skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of the many things that could be trivially detected and fixed when you have multiple watermarked copies of the same file.
I recenty got the AirPods Pro and they're really underwhelming. Apart from their durability, everything they do can be found on headphones half the price e.g. Anker
I have many of those issues mentioned in the article daily with iPhone 13 Pro and MacBook Air M1.

Whatever Apple advertised as AirPods Pro features, it's all false advertising. I can't get anything to work reliably. Anything. I don't trust them at all with any sort of serious meeting at this point, either, since they recently started to randomly switch from being actively used with my MacBook to an idling iPhone in another room. Seriously, Apple?

The experience is getting worse and worse. And I seriously wonder why isn't it yet another class action – they well deserve it.
Zlib is great. I used to use it all the time ~25 years ago. I don't directly use it much now but only because it has been a long time since I worked on anything where I had to deal with compression myself.

The only time I ever had a problem with it was on a project to implement a virtual CD-ROM drive for a client. The CD-ROM images needed to be compressed, and the client wanted the user of the ripper to be able to choose between more compression and more speed. Zlib supports different compression levels, but the speed increase from less compression wasn't as much as the client wanted.

I found an implementation of zlib that purported to be faster due to hand optimized assembler code. I tested that and it was faster, perhaps enough that the client would find it acceptable. But we would need a commercial license for it, and it was open source.

I contacted the author and he was willing to sell a commercial license to allow us to use it in all our products (generally utility software for Windows and Mac). We had an acceptable price worked out and were about to conclude the deal when he got cold feet. He started thinking that since we wrote Windows software and were a small company, maybe Microsoft would decide to acquire us, and then Microsoft would have a commercial license for his zlib.

He wanted to do a contract where the license would terminate if the company changed ownership. That would require getting my boss (the founder and CEO of the company) involved to work out the details and he didn't have time for that. I tried doubling the amount of money we were offering for the license to see if that would change the library author's mind but it did not.

My boss told me to find another solution, and to find one quickly because this was an urgent project for the client (for a completely stupid reason [1]). I found one.

25 years later I still can't decide if this was the most awesome hack I ever did or the most profoundly shameful thing I've ever written.

I added a slider to the ripper UI that went from 0 to 100. As the ripper ripped sectors, it either stored the sector in the image compressed with zlib at maximum compression level or it stored the sector uncompressed. The slider controlled what percent of the sectors were compressed.

The client was thrilled with this.

[1] The client was a major software company in Japan. Call them X. There was a small software company Y whose products did not overlap with those of X. X thought that a press release for a new product of Y's plagiarized one of X's press releases, were greatly offended by this, and so decided that they wanted to smash Y by directly competing with one of Y's best sellers. That was a virtual CD-ROM, so X told us to put the several other things we were doing for them on hold and quickly provide them with a virtual CD-ROM product and make it better than Y's.
To spell it out further: if the two processed outputs from different accounts are bit-by-bit identical then it is impossible to tell them apart. Ie they cannot contain identifying data to you.

They might still contain data that groups those multiple accounts together though. Eg everyone in X university gets the same watermark.
And the "metaverse" is following in line.
That simply doesn't work for me. Regardless of what options I set, about 60% of the time, if I'm talking on an iphone with airpod pros, and I walk within a few feet of my mac (which does have a connection to the airpods), it will switch from the phone while I'm talking and... there's no reliable way to get that back. In the phone app, clicking 'airpods'... is slow as molasses and sometimes shows them as connected again, but... no sound. Speaker works - the call is still ongoing. If I walk far enough away, sometimes it will reconnect, but not usually. The only near reliable way is to disconnect the airpods in the bluetooth menu, then wait, then reconnect. This is annoying as hell for the person on the call to have to sit through.

