Urgo

Just like being "verified" is a monthly subscription on twitter/meta too. They are not verifying you each month.

In before we have to start renewing our birth certificates each year too.

I'm not a sports person and other then going to a superbowl party really don't watch anything but this is really cool. I even put a game on the tv and was comparing it to the site. Very well done :) If there was some way to have live audio streaming in to hear what was going on while the screen animated it that'd make this perfect but I imagine that isn't really a thing that can be done.

Either way though, great job on this!

We couldn't scan this site

403 Forbidden

error code: 1106

The site is blocking our scanner. This may be due to WAF rules, bot detection, or IP-based restrictions.

Perfect :)

Looks like this no longer is included in the FAQ, but here is an archived copy directly on mirc's website about the lifetime license going away. It looks like the lifetime ones were downgraded into 10 year ones. It looks like at least when this FAQ was live you could email him and ask for a new one for free once it did expire so that was nice, but unsure if that is still being honored as the FAQ has now been removed [2]. He did try to make you feel bad about emailing though asking.

Full text copied from [1] for ease of reading

>> Question: I have an old registration that is not working, can you help? Answer: When I originally offered a lifetime license in 1995, it seemed like a kind and fair thing to do. However, I did not expect that I would still be working on mIRC twenty-five years later. The lifetime license means that I am still supporting and providing updates to every user that has ever registered. This has become gradually more difficult and has reached the point where, sadly, it is just no longer possible. If your registration is over ten years old, if you can, please consider registering again. Your continued support for mIRC would be really appreciated. If you register again, you will receive an updated registration automatically. If you cannot afford to register again, or would rather not, that's okay, just email me. However, please be aware that it will take time for me to reply.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201001000000*/https://www.mirc...

[2] https://www.mirc.com/pfaq.html#registration

omg yes! ircN was the best!

For mIRC's first 20 years when you bought it, the license was for all future versions for life. In ~2016 though that changed and they expired all previous lifetime licenses. Now you get a license only for a year.

I know I shouldn't be upset as I did get a ton of use out of mIRC in the 90s/2000's and they probably didn't expect it to still be around and updated to this day, but expiring something sold as lifetime just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They should have honored all previous lifetime licenses and just made new ones follow the new rules.

You can see the changes on various pages here [1] pre 2016 and post 2016

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160215000000*/https://www.mirc...

It's not clear from the article. Are they reducing the staff count so that it naturally averages at at least 15 minutes to get to an agent or are they literally adding a loop in to make people wait even if an agent is available? While longer waits are not great, I guess I could excuse the first way. If they are just sticking people on hold to make they hang up even when the wait time would have been shorter without an artificial hold, that is just bad.

Looks much better now! Good luck!

More then just the testimonials, pretty much everything on the page looks to be fake. It says 10,000+ happy artists and 100k+ designs created while the domain was registered today.

The actual function looks solid. I created a picture and printed it out for my son to color. Let the product sell itself, don't make up fake reviews and numbers. Big turnoff.

Ebay sellers already can do this [1] [2]

[1] https://www.edesk.com/blog/ebay-fulfillment-amazon-fba/

[2] https://sell.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon

For what its worth, I have a Quest Pro and am quite happy with it. I don't use VR a ton, but compared to the Quest 2 I preferred the Quest Pro hands down. I have not tried the Quest 3 to compare though. That said, I thought it was already discontinued already a year ago.

> Of course, but it means it should be within reach to turn on and it will blast blue light in my face should I want to check it at night. An e-ink screen would work best, considering low refresh rate is not an issue in this scenario.

You can set a schedule. Mine automatically go into DND mode a little before bedtime and turn off after the sun is up.

> It cost more than $400, and it lasted less than half a year.

I have four of IQAir's indoor ones and one of their outdoor ones. I got the first one probably 8 or 9 years ago but the others maybe 3 or 4 years ago. The original one was made before iqair bought airvisual. They all are working fine currently.

Also, for the indoor ones, you can set DND mode (I forget the exact name they use) and it'll turn off the display during the night. Does have one downside I'll cover in a sec though.

That said, until this year I always just used their website to view the data or the app. It worked.. ok. But their graphs were tiny and not very easy to use. So this year I started digging in deeper and set tried to connect things to grafana. The indoor units have a samba share where you can pull down data, but the issue is they only update that data every 5-15 minutes (15 when its in DND mode).

The outdoor unit does NOT have a samba share. You need to use their API for that. Now this is where I'm really unhappy and eventually looking at AirGradient or some other option. In order to get api access to my data on the outdoor unit I either need to pay (a lot, I forget how much) for api access, or I can get free api access if I allow iqair to sell my data to everyone else.

