Hacker News Reader

Hard_Spaceon Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab

At the bottom of the FAQ section[1] that bans deepfakes, it says 'Additional restrictions exist for paid users', not 'different restrictions'.

[1] https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html#limitation...

Hard_Spaceon Google Colab Bans Deepfakes

The last known version at Wayback Machine that doesn't feature the deepfake ban was 14th May 2022 - https://web.archive.org/web/20220514170909/https://research....

Hard_Spaceon Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

Yes, that's probably a better solution.

Hard_Spaceon Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

If you feel conflicted, you could host the original pages in a dedicated directory with a no-index header, and set up a permanent 301 redirect for those pages..? If they end up listed with your own results, it's trivial to get Google to remove them via Search Console (I do this occasionally for my pure HTML website, which has no Google Analytics etc. on it).

That way, anyone who ever saved the link or linked to it from a blog would still get through to the content.

Hard_Spaceon Ask HN: What Happened to Outline.com?

There's something to this. Over the past few weeks I built up live RSS feeds that sucked in the latest submissions to apposite subReddits, and a collection of other feeds and sources.

Two days ago I deleted all that, as it was making me sick and crazy. I think maybe what we need is 'slow news', and to rely on anything we really need to know percolating through the misinformation and speculation.

What stressed me most was the unexpected extent of polarized alarmism all over Reddit, and (to a lesser extent) even here on HN. There's no logical reason why I couldn't have expected that to happen; I guess I just didn't map it out internally in the calm before the storm.

Hard_Spaceon Tell HN: If You Are in Russia

It's a bit alarming that some HN posters are saying that Ukraine never applied to join NATO. That they did is the central seed of the John Mearsheimer lecture 'Why is Ukraine the West's Fault?' [1], which got about another 2m views in the last 48 hours.

Mearsheimer provides a direct quote demonstrating NATO's resolve to eventually incorporate Ukraine, which was pledged at the Bucharest 2008 summit.

Bush was also pushing for NATO's membership in 2008 [2].

Mearsheimer's narrative depicts a cornered Russia determined to make Ukraine so politically toxic and disrupted that it would cease to qualify for NATO membership. Therefore, yes, if you say 'Ukraine was never going to get into NATO', that's true after 2010, and more so after 2014. But Ukraine did want to become a NATO member, was promised that it could enter, and had some notable US advocates for membership.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/04/01/ukraine.anal...

Hard_Spaceon Ukraine Conflict Live Map

A nice idea, but not crazy about the mushroom cloud icon.

Hard_Spaceon Francis Ford Coppola’s $100M Dollar Bet

GQ seem to have overcome every anti-autoplay setting and add-on that Firefox can throw at it.

Hard_Spaceon Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

Wow. I've been talking about this for 15 years. I guess they finally got painted into a corner enough to implement it.

Hard_Spaceon Lessons Learned after $5B of M&A

Top right corner, grey 'X'.

Hard_Spaceon Show HN: Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox

For me the killer feature would be to entirely withhold incoming mail from specified email addresses or email domains until weekday working hours. No bolded 'pending' folder, no indication that you're being communicated with by business concerns in your leisure time...I'd pay an extra fee every year just for that one feature.

Hard_Spaceon Airbnb wants to GPS track you also when not using the app

Good advice. I recently deleted a lot of apps from my iPhone when I realized that I only used some of them once a year (or less). If they're just local frameworks for account-based services such as AirBnB, keeping the app is like keeping the web page open for 12-18 months in case you need it again soon. Reinstall when needed, log in, and then delete when the need has gone.

Hard_Spaceon Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

Give the innovations a rest for a couple of years, and redevote the funds to security development. Hell, do that for four years! Many of us long-term users are held hostage by the fact that security updates (which we need) come bundled with this tosh.

Hard_Spaceon Feature request for Google Images: a deepfake label?

The identification of deepfakes is a current and hot research sector in computer vision, and a cold war between advances in deepfake technology and those seeking to identify artifacts of deepfakes. It's currently far from trivial to simply add a filter. Google Arxiv to find out more:

https://www.google.com/search?q=deepfake+detection+arxiv

Hard_Spaceon What have we got to lose? (1998)

'Let us now bow our heads in payment'.

And that was 1980! He was decades ahead.

Hard_Spaceon Ask HN: How long until Google charges for private Gmail accounts?

> I live in fear that someday the Algorithm will decide I am naughty and lock me out of my digital life.

That fear became too much for me after getting locked out twice of my main Gmail account (which has been my 'life' for 15 years) last November. I was able to recover it, but some have not been able to.

Now I use Fastmail, and am migrating all Google, Amazon, SaaS etc. service I can to self-hosting. The transition is taking months in my spare time, and there's some expense, but I feel the 'free' party is truly over now.