Yeah, sorry Apple support... I've only got the ios 15.x from a couple weeks ago. No doubt upgrading to the very latest will definitely solve all extant problems, everything will magically 'just work' and there will be absolutely no new problems introduced. /s

When I describe this to some Apple store folks (2x last fall), they seemed 'shocked' (couldn't tell if it was fake or not). "Wow, never heard of that - no one's ever told me that before, that doesn't seem right. We have some training classes next week you can sign up for".
The "low audio quality after/during conference" problem as I understand it is because of the SCO codec used for Bluetooth microphone stuff (which is lower bandwidth but allows you to speak and listen at the same time). It takes a few seconds for the AirPods to switch back to their usual codec.

Is there a way to fix this without ditching Bluetooth?
Interestingly, this is basically the marxist analysis of the economy, in terms of surplus value.

The rosy side of the equation happens when we look at the price of useful products that can be automated, like fridges or computers, where labourers are much richer in such products than they were 100 years ago. However, the ugly side is visible when looking at the price of products that can't be automated, like land, where labourers are much poorer then they were 100 years ago. The difference is often made up of useless products that could be automated, like cheap fashion or fast food, which marketing keeps pushing as hard as possible.
Why (Enterprise) Software Is Bloated
Tell HN: Hetzner Finland price increase email was incorrect
"We wrote you an email on __ January 2022 about a price change for your servers from the Server Auction. There was a mistake with the database readout, which mistakenly included servers in Finland. But these servers in Finland will not be affected by the increased energy prices.

The price will not change for these servers you are using:

____
____
____

The good news is that the monthly price for these servers will remain the same! We sincerely apologize for the mistake and the confusion and inconvenience it cause.

Kind regards

Hetzner Online"
Mine play a high pitched prolongated shrill ping at the highest volume it can. It happened 3 times before I threw them away and went back to hard wired headphones. It hurt. The first time I reacted quickly to get them out of my ears.

I figure it has something to do with the noise cancelling feature. I also figure it has something to do with me using my AirPods to run, thereby being exposed to moist conditions for prolongated times. I no longer trust headphones like I did.
The replies are actually quite disturbing... this all the way!
I've met plenty of reasonable vegans. I wouldn't consider them to have an eating disorder. I eat meat.

When I've engaged with discussion about this with them (usually because I asked), I've found their arguments personal and convincing.
All valid annoyances, but I really think OP should try using another brand of Bluetooth headphones for a week just to get some perspective of how well AirPods "just work" compared to the competition.

Manually having to re-pair once in every blue moon, one earbud playing while the other isn't, no automatic device switching without having to go through the Settings app everytime, A/V desync, dodgy mic quality, earbuds not waking up correctly when removing them from the case, etc are all part of the non-AirPods Bluetooth experience.

I recently switched to a pair of Sony Bluetooth headphones as I don't like the too-neutral AirPods Pro EQ curve, and while they sound excellent, the UX really leaves a bit to be desired.
I have the same feeling. Actually, I've seen it in real life. A company I consulted a few years ago created lots of "evergreen content." Now, they had a reason to do so, but...

It would be cool if archive.org (or any others) had an API that made it easy and quick to look up "first seen" timestamp for any given URL.
Some of these problems are because of Bluetooth (see complaints in this thread about Sony headphones — a company that many consider to have a similar product design ethos as Apple).

Others are due to bad configuration defaults from Apple. Forcing AirPods to connect to the last device and turning off “pause music on removal” fixes two of the author’s problems.

This isn’t a defense of Apple or AirPods. They obviously don’t “just work.” But there are things that can improve the experience.
Best thing: They are dumb. They don't even need a power supply! They don't have many ways to go wrong.
I'm reminded of Alan Kay's quote on the Mac. Similarly, AirPods might be the first wireless headphones worth criticizing.
This is very good to know. I have all these issues with basically all my wireless headsets and was thinking: I should invest in Apple Airpods to get rid of this mess... Guess I'm not.
The US is super reluctant to shut down anything that looks like a business. It's a capitalist country, they love people going out and making money, especially in finance.

