really have helped me at a prior job.

Some corporate IT shops manage user machines with tooling that can't deploy software specific to machine os/version/hardware/etc. This often caused problems with 32-bit vs 64-bit windows machines or differing windows versions (XP/Vista/....). We also couldn't easily make linux or osx executables available for the end-users due to corporate IT policies.

I don't think, based on 20 minutes of internet research, that the job title "therapist" (with no modifiers/descriptors) is legally protected anywhere in the United States. But with the URL spelling using an 's' not a 'z', this might be targeting other countries.

But I really don't like the URL here:

1. US english would typically spell the URL as therapiZe.me . Unfortunately, that domain looks held under a different registrar from the submitted one. I assume that's a domain squatter. In word-of-mouth recommendations, this tool becomes "therapise.me with an s not a z". You lose the snappiness of common sense. (That said, if this tool is aimed at the British public or whatever, it's perfect.)

2. "Therapy" is an emotionally-loaded word for some people. You might be turning away users based on their preconceptions of therapy. (Thinking of the big online mental health players, none of them use the word "therapy" in their name. But they all seem to use the word prominently in their websites, so maybe it isn't so cursed.)

How is Twitter tied into this problem?

The first reporting on the topic was the Al Jazeera English tweet, which used "killed". The second reporting of the topic was the Al Jazeera (Arabic) tweet which included the video and the Arabic word for victim/casualty.

We don't actually know what sources various reports actually used. I would not strongly fault a reporter who found both the AJ English and Arabic tweets and trusted the translation. This story hinges on the difference between "500 killed" and "500 casualties", which is a distinction that many native English speakers aren't good at picking up. I would absolutely believe that a reporter who passed the AJ Arabic tweet through a machine translator would assume the computer made a mistake by choosing "500 victims" when compared to an ostensibly expert-translation from a different media outlet.

> It'll never happen, but if funding agencies like the NSF or NIH put strings on the funding like "100% must go to the PI awarded this grant" with accounting requirements, it would help remove some of the financial incentive.

From what I've seen in very limited searches, universities claim that the 30-60% overhead/administrative costs are to account for things like employee benefits, utility costs, building maintenance, and the like. The stated money pits all make sense to me, but I don't see how it actually comes up to those numbers.

Do you know if these costs are ever itemized by universities? That's probably a necessary first step before NSF/NIH would consider a rule to avoid paying opaque overhead costs. (Though I fear it would lead to absurd equipment rental fees or something of the sort. "You want to use a test tube? $3 per day per tube!")

I really don't like this assignment idea as anything more than getting used to the assignment submission and grading system.

1. What is it teaching? Comparator<Integer> is trivial to implement, and you're adding no requirements on it (except maybe having a human readable shortname). Code reviewing a Comparator which merely has to compile and match the two simple rules of Comparators is not a useful code review. CI tests to check those rules for common errors is quite easy (undermining the value of code review) but there's not much extra complexity to shove into the Github actions to show their power. Maybe students will be amazed by a live scoreboard, but I don't expect that anymore. We had live scoreboards for (secretly submitted) assignments back in the 00s, and the world has become significantly faster-updating since then.

2. Incentivizing unique comparators adds in a lot of meta-work. Students will need to monitor the repository and the submissions of other students if the incentive is too high. Some students may wait until the last second to submit their solutions to avoid being detected, and yet other students may try to play spoiler and copy other submissions.

3. I don't like the structure where students submit two things (a number and a comparator) where the outcomes of the lottery are almost entirely based on the number. The comparator, which seems to be the intent of the lesson, isn't tied to the success of a particular student. And since you're only re-rolling comparators in the case of a 0 output for an input pair, there's a pretty significant chance that some student submissions won't even appear in the lottery computation tree.

There are definitely people advocating one-way trips to Mars. Buzz Aldrin wrote "Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration" (2013) pushing the idea of one-way trips and colonization by 2040. There are quite a few projects that have invested time and money into the idea. MarsOne (2012-2019) is possibly the most serious of the attempts, but they weren't exactly close to sending a mission.