Hard_Spaceon Ask HN: Which feature would make you switch away from Google search?

Complete discounting of geo-IP on request. Not currently possible:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/179386

Hard_Spaceon Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web?

This is very annoying. I write for an AI site, and have requested a change to the CMS, which changes the publication date to the 'updated' date, leaving no visible evidence of the original date behind. If you open up the HTML, the original date is in there as a token, but the casual reader won't know, and Google is annoyingly unpredictable as to whether it will display the date in SERPS (it almost always knows the date, whether it shows it or not).

I have taken now to including 'Original publication date' as a codicil in my pieces.

Hard_Spaceon Ask HN: Gmail account security

Yes - it was almost instantaneous, super helpful.

Hard_Spaceon Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

I just moved my domain mail to Fastmail, and everything arrives perfectly. I'm annoyed that I was bullied into this by the fact that 'unknown' mail servers are third-class citizens, but at least the problem is solved.

Some paranoid thread in me fears that Google will find a problem with Fastmail's IP range and credentials this spring (among others), in order to consolidate the Gmail upgrade cash avalanche, but I'm hoping that's just me with my tinfoil hat on too tight.

Hard_Spaceon Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

Absolutely. I set up my own domain last year, hoping to run a mailserver directly off it. The whole thing was perfectly configured, but the 'some dude' IP address made it unusable. Eventually I moved the domain's hosting to Fastmail, and now the mail actually arrives.

Hard_Spaceon Ask HN: Gmail account security

You can send a message with a connection request, no Premium required.

Hard_Spaceon Ask HN: Gmail account security

That's really cool! I'm just now migrating my Gmail-led life (15 years) to Fastmail, and it has been great so far.

Hard_Spaceon Ask HN: Gmail account security

Having had my primary Gmail account blocked twice in the last two months, apparently through VPN usage, I became sufficiently terrified to decide to start to move all my email to my own domain.

I adopted Fastmail for my domain email, and it has been a good experience (I do know that Fastmail is a five-eyes company with all the related issues around privacy, and I researched alternatives for several weeks, but I guess in the end I was willing to trade privacy for ease-of-use, uptime and various other factors).

Now I am looking into getting away from other Cloud-provided backups such as Prime Photos, iCloud, etc., moving to self-hosted NAS storage.

Hard_Spaceon A Necropolis in Naples Reveals the Enduring Influence of Ancient Greece

I lived in Naples for five years - it's a great shame that people land there still and scurry for the islands; the city really rewards exploration.

Hard_Spaceon Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

> I declined because I don't negotiate like that. If you mismanage a negotiation, there is no do-overs just because you overplayed your hand. The trust is broken.

As a freelancer, this is a pretty standard scenario where you need to have somewhere to go when you tell an old (even cherished) client about your latest price rise. If the current employer needs extra time to think it over, even by a bluff call, it's nothing personal to me.

Not that I am a hardened business person, far from it - I just have a blasted view that there are no real friendships in business that trump the 'bottom line'. If I had had a different experience in my working life, I would have welcomed it! Contracts exist because trust in business is too risky a strategy.

Hard_Spaceon Shodan 2000

Wow, there's a lot of it about [1]. Happened to me about three years ago, so pretty chilling.

[1] https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=%22Your+files+are+encryp...

Hard_Spaceon Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

I share the view that Google SERPS have dropped in quality the last 5-7 years. Of great annoyance to me is the amateurish way that a search results page will find relevant Twitter results but then clicking on the results takes you to the root page of the Twitter user and not the result. Since many Twitterers are prolific posters, it can be very time-consuming or even impossible to find the result listed. Thankfully Inoreader takes me to the exact Twitter result.

Hard_Spaceon Ask HN: Does anyone procrastinate on going to sleep? Any solutions?

I recently read an article (sadly I cannot find the link) about the way that delaying of sleep is a fairly common symptom of depression, as it allows the sufferer to feel some measure of control over their life.

As a sufferer myself, for 42 years, I can confirm this - delaying sleep gives me an extended window away from the problems that surface in a challenging period. Of course, this does not stand up to logical scrutiny, but it is, at best, a semi-logical and highly emotional response to adversity.

Hard_Spaceon Nude pictures on early retro PCs – was it possible?

I remember my scientist uncle showing me round the UK's National Physical Laboratory in the summer of 1979, aged 13. At one point, to amuse me, he printed out a dot-matrix picture of a scantily clad woman, which seemed to be a familiar image to the (all-male) scientists in the room. It may have been Lenna [1, referenced in TFA], I don't know. But it was undoubtedly the first digital smut I ever saw.

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