AmericanChopper

This is the main reason I never plan on buying one. I really hate all of the car-driven-by-a-computer functionality. I don’t want to drive a car where an internal computer can take over control of the vehicle, I especially don’t want one where the computer in charge of the car can connect to a network, I never want to drive one that has a mandatory always on connection. I also really want buttons, dials and switches, and think a yoke is such a stupid idea for a road car…

Plenty of ICE vehicles are starting to get these features as well, but I don’t buy those cars either, and all of the half decent EVs seem to have (nearly) all of those features I hate, configured in the worst way I could possibly imagine.

> consumers are never satisfied because they have wrong expectations

Consumers are satisfied with buying ICE vehicles, which is why 90-something percent of them do just that when buying a new vehicle. You’re not saying anything about consumers expectations here, what’s happening is (most of them) just they don’t want what EVs are selling. You can’t be wrong about wanting something, we’re all allowed to choose what it is that we want for ourselves.

This is just the EV version of “the world would be much nicer if everybody thought like me” argument.

If you want people to choose one thing, then you want it to be better than or at least as good as the alternatives. The idea that EVs need to be comparable to ICE vehicles isn’t just some silly argument, it’s literally the choice that consumers are faced with if they want to buy a car. Even if longer range travel is only 1% of what consumers will do with their car (which I’m sure is a number you just made up), why would you get a product that only meets 99% of your needs, when you can get the competing product that meets 100% of them?

I agree that it usually doesn’t fly with clients, unless you already have a good relationship and track record with them. But I don’t think it’s supposed to be a trick. On the client side somebody either has some funding for a project and needs to know whether you can deliver within the budget, or they need to go and apply for some funding to complete the project, but in either case the deliverable they’re committing to provide in exchange for this funding is the completed project, not a scope for the project.

From that perspective the “discovery project” is just a much worse version of “contact us for pricing”, it’s “pay us $5,000-$20,000 or more for pricing”. Paying a lot of money to find out how much something will cost, or what you’re going to get from it (if anything) just isn’t a valuable proposition to a lot of people, and doesn’t fit in nicely with their existing business processes.

I’m not a big fan of the “my opinion is fact” or “your opinion is wrong” headlines. They can be mildly funny in the right context, but it’s been done so much that they’re just a bit boring now. I’m especially bored of seeing this convention in conference presentation titles.

I think it’s an excellent comment, and I’m very happy with it.

I’m happy for people to keep writing M$. It’s a great way to quickly identify comments to scroll past.

To say that some quality is embedded in a culture isn’t even close to the same as saying all people originating from that culture possess that quality. The extent to which India’s (racist) caste system is embedded in its culture is hardly up for serious debate, the influence it has in India has basically been proven by science at this point.

> https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/the-caste-system-has...

A hypothetical claim that all Indians are racist would clearly be absurd, but it’s hardly surprising to find a group of Indians practicing something that is openly part of their native culture.

Most tremendously wealthy people don’t want to be known for being tremendously wealthy. Unless being known for being tremendously wealthy is a part of your wealth accumulating strategy, the attention it brings is almost entirely negative. Being tremendously wealthy without millions of people constantly chirping about clawing as much of it away from you as possible, or demanding an explanation from you every time you wipe your ass is a far better outcome, and most people who are savvy enough to become billionaires are savvy enough to figure that out pretty quickly.

I’d say it stops being a useful descriptor at that point. If any activity that a person can possibly find rewarding in any way can be addictive, then everything is addictive. Because for any activity that you can possibly think of, you’ll find definitely find somebody who likes doing it.

By this criteria, I’m sure you’ll be able to find at least one eating glass addict somewhere in the world. But if we can stretch the definition to include glass as an addictive substance, then it kinda stops meaning anything at all.

And when I say these innovative addiction diagnoses are controversial, I mean within the community of clinical experts, which they are.

I never suggested shame as an effective treatment. But refusing to acknowledge the reality of the situation is not an effective way to discuss the problem. Obesity is the result of lifestyle choices, and those choices do impose their costs on everybody in society. Which is why I would be very happy (and I would suggest everybody should be happy) if an effective way to address the problem was discovered.

The fact that an obese person is harming other people as well as themselves might be an uncomfortable truth for them to hear. But ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.

Well the food addiction or sedentariness addiction diagnosis are a lot more controversial than a heroin addiction diagnosis, though I can see how they have some things in common. I think labelling any observable manifestation of poor impulse control as a medical addiction is more of a social trend than a legitimate scientific discovery.

The bigger difference though is that we all eat food, and for most of us includes at least some absolutely delicious food that would be incredibly unhealthy to eat in large quantities. We’re all (more or less) exposed to the “addictive substance”, it’s just some people have the ability to deprive ourselves constantly indulging that impulse, while others don’t. We don’t however, need to take small doses of heroin every day to survive.

