skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got a free loaner phone once a few years back ("Samsung Ultimate Test Drive") which came with pre-activated mobile phone service and was very clearly re-using a phone number that someone else had quite recently actively been using.

While it was weird to get SMSes about SoCal drug deals, the strangest thing of all with that phone was opening the Lyft app and being automatically signed in to someone else's Lyft account on the basis of my auto-confirmed phone number. Their active credit card was linked to the account and I could take free rides!

(I didn't... but it was very hard to sign into a different Lyft account when the phone # was actively linked to another, live account.)
So.. i switched yesterday and the Firefox app downloaded 1.5gb by itself overnight.. no idea why it was using so much data.. had to uninstall it..
These guys were actually shipping phones to cartel bosses. It’s a bit different than just offering a phone in a general purpose retail store.
The article is 6 months old and the study it's based on is more than 1 year old. How is the project?

There are rare earth minerals everywhere. Even when they are economically viable to extract, most countries are unwilling to, because of the environmental costs associated with mining and refining. As well as the human health costs for workers. I'm not sure Japan will be willing to pay that price.
Sure, as soon as its dev tools aren’t complete garbage.
Exactly. When you are well rested and in a good routine you can have late nights and be ok. Just watch out for the things that come with late nights: excessive alcohol, eating lots of food late etc.
A whole chain of things need to happen for you to die, but they typically culminate in starving the brain of nutrients or oxygen. That usually happens due to organ failure, and that can certainly be the eventual consequence of old age. So tying 'cause of death' to a single factor is almost always a gross oversimplification. There are many causes for every death, and it's only important to look at specific ones should you care to prevent them or assign blame for them.
That isn't the only definition.
There’s one annoyance I have with Firefox right now and it’s the search bar. When I type the start of a frequently visited site then instead of jumping to that site it googles my half-word. Very annoying and different to Safari or Chrome.
You have felt the need for more desktop RAM but haven't done so.

I haven't felt the need for a smart phone, and haven't done so.

These are different, yes?

FWIW, I've felt the need to not have a smart phone. My feature phone is small; I can drop it in just about any pocket. It's cheap; I've had four phones which ended up in the laundry (see 'just about any pocket'), and destroyed phones other ways, and $20/phone means I don't worry about it. And I love having a 1+ week charge time.
Judge orders Facebook to turn over records on data privacy
It depends on what your definition of "successful" is. I meant in the monetary term. Sure, there are old Unix utilities that haven't changed much but they haven't made a lot of money. Those with paying customers generally require a lot of changes to make their customers happy.
I can't go"hunting" anymore
If you require PCI DSS compliance it won't fly either.

https://pcipolicyportal.com/blog/pci-compliance-password-req...
As much as I pay for services I use, many people don't have the ability or won't see it as important enough to fund. While you and I might see the purpose, I suspect those like us area in the minority.
Bing still is a laughingstock unless you change your regional settings on bing.com to USA. If you do that you may find that you have little need to visit Google anymore.

It is my impression that most users are completely unaware of the effect changing region on bing have and that bing is amazing if you do.

So odd that default setting, for most, is non-US and for those user Bing is still very much a laughingstock compared to Google.

US and non-US bing is not the same product. Non-US lacks most of the cool features found on the US version so why non-US is the default is something that has pusseled me for years. Very odd behavior to degrade your own product the way Microsoft does with Bing.
You are wrong, sir. This is a browser feature.

https://www.ghacks.net/2018/10/01/chrome-70-features-option-...
> I don't understand why you were unable to make alternate arrangements in that time.

I shouldn't have to make "alternate arrangements" to prevent software from deliberately destroying my data.
Hey guys,I've created the project to facilitate sharing and testing of other users terminal setups.
I love feedback and am open to all PRs, so please don't hold back.

Also for those who don't want to read the post, https://github.com/rylandg/myos is the repo, leave a star if you like what you see.
Psst…I think you meant "abstain".
It's because your username is an ideological provocation. I'm sure you didn't mean it to be, but it actually would be helpful to switch to something else, because it's regularly triggering people into taking threads off topic. (In boring directions. Taking threads off topic in interesting directions is fine, though much rarer.) Would you mind emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can change it for you?
Qualcomm doesn’t own spectrum either. Apple should be investing in tech, not in cash. It’s crazy to think of tech companies sitting on that much cash. At this rate, apple will have 1T in the bank in 15 years.
GSM is a 2G standard [0]. Modern phones are pretty hard to put into a single bin. They often support 2G (GSM[TDMA]/CDMA/GPRS/EDGE, etc), 3G (UMTS[W-CDMA]/CDMA2000/EDGE/HSPA, etc), and 4G (LTE/OFDMA/WiMax, etc).