.. not interested in that

So I'm currently only getting data from my indoor units and only getting every ~5-15 min data points.. but they are working. I did invest a lot in these devices so not ready to upgrade to anything different just yet, but every time I see one of these air quality topics pop up here on HN it really makes me want to change.

Really interesting read! I was one of those first 5000 units (preordered Sept 29 2009 and shipped Dec 29 2009) and I wore my fitbit religiously (upgrading to newer versions now and then) until last year.

>> "That something had to be comfortable to wear all day, be easy to use, upload its data seamlessly so the data could be tracked and shared with friends, and rarely need charging. Not an easy combination of requirements."

I ended up finally retiring my fitbit last year after seeing little by little Google dismantling all that made fitbit fitbit. Google's first version of Fitbit was the Pixel watch which didn't even last a day. It also may have been comfortable to wear, but was not comfortable to use and the social aspects of it, namely challenges, were axed. So all you were left was a device with the tracking aspects and upload aspects. Not great.

I ended up moving over to a Garmin fenix 7X Sapphire Solar which has a very impressive battery life, fits way more comfortably, has way more features, and while still not the same challenges I loved on fitbit, still has better social features then google left the fitbit with.

All in all, while I do love my Garmin device now, it was a very sad day leaving Fitbit behind. I still hold that, while unproven, I think I probably logged more days of data on the fitbit at the time I switched over then anyone else. I now know I have a 1 in 5000 chance at least of this being true!

>> "In April of this year, Park and Friedman left Google. Early retirement? Hardly. The two, now age 47, have started a new company that’s currently in stealth mode."

Excited to see what you guys are working on now!

Looks like The Guardian may have had a typo (-sleepp) in their url, fixed it, and didn't redirect traffic from the typo to the new url. Either way here is the working url:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/22/the-big-idea-w...

> Can anyone who uses or has tried to use recent "watch" style products from Google/Fitbit provide anecdotes on this claim?

I was a Fitbit user from the day the initial fitbit went on sale for preorder. I used pretty much every 'flagship' fitbit since then until Google bought them. Ever since Google took over the Fitbit product got worse and worse. I decided a year ago I needed out when they got rid of the communities favorite feature, challenges. I'm pretty sure when I finally packed my fitbit away I had logged more days of usage then anyone else.

I started exploring what the other options were but was not able to even consider the apple watch because I do prefer android to ios. If it had supported android I'd have potentially gotten one though. Anyway as apple placed themselves out of the running I explored other options and decided Garmin had the best offerings. The biggest issue there though was they had way too many models and way too many versions of each model and little help to figure out which one is the best for you beyond super high level titles like "runner". That said I ended up settling on the Fenix series and after a year of use I can say I'm quite happy with it!

When I upgraded my phone this past fall to the latest Pixel Google actually was giving away free Pixel watch 2's with every purchase so I did wear a pixel watch for a couple of weeks to test it out. It was.. not great... especially the battery which was supposedly improved from the pixel watch 1.

Anyway, yes, I do agree with the statement that Google hasn't created something good enough, but I don't think they've actually tried. Like other hardware they've bought (nest) they just let it die. Garmin needs some major marketing help, but I do feel like they got a great thing going over there.

Back when I was 14 I was at a friends house and I needed a name for a character in a MUSH (like a MUD) based on Lord of the Rings that he was playing. That day I created the username I still use to this day. Amazing to see they still keep the lights on over there almost 29 years later!

Urgo..................Jun 23 1995

Google Bard.. Gemini makes it explicitly clear that they do this right from the homepage:

"Your conversations are processed by human reviewers to improve the technologies powering Gemini Apps. Don’t enter anything you wouldn’t want reviewed or used."

"How conversations improve Gemini

Just by having a conversation with Gemini, you’re making Google services better, including the machine-learning models that power Gemini.

As part of that improvement, trained reviewers need to process your conversations.

So when using Gemini, don’t enter anything you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google to use.

Your Google Workspace content, like from Gmail or Drive, is not reviewed or used to improve Gemini.

You can turn Gemini Apps Activity off If you don’t want future conversations reviewed or used to improve machine-learning models, turn off Gemini Apps Activity"

You can still ask it:

> when were you last updated?

My last update was in April 2023.

Video Responses! Yes! 2006 [1] - 2013 [2]

[1] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/video-responses/

[2] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/so-long-video-responses...

