skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For all the people commenting "How would they know?", AirTags are scannable by NFC readers and identify themselves as an AirTag.

You can test this yourself by downloading the NFC Tools app on your iPhone (or one for Android) and doing a read on the AirTag.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nfc-tools/id1252962749
If you stick it in the middle, it’s out of range. Unless you have some super powered scanner perhaps
And Insurances
I still buy CD's. The reason is that my family enjoys going out and seeing non mainstream, indie bands. After each performance, the band always has some CDs to sell, of their own and often for their friends as well.

I have asked some musicians bluntly: What's the best way to buy your music, so that you get the biggest cut of the money? The answer is always: "Buy the CD right here."

The CD's go home, get ripped onto a network drive, and converted to MP3's that fit onto a flash drive that gets plugged into the car stereo.
There are many civilized people that are disgusted by those governments (such as e.g. India, China, North Korea and Iran) that are unwilling to even condemn Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine.
You’d have to admit to breaking this rule in order to point out any baggage misplacement.
> Gosh, I don't know, how about literally all of the problems that 2FA solves in the first place?

Well, it isn't solving this one. Option to opt out would be nice.

> aren't capable of keeping track of a physical device for more than N weeks?

Bit ignorant of you. They could be just plainly stolen by someone else. A piece of rag working as a tent doesn't exactly have best physical security...

> I'm not unsympathetic to the problems of the homeless ant the burdens 2FA entails, but I'm also not willing to ignore the huge problems the 2FA solves, and realizing there will often be a tradeoff between making it very difficult to hack into accounts and making it easy for people with mental and other problems access their accounts.

It's not either or.
>All carriers, switching to airplane mode is a federal requirement on U.S. domestic flights.

How many people do you think actually do this. (I mostly do, when I remember.)

If it's actually a problem, the FAA would be dealing with it other than hoping passengers individually pressed all the right buttons.
:-)

Glad you enjoyed it!
I would love to learn more from actual Ukrainians. I have spoken with a few. It’s heart breaking how ridiculous every corner of the Internet can be for one topic or another.

You think you find a sanctuary and then… more of the same.
At the least this gives them some poor counterargument if someone says they were able to track their lost bag with an Airtag.

"What do you mean, you have an Airtag in your bag? We don't have any guarantees for baggage containing banned materials."
I agree with this. Mostly because I had a poor experience with one of their gate agents recently. They forced me to check my hand luggage because it was 2kg overweight. They don't uniformly enforce the hand luggage weight limit, their employees get to pick and choose passengers at the gate. The gate agent scoffed at me putting an AirTag in the bag that they were making me check.
Need the ability to program them to not transmit for X hours. Problem solved.
> I guess in its current implementation the ruby code is the code that ends the loop

I don't think so. It looks like the rc code generates the REXX code, which generates the Ruby code, which generates the Rust code....

The only thing that separates Ruby is that it's formatted into ASCII art, although it's not clear if the REXX output is similarly formatted. I can't say I've run through the cycle.
For me it's not so much any of the physical properties of the machine in question (though those can be nice in their own way), but more of an intangible sense of "realness" that's difficult to attain with an emulator. It may just be placebo effect but I think that long time computer users can probably pick up on subtle differences, and that likely shapes the experience more than is often thought.

Certainly, pulling out my PowerBook G3 Pismo is a significantly different experience than firing up SheepShaver or qemu_ppc running the same operating system.
But then why is inflight wifi a thing?
Many years ago, I had tried developing a font style with each glyph resembling a blade of grass. The constraints were strongly enforced, so the optimized glyphs no longer resemble the original shapes.
https://imgur.com/a/8jTf7yn
AFAIK you are still allowed to use Bluetooth and wifi in all phases of flight which is what the AirTag uses (ble).