A modern US iPhone or Android phone is perfectly capable of moving between every major carrier on every technology (its almost always LTE anyways). Every major US carrier uses SIM cards.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM "The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to describe the protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile devices such as mobile phones"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Linux says "In April 2019, it was announced that Scientific Linux would be discontinued, but that maintenance will continue to be provided for the 6.x and 7.x releases through the end of their lifecycles."

lwn synopsis at https://lwn.net/Articles/786422/ .

Note: 'Scientific Linux' is a Red Hat-derived distribution. Users are migrating to CentOS.
I think I'd go with largest Wikipedia article, probably in most cases the same.
Plastic Gears Are the Future (2017)
Depends on whether you consider a 7 months old feature new or not.

https://www.ghacks.net/2018/10/01/chrome-70-features-option-...
Thanks, today I learned something about Hawaii. I assumed with the high COL it must be really desirable. But I guess tourists are pushing out locals?

Oh and there's a lot of housing regulation.
Mark likes to say a lot of things. He has made what seem like off the cuff remarks about personal finance, personal medical advice, technology...all in a way that indicates he is more than happy to tweet or otherwise give advice about things he doesn't understand.

He could be right, but his history doesn't make me think he knows anything more than Average Joe on the street.
Ironic, though, given their stance on opt-out-only telemetry.
This is why I don't use WhatsApp despite the fact I know many people who use it. To use the app, you have to give access to your entire contacts list. Even if I'm okay with them having my information, I don't feel comfortable consenting for those in my contacts list who don't use WhatsApp.
Digitizing Embroidery Services
I think you need to provide approval from one of your other devices, or enter your iCloud security code before the sync can occur.
A sort of Google Fi for Amazon?
Two phones.

(or a double SIM phone, but then you still risk messing up yourself by mixing data / calling from the wrong number / etc)
Given your pricing you should ask folks to pay for one or more targets and 30 days of storage if you are writing custom code or helping with an integration. If someone pays you $25-$100 for an eval they are far more likely to be serious. You have priced for easy trialability and should ask prospects to put a little skin in the game.
I think you have to break it down a little. There is potential harm to you individually, further broken down by "legitimate" parties with access to the information, and then problems where that big pile of data tempts hackers to steal it. For the latter, think of the time and location history of your children gleaned from photo location data (or the location data of their cell phones). Or just patterns that indicate when you're on vacation.

For the former, I agree it's a little hard to find realistic examples that don't involve having something to hide (but if you do, those are easy: porn history, extramarital affairs, time spent goofing off on various websites, surprise gifts, pregnancy, financial problems, stalkers, ...) Still, do you close the door when you take a shower? Do you sing in public? Do you disclose your salary in casual conversation? Those might seem silly, since the discomfort there mostly hinges on fully public disclosure, but the data are getting shared so widely now that it's getting easier and easier for the data to escape to places where they can be pulled up by someone who is bothered by your NextDoor post.

The other main category is the problems with massive numbers of other people's data being available to these companies. Those are more societal effects, like segmenting the population, radicalizing us, and setting us against each other. Outrage culture. Hyperpartisanship. Phishing. Vulnerability to external trolls/griefers/fake news publishers. Functionality being lost because it's overloaded by targeted spam. Harassment of minority groups (heck, you only need preferred language for some of that, though purchase history would reveal a lot more.)
Because people just love to rip on names if they have nothing more substantial to add.

Look at every thread ever about CockroachDB.
> They've blocked US enterprises whole hog except where they had no alternative.

Try walking through a mall in Shanghai it Beijing some day, and try saying this again. American companies and brands are everywhere. They don't have to drink Starbucks - it would be perfectly possible for a Chinese company to brew coffee - but they do.

> it's hard to look at the way China has operated from an economic POV and not have expected retaliation at some point.

They've provided cheap labor to American corporations, boosting those companies' profits. They've allowed their labor force to be massively exploited by Western companies, with the understanding that they themselves would be able to eventually move up the value chain and live on a level closer to people in the developed world.

The reason for the "retaliation" is that there is a circle of people in American politics that cannot accept the United States being eclipsed by another power. This is about geopolitics. An established power fears a rising power, and is moving to try to cripple the rising power while there's still time.
What benefits did Scientific Linux offer over other distros?
I have mixed feelings this. Spam calls are very much a real problem in the US as well - I get around ten per day and it's a constant annoyance.
Basically Intel is trying to give away their market share like IBM did.

FYI - IBM handed Microsoft and Intel a big chunk of market share because who would ever want a personal computer...
Offenses against us are entirely ignored...

Meanwhile everybody else is saying that US antitrust law is concerned entirely with consumer harm and not with competition. Although in this case the consumer harm seems to be that a >$750 phone costs ~$20 more than it might otherwise.
The story about the rigged Monopoly game made me think of the reproducibility crisis. I have a hard time believing that most people wouldn't point out their huge starting advantage when asked why they won. Really? You played a whole game of Monopoly, where you had four times the other guy's money, rolled twice as many dice, and got more money for passing Go, and you think you won because of superior skill? I don't know people who win at fair Monopoly and are under the delusion that Monopoly is a particularly skill based game.