But one thing the US is regulating is money laundering - the US sanctions regime is super-important. So FinCEN in the US and FATF internationally are tightening traceability on the crypto system, wherever it interfaces to actual money. 'Cos they might not be able to stop bitcoin trades, but the interface to actual money is entirely in their purview.

The one thing the US couldn't tolerate about Libra was that Facebook was trying to mess with the money, at systemic scale - and doing so incompetently, which was probably a worse failing.

Regulators and legislators had Libra's number immediately - they knew this species of dumbassery, and they knew that these bitcoin-VC bros were absolutely stupid and arrogant enough to do another 2008 financial crisis all by themselves.
What's the big deal here, Apple?

People have been complaining about BEING CAUSED PAIN BY AIRPODS for YEARS and they are not doing anything about it!

This being the top rated comment here further proves it's a major issue for airpod users. What the fuck, apple?

I am absolutely terrified of that painful sound and will regularly check battery to ensure it won't hit me.
Ahh, creeping dystopia!
Minting CVEs into NFTs
I highly recommend Jabra bluetooth earbuds as a replacement for AirPods. They stay in your ears well, they're comfy, have pretty decent audio quality, good connectivity, good battery life, ANC, wireless charging. If you watch their website, they sell refurbished units for pretty huge discounts. The Elite 65t's may be old but they're still really good and super cheap now: https://www.jabra.com/deals#?pfs=discountedprice-desc&pff=2f...
I feel like this whole thing is driven by corporate interests. It would make sense in a context where a machine has multiple users (or: anyone at work can use their credentials on any workstation), which is not uncommon in a work environment. It seems largely irrelevant for a single-user desktop.

It irritates me that the Linux environment is constantly growing more complex to account for scenarios that are not relevant for me, and it's hard to opt out. That complexity is not zero-cost; I've been hit by many a bug (and have wasted a lot of time working around..) related to things that exist on my system yet serve no real purpose for me.

I guess it's the year of the Linux desktop when it gets corporate enough, and those who want a comfortable free operating system will be looking for alternatives :)
I wish HN had a dark mode option.
Not just a little iffy, it's more like "Nope, even if I get this working, this is not something I can recommend supporting for everyone on the team."

For business, it's a better deal to buy new Yubikeys that support FIDO2 then it is to support GPG on Yubikeys.
Of course not linear. The growth would be exponential. It is impossible for Covid to have existed in humans in 2017. You would need to explain how that exponential growth was invisible for years, and why phylogenetic analysis shows the common ancestry in around September 2019.

2017 and 2019 did indeed have the same prevalence in Europe: 0%.
I generally like the QC20, but I think those were recently discontinued. The mic wasn't the best, but for regular conversations generally didn't have problems if I clipped the mic to a shirt. If it bounced around and rustled on a shirt that wasn't good, but that's going to be a problem with any mic on a wire, I'd think.
If the article wasn't as old as it is (almost eight years), I'd take it as a given that the author deliberately omitted a whole lot of things that might put BTC in a bad light. Considering that even in 2014 the days of whole-number BTC amounting to play money had long been over, I wouldn't be surprised if there was self-censoring due to being personally invested even back then (but I wouldn't have suspected it back then)
> But that's always going to be the case surely with Postgres? If you're running your one DO box config in say US East, every request is going to have that 70-300ms response time for people not in US East region.

Absolutely, but in DO's case you'd be paying $10 / month instead of $186 on Fly since you're accepting the situation for what it is (you have 1 server in 1 location).

> However, if you are just doing reads, then you are going to get a lot of optimisation from having it closer to the user.

Yes but this also comes at an additional cost I think. Their shared CPU + 2 GB PG cluster is $27.40 a month. Based on their pricing page it's not clear on how this would be priced across multiple regions and read-replicas only but if it's like their app servers then it's multiplied by the number of regions, so if you had 6 of them across the world it would be $164.40, then you have your $186 for your app servers for $350.40 a month and you still have high latency writes. We haven't gotten to Redis costs either. Keep in mind this is for a 1 CPU + 2 GB set up too, the costs get multiplied if you need more compute power.