If you aren’t then someone should tell United because I stayed connected to their network watching a movie all the way from cruise altitude to the gate.
This is going to have the opposite of their intended effect. People are now going to be more interested than ever in AirTags precisely for luggages thanks to them.
Oooooh!!! Very clever. :)
I do see how they'd find it bothersome. Imagine what it must be like that the situation before was: "Oh no my baggage is lost!" "Oooh that's rough! We'll let ya know!" then nothing.

Where now what it might be like is: "Oh no my baggage is lost at XYZ airport at your terminal" and that accountability is somewhat forced now because they can't just say it wasn't found or it is 'in transit' when it really isn't.
Uppercase is readable.
Well the fuselage does already, but the cargo bays are a faraday in a faraday ?
> I don't worry about any of this with my RSS feed.

Where do you host your blog?

If all you are doing is consuming blogs then yeah RSS is a lot easier than choosing a Mastodon instance.

But if all you want is to just consume Mastodon, you can do that with RSS too. Almost every public profile in Mastodon has an RSS feed that's easy to discover (and most auto-discovery tools will do it for you).

The complication, just as with Blogs come from when you want to post. With RSS you still have to pick a blog host. Do you pick one of the big name cloud hosts like Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, or Medium.com? Do you pick a smaller host or self-host? If that, which blogging software or static site generator do you want?

Mastodon federated at the exact "same" granularity as RSS, it's just that generally more people assume they will post on Mastodon today (and more people have private/semi-private feeds) rather than just only consume public feeds. Choosing an instance is exactly like choosing a blog host. There are the big giant instances that are easier to get started but you "own" less control of them. There are the small community instances. There are instance hosting providers. There are plenty of opportunities to self-host if you have the technical determination. There are even multiple software options to consider: Mastodon, Pleroma, Mastodon-forks like Hometown, Pixelfed, and many more (those are just the ones off the top of my head that federate with the ActivityPub "Fediverse").

Trusting an instance admin is just like trusting a blog hosting provider. They have "your data" because you've asked them to host it for you.
This is a fun side project. What I'm curious to know is: has any blind person actually tried any of Alexander Fakoó's scripts?

The reason I'm curious is that there's something funny that happens when sighted people create tactile technologies for the blind: they often don't consult with blind people at all. There's something appealing about the idea of theoretically assistive technology that leads to very impractical systems like Boston Line Type [1] or "braille displays" that have only one single character, that's 10x the normal size. It's easy to assume that if you can technically feel something then that's sufficient for blind people, but the history of blind writing systems shows us that's not enough.

This particular idea seems more promising than other efforts (e.g. Moon), because bumps seem to be easier to feel than shaped figures. It can also be written using a regular slate and stylus. However, modern Braille [2] is full of contractions to reduce the number of characters, and even then braille books are massive and heavy compared to their print counterparts. Doubling the width of individual letters and forgoing contractions really limits the utility to very small snippets of text, and learning an entirely new alphabet just for that doesn't seem very practical.

The author's website [3] is full of promises that "anyone" can read the writing system, but it also says "Developer is Alexander Fakoó, who has learned to read the Braille Writing optically". That's great, but sight-reading Braille is a whole different medium from tactile reading. Personally, I used to be able to read grade 1 braille by sight, but could never read by touch.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_line_letter

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Braille

[3]: https://fakoo.de/en/fakoo.html
Maybe the backyard is in the north side and in deep shadow from buildings most of the day...
in this analogy we have paid 2 billion for a run down Saskatoon house
From my very little experience, you can search for anyone in any instance as long as it's federating with the whole network.

The actual problem is... to know the person. There are no more suggestions from algorithms and no more million-followers accounts that you usually heard of, you need to dig to find people you find interesting.
These devices beacon every few seconds to announce their location.
Yes, if you use Solana you should be aware that the chain very regularly has serious downtime. Ethereum gas fees can spike but generally there has never been downtime.
AirTags are scannable as an NFC and they identify themselves as AirTag.
Just one more way in which being on a lower rung of the socioeconomic ladder is a self-reinforcing situation.