"Cruise gives the cars cutesy names" is typical of fast turnaround journalism. The reporter doesn't have the time or resources to investigate the details to determine if this is indicative of a casual culture at Cruise. Instead, they can drop the easily verified vehicle name and let the readers fill-in-the-gaps. It doesn't exactly line up with CA DMV suspending the AV permit, but it adds so-called depth to the story.

I wouldn't expect this offhanded fact in long-form, slower journalism. But I expect this from Reuters.

From my limited understanding, web browsers were improved drastically by the creation of cross-vendor testing (e.g. Acid tests). I wonder if there is a way to do some sort of AV simulator testing that would allow us to test the different manufacturers on data collected from the others.

AVs seem to all have different "mental models" of the external world, so it seems like we've got a lot of work before we can pipe data collected from this Cruise incident into a simulator and test Waymo, Uber, Tesla, etc.

I've been in those situations. Your description here does not match my experiences at all.

I _hate_ the vernacular of "fighting cancer". As a leukemia survivor, it wasn't a fight. You don't punch back. It's more akin to public flogging. My body was absolutely destroyed by the treatments, and as I watched myself turn from a human being to a not-yet-dead skeleton, I had to endure people calling me "brave" and a "fighter". It absolutely felt like public mocking (though the people around me certainly did not intend anything of the sort). I was forced to watch my loved ones struggle with my impending death. Only a couple people were able to actually discuss death with me, with everyone else dancing around the topic like I had nothing more than a bad sunburn.

I never lost hope, but I was expecting to die. The "fight" worldview kept my loved ones emotionally distant and distracted. Maybe that was good for their own mental health, but it certainly didn't help mine.

The laws and regulations around genetic information seem to be (intentionally?) easy to misread.

Health and Human Services has a FAQ page[1] which states:

> genetic information is health information protected by the Privacy Rule. Like other health information, to be protected it must meet the definition of protected health information: it must be individually identifiable and maintained by a covered health care provider, health plan, or health care clearinghouse.

However, according to many other sources[2][3], the interpretation of these rules DOES NOT apply to companies like 23&Me. I assume the company is not considered "a covered health care provider, health plan, or health care clearinghouse", but (again) the HHS definitions are (intentionally?) vague/misleading[4].

I suppose you need to be very familiar with regulatory law to actually make sense of this junk. (I don't know the history of these regulations and carve-outs, but the tin-foil-hat part of me wants to blame lobbyists/legal-corruption for the lack of common-sense and simply worded regulations.)

[1] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/354/does-hip...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6813935/

[3] https://lawforbusiness.usc.edu/direct-to-consumer-generic-te...

[4] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-entities...

In the fonts I use, I've never noticed a difference between hyphen/dash/endash/minus. But (as alluded to in the intro of the submitted message) some fonts will render it differently. I would not be surprised if various screen-reading software handles them differently.

So for some people, rewriting all of them into '-' would be information-discarding.

(However, I'd not be surprised if there are more "incorrect" hyphen/dash/minus issues in many code bases than "correct" ones...)

The Arxiv[0] paper abstract seems much clearer and more informative than the linked article.

In particular, it points to WHY the mass has been revised down so far -- there's seemingly a lot less mass at 19+ kiloparsecs (about 62,000 lightyears) from galactic center than we expected the galaxy to have. I'm not an expert so it isn't clear to me if the discussions in the paper about dark-vs-baryonic matter are a theoretical explanation of the gap.

Here's a 2019 article[1][1b] describing the mass of the galaxy at 1.5 trillion solar masses. This current research lowers that number to just 200 billion solar masses with a 3 sigma confidence.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00048 [1] https://www.sciencealert.com/the-most-accurate-measurement-y... [1b] https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.11348

When crypto is involved, I think of shady folks.

If you use a crypto exchange to acquire cash and then purchase a Ferrari in cash, you probably will trigger IRS regulations that require the dealer to report a large cash transaction (>$10k)[0]. I cannot find clear documentation from the IRS that states cryptocurrency transactions trigger mandatory reporting, though it is possible that it is reported somewhere.