> The problem is though that many applications do writes regardless of what the user is doing (analytics/audit logs and that kind of thing).

I think there's a lot of cases where you'll have a good amount of writes independent of audit lots. For example a chat system, or leaving comments on anything. There's a lot of scenarios where writes are common and this isn't a problem related to DB scaling. Each one of those writes will cause the user to wait a long time (location dependent) since your controller action will wait for your database to return before it sends an HTTP response back to the user. But I do agree there's tons of opportunities to take advantage of read-replicas for reads.
Bitcoin would be a lot less interesting to its proponents if it were to become illegal to interact with the network and every "legitimate business" suddenly can't operate in the US anymore.

Not to mention that it would be extremely easy for the FBI to just, like, find miners and tell them to shut stuff down (at least US miners). A coordinated worldwide effort and bitcoin dissapears overnight.
What bugs are you referring to?

> You'd be no better off with a Sony Headphone that screams in your ear that a device connected, the device is turned on and the battery is almost empty.

I have the WF-1000XM4s. On the iOS headphones app, visiting System and turning off "Notification & Voice Guide" gets rid of the power on and battery level announcements leaving only the connection/disconnection alerts (although I keep all of them on as I find them useful, and wouldn't characterise them as screams).
There IS also a difference (as well) between Dark Mode and pure white text (or close to it) on pure black background. Usually a Dark Mode will have the contrast be slightly less (both text and bg are grays).

Sorry to point this out, but it IS a UI design site, and the person is griping about the minutia problems of an Apple device, so: fair game.
I think OP is right.. since you can also make the claim the member is promoting unhealthy habits to sell a cure.
Yes, I consider it to be a positive use of my time. Here are some benefits:

- keeping aware of latest tech trends
- deep deep knowledge in some of the comments about tech stuff and other stuff. I like to learn so this is helpful
- the ability to shine a spotlight on things I think are interesting, either what I've written (occasionally) or what others have written
- the monthly jobs post is helpful for keeping an eye on the tech hiring market

You can definitely waste time on HN, just as you can on some of the other sites you mentioned. I occasionally find myself cycling between HN, Twitter, LinkedIn and email, waiting for that hit of dopamine with an interesting comment or reply. When that happens, it's time to go to bed, go for a walk, or read a book.
Scott Gottlieb is also a former FDA commissioner and an MD, not just a Pfizer board member.
>This isn't a problem in modern crypto hardware wallets

Which ones?
Meanwhile I’ve given them up since the charging contacts have gotten so bad at reliably touching. Most of the time I’ll pick them up and they’re dead or I’ll spend several minutes (not exaggerating) putting them in the case and taking them out to get them to activate properly.

No amount of cleaning or other finagling really helps.

And this has happened to me in the very first AirPods and the AirPods Pro.

I’m not sure how this bad design survives but fool me three times…
I turn off auto switching, it causes too many issues. Otherwise for me they have worked better than any other wireless headphone / earbuds.

They need double the battery life and they would be basically perfect for my use, I am hopeful ver 3's will do this along with maybe some crazy move away from bluetooth which I still believe is the root of all the issues that even Apple can't fully solve without just making some different wireless protocol.
> The pursuit of captial accumulation is always dependent on the exploitation of someone's labour / time somewhere.

So what's wrong here? Are not capitalists exploiting the labour and time of others to accumulate capital? It's self-evident that they do.

