FriedPickles

I so badly want an old school flippy light switch that physically flips when toggled by the smart home.

IMO that would be the first smart home product strictly superior to its analog counterpart.

Sweet, they open sourced their iMessage connector. I was shocked to see that Apple is using Hashcash in their oauth header! (I see now hashcash.js when I login on the website too). I assume this is to make password testing more expensive, and probably explains why I've never had to bother with a captcha when logging into an Apple ID.

https://github.com/beeper/imessage/blob/2c45fc5619cbc33f2441...

Reuters did a great piece on Ride Aid's facial recognition in 2020: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-rite...

Can you say more about how Beeper is doing device attestation using ripped Apple device identifiers, or where you discovered that? Device attestation can be extremely user hostile, and if this is a true workaround it will be useful in other applications.

Are there any vehicle regulations designed to protect pedestrians or cyclists? A quick search of "pedestrian" in the FMVSS returns nothing [1]. We can't blame automakers for marketing whatever they think will sell best that passes the regulatory bar. If new regulations would be helpful, let's make them.

What would it look like to optimize for pedestrian safety? The new USPS truck [2].

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/fmvss [2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/23/22297823/usps-postal-serv...

It seems to be one of several fixed, round numbers depending on the market (city). But there may be other factors. It's an interesting policy choice and I'm curious why they do it. Needless to say, drivers very much want to know the whole tip amount and are annoyed that the displayed value is capped.

It works as a bid but only up to a certain amount, above which Dasher just shows the offer with e.g. "$6+ tip", hiding the full tip amount until after the order is delivered.

A very similar concept is Revoy, which hitches a device between the tractor and trailer. I expect Revoy's model would see a much higher utilization rate (time spent driving or charging vs sitting idle).

https://www.revoy.com/

I enjoyed this well made video illustrating how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh79YSCC8mM

And this one explaining how reservoirs can be used to trade-off water consumption for land requirements using side ponds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBvclVcesEE

AKA how to train a generative image model on a biological neural net. Listening to him do it sounds a lot like a description of a diffusion model generating an image from the initial static--surreal.

Maybe. But with the liquid form, you can smell and taste when it's rancid. You could take a whole bottleful of capsules and have no idea they've gone bad.

I appreciate the stability and minimalism too.

Personally I'd like to have some controls for the frontpage algorithm. For example, I check HN pretty infrequently, so I'd prefer to see older stuff (currently I use Algolia for this here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth). I'd also like to see controversial.

Hmm so if we pump water to amplify the tides we can speed up the Earth's spin and get rid of the leap second.

Very cool. I wonder if there's an even simpler geometry that chokes the flow of the air and uses the heat at the construction. May need to be very large, but it could be an architectural thing.

It's easy to laugh at the Thai posters for how obvious the precautions seem. But this is a good reminder that there are new technologies today for which we don't yet know the "obvious" precautions.

I wonder if there's a cheaper filler gas we could use besides He. Perhaps methane, hydrogen, or acetylene, though they're quite flammable.

I like the idea of this list. Some others: - Quantum supremacy - HIV vaccine - Synthetic life - Discovery of ET life - P vs NP solution

Everybody's talking about reproducing the material which is great, but will take time. Why don't the authors supply their existing material to an independent lab for earlier confirmation?

And how many microplastics are released the second time the container's microwaved? And the third?

I'm all against microwaving brand new plastics (not a huge fan of take-out containers). But I suspect the plastic coffee brewer I've used ~1000 times has long since leached out anything that was going to leach out. I wonder if there's any research on this.

It'd be cool if there were a commercial lab I could send a some samples to measure microplastics, the same way I can send my tap water to be tested for lead.

Where do you see Apple pay on the web? I was excited when it came out, but have only seen it once or twice since then.

I highly recommend the NOVA episode "Saving Venice" on this topic. MOSE is a marvel of engineering and makes me feel proud to be human.

https://www.pbs.org/video/saving-venice-zq9di2/

Perhaps they could lower the total cost if they recaptured compressed air as seawater reenters the gates during the sinking process.

There are unavoidable losses to heat, but if they did this it wouldn't be too different from "deep sea pumped storage" concepts.

Oops, not sure how I missed that. Thanks.

What are those funny symbols by the authors' names?

Cigarettes are obviously an awful way to deliver nicotine, but I've failed to find any science showing that nicotine is any worse than caffeine. In fact, its shorter elimination half-life makes it far less disruptive to sleep. Are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Gwern on the subject: https://gwern.net/nicotine

> what prevents a person from hooking up their phone to a development HTTPS proxy, intercepting the API requests, and making their own cracked client without side-loading at all?

SSL pinning, essentially.

Totally true about Android--it's the smaller platform for us, but the fact we have not seen piracy there yet gives me hope.

To be clear I am in favor of sideloading, and we would benefit from it in several ways.

As the developer of a subscription app, if unfettered side-loading is allowed I'd be worried about cracked versions of my app being distributed.

We've done everything in the client for privacy and reliability, but the obvious countermeasure would be to move functionality over to a backend. This would be history echoing the transition from boxed software to SaaS.

Why not inkjets too?

Clicked on this expecting to read about an AI enhancement technique. Was very refreshing to read about actual hardware improvements.