This seems like the kind of result that would be tough to reproduce. This test result is ideologically satisfying and sensational - "The rich are evil, we knew it." The null result, "People realize it when they are massively advantaged in an unfair game" seems unpublishable.

I googled the study and the name of the author with the word "replication". It seems like at least some of the author's research on this subject area, though I can't tell if this is the same Monopoly experiment or not, failed to replicate.

https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2016120
Just to be the king of this pedantic hill it's actually Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation.
Foursquare buys Placed from Snap Inc. on the heels of $150M in new funding
I find TrueCaller very usefull. I used to get sooo many sales and robo-calls a day that I seriously considered just getting rid of my phone. Now they get automatically blocked or I can just put them on a profile that they ring silently and hang up immediately.

I get that this can be dangerous for journalists, but shouldn't they maybe investigate alternative ways of contacting sources privately? Mobile numbers are not in any way secure or anonymous in most parts of the world anyways. Hell, here where I live you have to register with your government ID in order to get your sim card activated.
Mark Zuckerberg's Security Chief Is Accused of Racism and Sexual Misconduct
You shouldn't need a CDMA phone for an LTE network, unless it doesnt support VoLTE, which Sprint uses.

Fallback to 2G/3G networks in areas without LTE is another issue though.

"CDMA" isn't slower than "GSM". That being said, those terms are very ambiguous. For example, the GSM (2G) group also came up with the UMTS (3G) standard, which uses W-CDMA. So, most "GSM" carriers were using a variant of CDMA a decade ago. Traditional "CDMA" carriers also saw improvements with CDMA2000 (aka 1xEVDO) and other enhancements.
This has a common term in the news industry: Man Bites Dog

Since 'newsworthy' is synonymous with 'unusual', we end up thinking rare things are actually common, since we only cover rare things in the news.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog_(journalism)
I had thought you meant sponges at the bottom of the ocean.

Not sure what you mean by storing heat.

You could store energy obtained from (the smoothing-out of) a temperature gradient, but that isn’t storing the heat, just the energy extracted as the temperature gradient goes away. It doesn’t decrease the amount of heat?

And I suppose if you have some endothermic reaction (like melting ice) you can decrease the amount of heat around, (and then if you freeze it again, you release the heat), which is sort of like storing heat, but it isn’t like you can store arbitrarily large amounts of heat this way. You would need arbitrarily large amounts of stuff to have react.

I’m still fairly sure you cannot “transform heat into kinetic or chemical energy”, but rather, you can transform a difference in temperatures, and a potential for heat to be exchanged, into kinetic or chemical or whatever energy?

In the example of that mechanism for converting a temperature gradient into electricity, suppose you had two regions with particular and different initial temperatures , which are in contact with opposite sides of the mechanism. The two regions have the same mass and are made of the same material. How do you expect the temperature of all the parts after reaching equilibrium to depend on the initial temperature? I expect that the total heat will remain the same (even though you did extract some energy as the difference in temperatures went away).

Also, pumping heat around costs energy. To move things against the tendency for temperatures to equalize, costs energy, right?

I don’t understand why the fact that earth is not homogeneous would be a reason to not call it a system?

I don’t see how the specifics of geology and such are relevant here. The question is: under what circumstances can we keep the part of a system that we care about to stay at a low temperature while waste heat is being added to the system at an arbitrarily fast rate, and the only way we have for heat to leave the system is blackbody radiation?
(Assuming the system is connected/contiguous and stuff)

Now it sounds like you are suggesting that we just make the inside of the earth hotter while keeping our part cool?
No JavaScript, pretty inspiring.
Can you share any of your potential used for warn()? I think I'm not really understanding it? Why is is better or different than print() or protected calls?
I worked with a VAR when that shipped. They gave us some to try and encourage sales. It was a terribly slow device with poor battery life compared to iPad.

I still use the well made power adapter (Micro USB) that came with it to charge devices to this day. Kinda sad seeing that blackberry logo and knowing the tablet was horrible.
Oh wow yeah that's recent. I haven't installed new extensions in a while. Thanks.

Edit: I don't like that it seems to not be the default though... if you don't see this option then it's the same situation as before.
I get zero spam calls and on most days no calls. Should we give up on privacy because US has bad legislation regarding spam calling.
I think the "lesser" is because capitalism works but causes lots of destructive side-effects, while communism doesn't work at all (and according to the article, apparently can have some of the same kinds of side-effects, which was news to me).