From my very biased perspective, Ferrari accepting crypto is just advertising to various "bad folks" (drug/gun/human traffickers) that they're not gonna tell the IRS.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/cash-payment-report-helps-gover...

Without underlines makes the data even more hidden. The style looks nice and clean to expert users, but I don't expect any of my less-savvy users to actually find it. (Though I could be very off-base as I've never A/B tested tooltip hinting.)

I used to put exact time/date information into tooltips, thinking "the users that need it can find it without overloading the UI". I ended up undoing a lot of that a few years later when user interviews demonstrated that hyperlink-style underlines was insufficient for users to think "mouse over this".

With the prevalence of emoji and higher resolution displays, I wonder if tooltip hinting with an obnoxious question-mark or magnifying-glass image would be sufficient to hint to older/less-savvy users.

It's a VERY time-consuming process to do a thorough review of localization materials. I've spent multiple working days on single massive commits when working with an unreliable translation provider. I can absolutely believe that someone glanced at the diff (linked elsewhere in this HN thread) at thought "that looks good enough". It wasn't a very large diff, and didn't do anything that reviewers will be keyed for (bizarre punctuation, formatting errors, incorrect captured variable references, etc).

Offensive localization strings is not a threat I'd considered when I did my work. I doubt the reviewers of this repo thought it was a concern.

Archive: https://archive.ph/20231008050640/https://www.wsj.com/person...

Cited research: https://kenaninstitute.unc.edu/wealthinequality/wp-content/u...

From the research paper, it seems that this conclusion is based on less creditworthy cardholders.

> The credit card products offered by the fintech company range from $500 to $10,000 in credit limit and 10% to 30% APR, and are generally targeted toward consumers with lower credit scores and/or shorter credit records compared with the general population of cardholders.

Sorry, I was trying to make an almost pedantic point. I agree with you that deceiving the public is important to understanding what/why. However, the claim that "very large majority of the people were against it the entire time" is false, and trivially testable. 53% in favor of war means at most 47% against. 47% is not "very large majority".

Would people have been against it _conditioned on having knowledge from today that was unavailable then_? Possibly, but this hypothetical doesn't move discussion in a useful direction.

I worked for a defense contractor when the mistargeted drone strike on Ahmadi occurred killing him and 9 family members (including 7 children). Based on internal information available at the time, there's a very good chance that the drone strike was mistargeted due to software bugs.

In particular, a "track this car" feature that worked against satellite and aerial surveillance was available in software used by those in the military's operations teams. I've poked around in that software to determine that it was definitely buggy, but this did not prevent the feature from being offered to users. I've been assured that users were essentially told "don't click this button that automates watching vehicles and instead do it yourself", but laziness and crisis crunch time of the American exit from Afghanistan makes it very realistic that users were overwhelmed and trying anything to stay on top of things.

I lay those deaths at least partially on software and the cavalier way that life-or-death circumstances are systematically ignored by the defense contractor software industry.

> very large majority of the people were against it the entire time

I don't think this claim holds up to the evidence. Looking at opinion polls between 9/11 and 2003's invasion of Iraq makes it unclear that a "very large majority" was against the invasion. Here's a quickly-found Gallup poll[0] from October 2002 wherein 53% of polled Americans supported a ground invasion of Iraq.

The American people were misled by government claims about WMDs and handwavy connections between Iraq and 9/11. But that doesn't permit us to retroactively declare that "well, if only the people knew in 2002 what we know now then they would have been against it."

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20171201030755/http://news.gallu...

> Unless you're already sitting on FU money, I don't understand why anyone would spend more [than $50/yr on phone upgrades].

Among the people I know, there's more people living paycheck to paycheck and getting annual phone upgrades than people with FU money doing upgrades. That said, the percentage of FU money upgraders is higher than the percentage of paycheck-to-paycheck upgraders.

Google/Samsung/Apple/etc may be making more total money from the not-well-off than the well-off, at least thinking about people I know.