Maybe you think that you can send just send the top 50 capitalists to the planet Mars and out comes a terraformed planet? Simply by their immense power of innovation?
The cormobidty of keeping a service alive and renewing it by forcing more and more unwanted features on the users is a fact. Every manager wants to parade around the new shiny thing without listening to their development team. It shows that you are not a webdev because you don't know the inner workings of a big tech corp if you really think it's just some indie devs that care about speed and optimization. The devs very much care.
Greens vs. ‘beefatarians’: Europeans go to war over their dinner
Without it, tax money still transfers to publishers, only via a less direct route. It funds the research that produces content, without which the publishers would have nothing of value to sell. I really don't like the high APC practice, but if tax money is going to the publishers anyway then I have a little bit of tolerance for slightly more going there to add significant value with open access.
Yes, very annoying! I once wrote a script to estimate the publication date based on archive.org first appearance, for an entire site for a blogger who had nit put a date on any page.

Might be worth turning it into a per page browser extension...
It feels really good to hear that the expensive models have mostly the same flaws as the cheap ones. So the people who tell me it must be my 40€ anker models, because theirs always work fine probably just don't use them as much, but at the same time, spending more money would not have given me better functionality (except noise canceling).

I guess the real thing to take away is, that cable is still the most reliable option (and also saves a lot on battery!)
I regularly get downvoted for being humorous. I don’t care, life is too short.
San Francisco is scaring away the tech crowd
That wasn't the case here - at least the flaggers looked legit to me, and they had long pre-histories as normal users. The thing to understand about flagging is that people mostly flag stuff when they see it on the front page and they don't feel it's good enough to be there. Different users have opposing opinions about what content counts as 'good' on HN—so some will upvote an article while others will indignantly flag it ("WTF is this doing on HN?") once they see it. The front page is a composite of this struggle between upvotes and flags, based on different tastes. It's actually a rather intense struggle because frontpage space is so scarce (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). But it's mostly not manipulation—it's just that to most people, their own taste about what's 'good' is so obvious to them that for someone else to have a different taste feels impossible—it simply has to be disingenuous!

I have a theory which I didn't post yesterday because it's speculation—but it's speculation that fits my intuition about how HN works, so maybe I'll share it in case anyone's interested.

I speculate that some users upvoted Bolt's post because they thought it would be funny to see "How Bolt does fraud detection better" in a cage match with Stripe's "Improved fraud prevention" on the front page at the same time, as briefly happened—see #5 and #6 here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418212112/https://news.ycom.... In other words, classic internet drama.

The two titles are so similar that I wonder if Bolt had seen Stripe's post on the front page and rushed their article out to challenge it with that baity title. (If you look at https://web.archive.org/web/20180418211511/https://blog.bolt..., you'll see that the article itself had a completely different title.) That would certainly have been clever! Either that or it was just a coincidence, but either way, some users would have seen both, would have found the collision hilarious, and would have upvoted for that reason.

Since that has nothing to do with article quality, you would expect other users to then see the article on the front page, go "WTF is this doing on HN", and flag it. This is standard HN dynamics: baity title -> upvotes -> annoyed users -> flags. That's how the front page operates all day.

If this is what happened, then Bolt only made HN's front page in the first place because Stripe's article was already there—which would add considerable irony to yesterday's antics.
https://archive.li/OfcAq
I wonder how messy this can get. Say you don't do some proper maintenance like letting the brakes get a bit worn - is the car able even able to notice decreased braking performance? And then does the decrease go from normal wear to a maintenance issue that then transfers responsibility to the owner?
Doesn't even mention Roko's Basilisk, so pretty safe.
> a $40 pair of Tozo NC7's that I bought for a backup. The Tozo's get way more use, to the point where I regret buying the AirPods

Thanks for the recommendation... I almost lost one of my airpods in 18" of snow last week when snowblowing, and I decided it's not a good idea to wear my airpods when snowblowing anymore.
I like to make lists of things I need and want to get done. Just in a tiny notebook I keep with me. Anytime I think of something I write it down. Then later when I’m sitting around unproductive I look at it and find something that I feel like doing.
Where are all the software startups?