In one sense this makes capitalism worse, because it can keep chugging along wreaking havoc instead of collapsing. But in another sense it's "less dysfunctional".
I don't know, but personally, I prefer extensions :)
Mining Cryptocurrency Is Against CenturyLink's Acceptable Use Policy
I was reading through CenturyLink's Terms of Service earlier tonight, and stumbled upon their Acceptable Use Policy: http://www.centurylink.com/aboutus/legal/acceptable-use-policy.html

I was quite surprised to read this particular section:

Users will not use the Service (a) by any means or device to avoid payment; (b) to access User’s account or CenturyLink Services after User has terminated User’s account; (c) on behalf of persons or firms listed in the Spamhaus Register of Known Spam Operations database at www.spamhaus.org; (d) to engage in phishing activities and (e) for purposes of cryptography or similar computational processing to mine or create units of cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin.

Is this becoming a norm for ISP's? Does anyone know why they would have such a policy?
Mobile numbers are also often the most secure (even if not secure) / only way to contact someone in parts of the world....
People writing rootkits are not necessarily experts in shell scripting :)
Yes but not to the degree that the ad network will make less money in total. If you understand how advertisers optimize their campaigns and think it through you'll come to this conclusion. Performance-based marketers will reduce bids until they asymptote at the real value of the traffic. But other marketers with bad stats will just keep spending, and performance-based marketers launching new campaigns will need to run run-of-network until they've blacklisted the crappy placements. In the end, the ad network will make more money and advertisers will lose money.

This is just one of a billion issues with a simple implementation of this idea. Another issue is that merely clicking ads without adequately spoofing your fingerprint will just get you ignored by the smarter networks... I could go on and on but don't have time atm
The hedgehog library is completely unsafe considering that any third party library or browser extension loaded in the website using the SDK can loop through localStorage to read the entropy value therefore recreating the hd wallet and stealing the user's account.
My guess is (1) inertia, and (2) not wanting to commit to a specific instruction set because they tweak the internal μop set with every release.

And (3), this would add complexity, because, even though one is much simpler, now you need two completely separate decoding pipelines and mechanisms for switching between them.
I realize this may be an unpopular opinion, but this is just not an interesting find to me. A slightly mutated game computer used to display a virtual aquarium? Knock me over with a feather.

I get the obsession w game hardware and that it was Japanese. But this article makes it sound like this was a lost DaVinci sketch book, and these comments liken game design dust to the same.
Yes. Did exactly that.
I use Firefox on mac. One feature that is missing in Firefox is that it cannot do a smooth pan zoom like Safari or Chrome. Hope Firefox developer fix this in future release.
>The problem with Sprint is that they are still relying on it for far too much (and they don't have broad enough spectrum holdings to make dual networks work well)."

Sprint has a crazy amount of 2.5GHZ spectrum holdings. They are already deploying that with Massive MIMO to move everything to LTE Advanced.
If it cost apple less to build improvement into 5G that would have been licensed to everyone they would have done so.

Standards require all participants to license at a FRAND rate. If apple developed 5G IP they would have effectively received a rebate based on the relative impact of their contribution.

Qualcomm actually has great execution. You realize 5G is going to put a 1 gigabit network in the palm of your hand? I can’t even get that out of cable.
I switched from make to mk and never looked back.

The syntax is saner. It took some time to learn it, but typing `mk` instead of `clang --many-flags-I-do-not-remember` is so much better.
Isn't that brave?
Do we all have to do everything beautiful in the world?
Original story, which dates from April 2018:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23948-5.pdf
Unless it grew, it probably gives you cancer, disease. What’s new? How many studies do we need to know that processed = not good for you?
Hey HN,
I'm the lead person who did the original data collection. We were previously featured when I made the initial site here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840237

Happy to answer more questions people might have about methodology or the analysis in the original study.
Thanks for the comment, I have just contacted the staff to try to update it
Trump announces tariffs on all Mexico goods
Kotlin – Multiplatform Project: iOS and Android
In a JWS the header is integrity-protected by the signature if the alg isn't none. This is prominently noted in the specs and alg=none artifacts are referred to as "unsecured JWS". In a JWE the protected header is integrity protected by the AEAD cipher, because all encs must be AEAD.

The alg=none substitution issues happened because of bad usage of mediocre libraries. Other algorithm substitution can arise for the same reason. The invalid curve attacks were the ones that the spec didn't call out as a security consideration.

I support the arguments that say algorithmic agility is a bad idea and a new protocol with algorithmic agility shouldn't have come out at a time when other protocols (like TLS) were finally starting to catch on to this fact. But the JWT cat is out of the bag, and won't go back in: it's widely deployed and people are using it thinking it's solving problems they actually have. Education is the proper remedy.

The PASETO effort attempts to provide better answers and better design to an audience familiar with JWT, but there's also been an uptick in the kind of advice that heavily condemns JWT without supplying some migration paths. That latter brand of advice is harmful.