In this case it’s not even a criticism of Google. I don’t see an easy solution here that couldn’t introduce a more gameable system for hackers.
"What would it take for artificial intelligence to make real progress?"
Classic case of missing the forest for the trees.

I can appreciate the author is trying to highlight current challenges in an attempt to start a discussion, but having witnessed the very real progress ML has made in just the last 10 years, it's hard not to read that subtitle as a bit inflammatory. With every new breakthrough - or even moderate improvement - the goalposts of what constitutes ML/AI progress are shifted just far enough to buy the naysayers just enough plausible deniability that they aren't immediately dismissed when they point out that "sure, ML has given us Siri/Alexa, StableDiffusion, AlphaZero, image recognition and self-driving cars that don't immediately crash, but what about cancer diagnosis and AGI?"

I wonder what the world of the Cambrian Explosion would look like to those naysayers if they had been around at the time. "Look at all these evolutionary dead-ends. Locomotion? Nervous systems? Skeletons? All this trial and error will never amount to anything. We need to make real progress."
Red hat was a THIRTY FOUR BILLION DOLLAR acquisition. For a company that dresses up free software for enterprises.

No way Red Hat is staying like some gilded ivory tower of open source purity. They are a brand name for selling services and licenses, so if Red Hat still looks after ... wait that was only 3 years ago? Well anyway if Red Hat is still recognizable after that acquisition in some non-IBM way then IBM is showing enormous restraint.

The previous 10 years at IBM were "buy company, attach Websphere to the front of their product names, sell, abandon product". Still better than Computer Associates software, but not much better.
So inconvenient for them to do what they were contracted to do: fly you and your luggage from A to B. Can’t they just get free money?
Assume I'm talking about something deeper than generic HN cliches. ;)

Pushing an implementation cutover by +6 months, and changing it from a hard to a soft date, because it has so many unresolved issues, incomplete APIs, and angry developers seems a fair definition of "clusterfuck."
If it is not connectable you won't locate your luggage either
I eagerly await US carriers adding this as yet another contrived upsell.
How does that support the claim that young growing trees release more CO2 than they capture?
I’m team “over” as far as toilet paper goes :), but the best argument I ever heard for TP rolled “under” was that in this configuration your cat couldn’t unspool the entire roll onto the floor.
if its out of range, its not much use as an airtag. circular logic
Impressive how readable that still is, and how good our brains are at filling blanks, but you wouldn't want to rely on it. I'm not sure I can parse || as an x reliably for example. The uppercase alone works, lowercase is pretty challenging.
That's fair enough I guess. In the case of bluetooth I don't see an issue.
Yea till they add 2FA too...
Heh...Reminds me when I was in school doing a report using the leather bound Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911 that we still had in the book shelves. I still wonder how accurate it was. It was a history report so maybe more so than later editions as it was closer to the event? Who knows...
It still beacons. And sticking it in the middle will attenuate the beaconing by quite a bit (per my own testing), which defeats the purpose.
Isn't everything on the page in a 3x3 grid?
I have an AirTag which turns off during flights and powers itself on after 24h. Hah. Compliance!
Oh, you sound like exactly a new fediverse user.
As much as I love bitmapped fonts I just don't know if there's one that supports unicode yet and since I work internationally it's kind of a sticking point in wanting to go all the way to using them in my terminal or whatever, even though it looks incredibly crisp. Is there anything like that out there which at least covers characters in latin alphabets with diacritics and cyrillic?
“ Lufthansa claims that the transmission function needs to be turned off during flight when in checked luggage, just as is required for cell phones, laptops, etc.”