I would say that your suggestion that grown adults should be absolved of responsibility for their own decisions is actually a quintessentially childish idea. The fact that you are so deeply offended by any suggestion otherwise is even more childish.

I don’t think being addicted to laziness and having a glutinous appetite is exactly comparable to say, being addicted to heroin. But yes, I do think addicts should receive treatment, just as I think obese patients should (and do) receive treatment for all the diseases they end up with. But addicts, like the obese, impose many of the costs of their own bad life decisions onto others. It’s what you’d call a negative externality, and if some magic treatment came along to fix drug addiction, I would also be very happy to see that negative externality addressed.

Health care costs is how individual people’s terrible lifestyle decisions end up impacting everybody else. If somebody wants to live some awful unhealthy lifestyle it really should be their own choice to do so. Except for the fact that it drives up everybody’s insurance premiums, and in countries where the government either partially or entirely subsidises healthcare costs, it gives the government an outright moral mandate to start nannying everybody’s health choices.

If somebody wants to live an obese lifestyle, I really think that’s up to them. But I’d be much happier about it if it didn’t cost me so much money.

I was going to comment basically this. Everything you could possibly want to know about how LI systems work is documented by the vendors online. It’s really just network interfaces that forward intercepted traffic to aggregators.

The thing about CSPs is their core business is edge routing. A majority of their core assets are going to be internet connected routers, and you’d actually be able to collect more data by owning some of those. The additional information you can get from LI (and the reason you often need a clearance to work on LI systems) is information about who law enforcement are running intercepts on.

Also, LI is just a regulatory cost centre for CSPs. It’s hilarious (or scary, depending on your perspective) how poorly those systems are maintained, and how often the break.

And publishing software that decodes encrypted Switch ROMs is protected speech and not a copyright violation. Releasing it accompanied by a statement that said something to the effect of "here's some software that decodes encrypted Switch ROMs which you can use to pirate Switch games" makes you a party to the copyright violation. Just like I'm legally allowed to provide you with a hammer, but if I accompany that with the statement "here's something you can use to murder your neighbour" all of a sudden I'm a party to a crime.

The main subject of the article seems to have come to an amicable agreement with Nintendo, but for all of the “copyright infringement enabling tools” that do get forcibly taken down, the way to avoid that just seems so obvious to me. The emulators, or DRM bypassing tools, or whatever, all seem to get tripped up by the marketing. Releasing emulators or DRM cracks is protected speech and not a copyright violation, but releasing the same tool and saying “this is a tool for enabling copyright violation, here’s how you use it to commit copyright violations” just makes you a party to the subsequent copyright violations that it might be used for. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s basically how a lot of them get taken down. Just releasing your tools without all the legally dubious explanation seems to be such an obvious risk avoidance strategy.

You really have to be doing huge levels of throughput before you start to struggle with scaling MySQL or Postgres. There’s really not many workloads that actually require strict ACID guarantees _and_ produce that level of throughput. 10-20 years ago I was running hundreds to thousands of transactions per second on beefy Oracle and Postgres instances, and the workloads had to be especially big before we’d even consider any fancy scaling strategies to be necessary, and there wasn’t some magic tipping point where we’d decide that some instance had to go distributed all of a sudden.

Most of the distributed architectures I’ve seen have been led by engineers needs (to do something popular or interesting) rather than an actual product need, and most of them have had issues relating to poor attempts to replicate ACID functionality. If you’re really at the scale where you’re going to benefit from a distributed architecture, the chances are eventual consistency will do just fine.

This only matters if it's important to you that everybody believe the same truths, which I would suggest shouldn't be important to you. Some people will believe one thing, another group will believe a different thing, and those disagreements can't always be reasoned away. Which should be a perfectly fine outcome, it shouldn't cause you any distress that people believe things that you think aren't true, and vice versa.

Trying to boil this down to the quality of the faith is also a rather immature response. To frame things this way isn't to accept that there are different viewpoints other than your own, it's just to assert a claim that your viewpoints are correct, and that while other view points might exist, they are wrong. Your assessment of what is a good faith or what is a bad faith argument likely has little to do with the quality of the arguments involved, and instead will somehow miraculously align with your own world view at a rather implausible rate.

If you want to argue with people in public, the only thing you should really be concerned about is stating your best case. If you do that then you've achieved the only mature goals that you could possibly attach to public arguing, and whether people are convinced by it or not is up to them.

Scottish history would be far too dangerous to teach today. Undermines the narrative that all white people have a detestable history of colonisation and exploitation.

