BayAreaEscapee

Boy, isn't that the truth. It's been shocking to see how alternative platforms get the banhammer from their payment network or hosting provider. I agree with the parent that it's hard to define what "hate speech" is. But the "common carrier" ought to apply to hosting providers and payment processors even if it can't be applied to social media sites like FB and Twitter.

It's true that Google has made quite a bit of awful and customer-hostile decisions about the path of Android. But what is Samsung's alternative to Android? There is none. All alternative operating systems (PalmOS, Symbian, Blackberry, etc) have failed. A new, proprietary OS from Samsung would almost certainly fail. They can't chain their cart to Apple. Android is the only possibility.

Is this news to anyone? I travel a lot, and for a time I used AirBnB a lot. Sometimes it's really great, sometimes it is mediocre, and sometimes it is downright awful. And God help you if the host doesn't live up to their obligation: contacting AirBnB support is useless. Do they specially require applicants for customer support to be brain-injured?

At some point a few years ago I realized that if I stayed exclusively in Bonvoy/Marriott hotels, I could quickly get the highest status. I've been platinum with Bonvoy for several years now. Now they give me room upgrades, free breakfast, extra free nights, bonus points, executive lounge access, guaranteed late checkout, etc. And when you call them, someone picks up the phone and solves the problem. (Not that there is much to complain about it: they normally get it right the first time.)

I will never use AirBnB again.

Puerto Rico has its own tax system that you can elect instead of the United States Federal Income Tax. For some people this can result in a significant tax savings.

https://nomadcapitalist.com/2018/06/02/puerto-rico-tax-incen...

This is really quite an interesting search engine. I was able to find posts by people who had deleted their accounts by using their deleted username in the "author" field.

It's a good reminder to watch what you say on the internet. Nothing ever really disappears.

I am a privacy.com user and I like it, but there's a number of sites that won't accept the cards it generates.

This AMA is quite old. Probably, this attack is harder to pull of with pin-and-chip cards that are used now.

In the future SIMs are probably going to be some kind of signed data blob instead of a physical card. But I guess breaking off antennas will always be a thing if you have the skill set to identify it.

I saw a video once, the goal of which was to sell to Microsoft execs how to market the first Xbox. The video explained that the target market wasn't fortysomething guys wearing suits in cubicles. It was skateboarders with tattoos on their neck. (And many other demographics that varied significantly from middle-aged IT people).

Your intuition is correct. This site [1] includes graphs covering political values of Americans from 1994 to 2017, and it's very clear that politics is much more polarized than in the past.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-...

My father reads voraciously. Whenever we talked about a book I was assigned in high school, he would say, "Literature is wasted on the young."

Now I understand what he meant and I agree with him. I understand so much more of literature now that I am well into adulthood.

This reminds me of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown. They put out the fire by dumping boron and sand on the core from helicopters.

https://www.livescience.com/65515-chernobyl-in-modern-times-...

It's interesting to notice my own mental bias here. When Trump was censored, I was quite perturbed. Who made Twitter the arbiter of what's appropriate for a sitting president to say?

But now that it's the Chinese government being censored for their treatment of the Uighurs, I'm almost gleeful. Those scoundrels deserve it for their inhumane treatment of human beings!

I just realized that I'm a hypocrite.

I often find that the HN comments are more helpful than the article itself. If I read a bit of an article and it doesn't get to the point quickly, I just close it and start reading the HN comments.

When you're twenty, you worry about what people think.

When you're forty, you don't care what people think.

And when you're sixty, you realize that nobody was thinking about you in the first place.

I feel for the foreign (non USA) countries that are subject to this kind of gaslighting from Big Tech. At least in the United States, we can proposition our own politicians to reign in the excesses of Big Tech in our own country.

Foreign countries have no real alternative: there is no way to lobby Big Tech for change. They have no real voice far away in Washington DC.

In some cases they can just block some site or app and insist people use the locally developed alternative, but this isn't really all that effective. Usually the local alternative has some deficiencies, and it doesn't always work: look at the way Russia failed to block Telegram a few years ago.

I started out on ING Direct and also liked the savings account feature. I created several saving accounts for when some website wants ACH routing information but I don't trust very much: I can put just enough in that account to cover the transaction I want covered.

I didn't realize that they god rid of the ability to add new ones. I guess I'll have to make do with the eight I have lol.

Matt Levine makes me laugh hilariously. How he writes so much funny stuff about such a dry topic is a true talent.

I'm so glad he is back.

This seems like an odd decision given recent developments in the area of supersonic missiles. China and Russia seem to have to technology to easily sink carriers from quite a distance. Aircraft carriers are almost obsolete.