On my phone, turning on airplane mode seems to disable the cell and wifi radios (with wifi able to be toggled back on) but Bluetooth defaults to staying on.
That's what I'd assumed, but I'm trying to use the most charitable interpretation of what their concern might be. I don't think it's an EM issue -at all-. I think it may be an accountability issue and the inconvenience of having to fly back individual parcels for no added profit in the face of proof.
> it just can’t transmit, which of course renders it useless

Because, what, it's impossible to program things like this to start transmitting after an N-hour radio silence?
It’s not reasonable to implement something like that. Any gap would need to be <0.5cm in size in order for it to work on a 2.4GHz Bluetooth signal.

Considering that half of the passengers are likely forgetting to put their device in airplane mode - and they’re all using Bluetooth headphones, there is effectively zero risk to the airplane.
By the way, these days there are wallets insured by Lloyd's which is a good of a guarantee as FDIC
Thanks for your thoughts.

My impression is that it's fairly easy to move around within Google. Was that your experience?

I realize that the only way I will learn if I like SRE is to actually do it. And it feels less risky (I'd probably be moving across the country) if I know that I won't be "stuck" in a role that I don't enjoy.
I just recently dragged my bin of 100s of CDs from the garage and ripped them all on to a server on my network. I think I may stick with it. It's gotten me buying a lot of physical CDs again, plus a little portable CD rom drive, since I no longer even own anything that can play them.

I honestly am not 100% sure why I like this so much more. Spotify can do the same thing. You can "heart" albums and then they show up in your "library", but there's just something that makes that so clunky to deal with. When you open the app, you get radio stations and podcasts. I love opening an app and just seeing album covers. I dunno, maybe I'm crazy.
Do they ban wristwatches with the same battery inside of them‽
Apple must fight this and get the regulation clarified. Ridiculous.
Bingo! It hadn't occurred to me until just now, but you bet your butt there'll be an Airtag, a Trackr, and a Tile in my luggage next time.
The purpose of that sentence was to bring us back to the issue at hand. GP was essentially saying (as I interpreted it) that we should focus on the root causes of homelessness instead of worrying about day-to-day concerns like how the homeless access email. I think we should do both, especially when the latter would be relatively simple.

But also, yes, there are in fact many times when it's important to consider the needs of different groups of people! That isn't to say that the ends always justify the means—it depends on what the means are—but reasonable accommodations should be made where possible.
Definitely, my experience and opinion doesn't boil down to all HN, but here is my take. A lot of hacks, the reports after suggest they were ignoring industry best practices that were relatively easy to implement and cheap. Here, I would point the blame. But for sure, if the hack was routed in some crazy new route to exploit software, you just can't protect against, so I wouldnt be so quick to assign blame. But I think another key different is, infrastructure is owned by companies who have engineers and IT whose job it is to run it securely. I think the proper equivalent for the home analogy is, you have an alarm system that was turned on, but didn't alarm when someone broke in. But then we would place the fault on ADT or Simplisafe or whoever.
> How many people do you think actually do this. (I mostly do, when I remember.)
I'm EU based and not flying every day but any flight at all it's always in airplane mode. It's like a seatbelt on a car for me, it's just done.

I'm biased but I would like to believe most people remember,
Contrast with this analysis published in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27364-8.epdf

"Historical records of Atlantic hurricane activity, extending back to 1851, show increasing activity over time, but much or all of this trend has been attributed to lack of observations in the early portion of the record. Here we use a tropical cyclone downscaling model driven by three global climate analyses that are based mostly on sea surface temperature and surface pressure data. The results support earlier statistically-based inferences that storms were undercounted in the 19th century, but in contrast to earlier work, show increasing tropical cyclone activity through the period, interrupted by a prominent hurricane drought in the 1970s and 80 s that we attribute to anthropogenic aerosols. In agreement with earlier work, we show that most of the variability of North Atlantic tropical cyclone activity over the last century was directly related to regional rather than global climate change. Most metrics of tropical cyclones downscaled over all the tropics show weak and/or insigniﬁcant trends over the last century, illustrating the special nature of North Atlantic tropical cyclone climatology."