Thank you for the reply! I suppose that does make sense, though it still doesn't give a warm fuzzy feel separating the functionality. While the average human might only have one email address they use, I'd venture to say people who would want a service such as this would skew more towards having many they use for privacy reasons.

I get what you're saying about how emails aren't the primary means of finding people, but it is a way, and something people often do have more then one of. I'd humbly request you reconsider and try to better incorporate support for automated scans on multiple emails/phones into the main product. For what its worth it looks like Mozilla's product supports 5 based on their docs.

That said, after submitting this comment I'm going to go ahead and sign up for the one year ultimate anyway in hopes that you will reconsider my request if I'm a paid user. :)

beyondd, I've been reading through this thread and your comments about Optery and you got me to sign up for an account on your site vs Mozilla's service so good job. I was even going to pay for your Ultimate plan for a year. But.... you lost me when I got to the profile page. I have a handful of email addresses and a couple of phone numbers. I would want them all to be scanned for. I had previously been using experian's removal service and they allowed for 10 emails and 5 phone numbers.

Your documentation says:

"You can only select one email and one phone number for scans at this time. However, Optery's engineering team is actively working on providing more configuration options such as the ability to run scans on demand for multiple email addresses and phone numbers."

Any comments on when this will be an option? I would want automatic scans on all of my emails and phone numbers. Not very useful for me without this.

I guess at the end of the day the world's legal system needs to decide if when visiting a website do all requests need to stay on the website itself, or if that website is allowed to use any third party sites to run its business as well. That is the crux of what is going on here, not selling viewing history even though that might be leaked.

The facebook pixel[1][2] that is the center of the legal battles here is routinely used not to sell information to facebook persay, but to allow the website to retarget the website visitor at a later point via an advertisement. For example you visit pateron's website, you might get an ad on facebook later from Patreon.

Now, can (and does) facebook do more with the data that goes along with it, maybe, but that is what the facebook pixel is routinely used for.. not something sinister, at least by the company who implemented it on their website.

By only reading the linked article and knowing about the Facebook pixel in general it really feels like Patreon is being forced to challenge this law not because they think its bad, but more because they are being forced to because they are being sued. Things are a lot more nuanced. Should they have just pled guilty though? Absolutely not.

Personally I think the law should be upheld but the lawsuit against Patreon dismissed.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/gpa/blog/the-facebook-pixel/

[2] https://www.facebook.com/business/tools/meta-pixel/

100% this. I don't really care about the whole bubble thing. I just though oh cool, let me try this and find some iphone user to see if it works. Downloaded, auth'd my google account which was the only option which is not right either... and then bam, paywall. Yes it does say it costs $1.99/mo almost at the bottom of the linked page, but I 100% would not have downloaded this if I knew that up front. And absolutely would not have auth'd my google account.

There 100% should be a message BEFORE logging in that has the pricing. And allow for actual email signups too, not google or any other 3rd party logins.

> I haven’t opened Google in a few years but I’ll try to remember to compare some results and provide you screenshots tomorrow or this weekend. I’m surprised others haven’t already done this!

I've seen a lot of people give concrete examples on how Kagi is worse in different situations, but yeah no real good solid examples of how its better. If you're doing a compare, please compare with DuckDuckGo as well. That is the one I use and am most interested in. Thank you!

> When I tried DDG, I ended up back at Google within a week.

I think actually you might have explained it. It's for people who don't want to use Google, but who didn't like DDG.

This is why I ask for more examples to be provided from Kagi because they claim DDG isn't good, just good enough, where as I've been quite happy with DDG results for years now.

If you could provide screen shots or a writeup of HOW they are better that would be helpful. Kogi fans just seems to say its better without really any examples. Not saying its not better, but no one has really shown how it is better.

Been using Duck Duck Go for maybe three or so years now? It's very rare I fallback to google other then for google maps (!gm). I do make heavy use of ChatGPT and Bard though.

I wish there was more example results then just "best headphones", "steve jobs", and "python exceptions". I'm interested, but not interested enough to sign up. Maybe its just me, but all the marketing and comments are why to switch away from google search.. which I already did.

There is a docs page[1] on Kagi vs. DuckDuckGo but it doesn't really have any compelling reason to use Kagi from that. I'd love to see concrete examples of how Kagi has better results then DDG.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-duckduckgo.html

While it's probably not a horrible idea to do something like this I don't think any or at least many does this currently? It wasn't a 23andme database that the attacker used, it was just some other random site/sites. So every time any website is hacked should every other website invalidate the credentials of those users on their site too?

Depends on how they tried to get in. They could have used a large amount of residential proxies to get around this.