The history curriculum I was taught in school was terribly boring and politicised. Other than the mandatory WW2 coverage, the _only_ other topics we studied were the horribleness of European colonisation, like Gandhi and Apartheid, ect… I was rather surprised to grow up and find out how interesting the topic actually was.

I’m not sure I would call it a dark pattern, it’s the stated goal of the product. To remove as many expenses as possible, and turn as many things into paid options as they can. They don’t make any effort to hide this and the RyanAir CEO talks about it publicly all the time.

They’re no different from a lot of other budget airlines. The seat pitch is as low as it can go, the seats are cheap and uncomfortable regardless of pitch, and everything other than the seat is a paid extra.

I had to take a reasonably long Air Asia flight last year, and the worst part about it was they woke you up every two hours by turning all the lights on and making a very long announcement that the duty free cart was going to spend the next hour trying to sell liquor and terrible perfume to every passenger.

However on that same flight, one of the paid options was for an incredibly cheap add on that gave you priority checkin, priority boarding, priority immigration, and priority baggage. It was like $10 or something, insanely good value.

We don't have to speculate about what they might do, as "the whole flight is economy class" is basically the budget airline business model (even though some of them have some flights that have a premium class). Apparently you can run an airline where the entire plane is cheap seating, and the outcome is the level of comfort and service provided by budget carriers.

When airlines were first created there was no classes at all, there was also more space and comfort for everybody. Also, the ticket prices for those seats were so high that any ticket was just as unaffordable as first class would be today. The creation of economy class is the reason economy class flyers can indulge in the luxury of flight at all.

The only no-class commercial flights that operate today are the budget carriers, and they have the least comfortable offerings amongst all of the airlines.

If the data was publicly leaked then this argument would have some merit. But it wasn’t, the only people who could have accessed these passwords were insiders, and those passwords were used to protect data that many of them would have access to anyway.

There is no evidence any unauthorised party gained access to any private data as a result of this incident. There is no evidence that any authorised party misused data as a result of this incident. A “breach” that involves no unauthorised access, and no misuse is not a breach.

A control failure occurred, and it was remedied in the most appropriate way possible.

It’s a reasonable possibility, it’s also a reasonable possibility that nobody did.

But somebody incidentally seeing them, and maybe, maybe not recognising they were passwords is not a breach. Somebody intentionally misusing them would be, and I haven’t seen anything to suggest there’s a reasonable expectation that that occurred.

A reasonable expectation is also not the standard of proof I’d generally like to see from a government attempting to enforce a penalty.

If this control failure allowed malicious insiders to access private data, and misuse people’s personal accounts, then a data breach would have actually occurred. But I haven’t seen any suggestion that this happened, only references to the possibility that it might have happened. I’m really just thinking like somebody who believes that if the government is going to punish you for something, then I believe the event you’re being punished for should have actually occurred, and also that they should be able to prove it occurred.

If reference to standard security policies formed part of the basis of this decision (as the article states), then the harm that you’re trying to contrive into existence here also has no merit. There is no framework of information security that allows for a password to permanently retain its value as a secret keeping tool. Conventionally passwords have only retained their value for a set period of time, and even the most modern security standards for managing secrets requires you to rotate them at even the most remote possibility that they were exposed. The idea that a password rotation has harmed Facebook users, and the implication that their password was a valuable asset that they could reasonably expect to retain its value forever is quite ridiculous.

Sure, and I don’t disagree that it’s a bad situation for Meta to have created. It’s being fined for “potentially violating” a statute that I find objectionable. Being breached implies that some harm befell consumers, this article (and the others I’ve read about this incident) don’t make any reference to an actual harm being uncovered.

Even by the broadest possible definition of a breach, this is still just a control failure rather than a breach. The control that failed might have made it possible for Meta employees to perpetrate a breach, but the article makes no mention of that happening, or provides any suggestion that there is evidence that it might have happened.

At at least one point in my career, I have also accidentally mishandled password data (I accidentally leaked them into a log one time - well one time that I know of at least). When I did that I caused a control to fail, and I caused a security incident that required follow up remediation work (including password resets and disclosure), which is exactly what happened here. But I did not cause a data breach to occur. I struggle to image a world where I could have caused my employer to be fined $102M for that incident, and for that to be deemed a data breach, when there is no evidence (presented or referenced in this article at least) that a breach ever occurred. If I leave the office and forget to lock the door, I've caused a control failure. But if nobody comes in to rob us, then I haven't caused a robbery or a breach or anything else like that to occur, even if a typical security policy might require me to lock the door before leaving.

The creativity required to come to this conclusion doesn't do anything to improve the credibility of the GDPR, which from an outside perspective really doesn't look like anything other than an import tariff on foreign tech in disguise.

You didn’t edit the link out, you replaced your comment with a completely different one. I always though HN was pretty good at preventing ninja edits like that…