Ditto:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5

"Atlantic hurricanes are a major hazard to life and property, and a topic of intense scientific interest. Historical changes in observing practices limit the utility of century-scale records of Atlantic major hurricane frequency. To evaluate past changes in frequency, we have here developed a homogenization method for Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency over 1851–2019. We find that recorded century-scale increases in Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency, and associated decrease in USA hurricanes strike fraction, are consistent with changes in observing practices and not likely a true climate trend. After homogenization, increases in basin-wide hurricane and major hurricane activity since the 1970s are not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s. We suggest internal (e.g., Atlantic multidecadal) climate variability and aerosol-induced mid-to-late-20th century major hurricane frequency reductions have probably masked century-scale greenhouse-gas warming contributions to North Atlantic major hurricane frequency."

EDIT: Additional citation.
I did not expect anyone on HN suggesting sticking it deep into the luggage so it's out of range.
I have no opinion on Gladwell, as I haven’t read any of his books, but I swear those 3 things seem to be covered in almost every “self-help” book I’ve read. I don’t want to blame the authors either… but it seems like everyone is getting their water from the same well (thinking fast and slow?).

I’m always down to read an authors interpretation or experience with the concepts… but I’d be lying if I said I haven’t found it harder and harder to push through.

You’re totally on point though. A lot of things are simple and obvious but only when noticed or in hindsight.
Looks like the 5x5 example doesn’t even bother recreating lowercase letters.
Thanks for sharing, enjoyed this. I tend to approach retro computing stuff from a nostalgia perspective, sort of assuming there's not much practical reason for using it. So it's refreshing to hear all the good qualities of the thing in its own right, from someone who isn't just reliving old memories.

The modern world of incessant trivial updates (interrupting what you were doing), surveillance, distractions, etc. is a bit sad, a far cry from lovingly engineered products intended to improve your life. Hopefully the market will curtail some of this BS in time, once we all collectively get sick enough of it.
Perhaps an opt-out version for homeless users?
Nope. Take a look at lowercase j.
The uppercase version is kind of ok. I'm not a fan of the 9 or the D, but I think you'd quickly get used to that. What's even more impressive is that if you consider just uppercase and numbers, it's a 3x3 font.
My heart breaks for them. They have to do the job they should have been doing in the first place.
I think a popular solution to this kind of problem is docker compose.
> The idea that you want, need, should or will tie your identity to a phone number where people can always reach you is long outdated.

Yeah I have no idea why phones still use numbers. It would be so easier if same address for e-mail worked for voice, just add some DNS records that point at my phone provider to domain and done.

Then again, spam calls would probably be so much worse...
ACH is undoubtedly covered under regulation E. $50 (waived by many banks) and some time is the most that can be taken from you.
Only in context. Letters like B, D, E, G, O, M and W are just literal blobs of pixels without any indication of what the actual letter might be. You can only tell C and E apart if you know what the other one looks like. Even worse for lower case. See x for example.
There are many jobs at which I would personally underperform out of sheer boredom, possibly inventing ways to stay entertained. Army Infantry, cashier, call center worker, landscaper, night watchman, and hundreds of others where well over half of the population would outperform me.
That doesn't make sense to me, surely it's always easier (by whatever little amount) if it's away from the wall ('over itself' as you say I think), whichever side it is, and whichever hand you use dominantly?
Delta has been providing live updates of luggage locations for years without an issue.

They're claiming it's due to radio transmission anyways.
I get that it's inconvenient and could be used nefariously. I'm not sure what kinds of worker protections airline staff have in Europe, but I can see why it might be problematic that I'm tracking the employee as they drive their van full of lost luggage to my hotel.

Still, it's my stuff, so I'm going to keep putting AirTags in every bag I travel with. I'm sorry, but.. what are they going to do? Ban me from the airline?
Processing it a bit more, particularly on the blutooth only 'mode' I think they are just creating a backup defense for luggage logistic nightmares.