billme

“Super users” in this case is relative, as in the super users of Ubuntu’s community are the users to most likely have an issue with this and willing to leave to another distro if needed.

Beyond that, increasingly common to see Ubuntu used in enterprise and the dev tasked with dealing with the issue may not have the authority to decide to use Ubuntu or not.

Honestly, unless you’re able to find a way to exploit the downturn related to the global pandemic, in a way that you’re able to maintain growth post pandemic, my advice would be to pick a new industry, since this is one of the industries that is in my opinion well know for killing countless startups.

If I had to give a singular piece of advice, I would suggest contacting large enterprises that still book hotel rooms, find the person who has the most control over bookings, and ask them, as it relates to the pandemic, if there’s service they feel is missing. B2B business has a much longer time to revenue, but the revenue is much more predictable. This would also solve the issue of Google, since they’re focusing to my knowledge on consumer market.

Lastly, this is a very regulated industries, I would suggest getting off the record advice from attorneys on potential legal issues based on any model you do find a product market fit for.

Largest issue I have with Snap is that it appears to assume the owner of a system is not in best position to make choices for their own systems.

Sure, this might be true for the average user, but it is toxic to the “super user” community that’s in the best position to help support the larger community and may end up pushing them away.

Snap at the very least should have an opt-out feature, if not be opt-in during an install.

More criticisms maybe found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(package_manager)#Critici...

My advice to avoid issues like this is to focus on being aware of why you’re reply is reasonable, your emotional state as it relates to the reply - and what reasoning you might present as to why you expect the receiver or others readers of the response to benefit from your reply.

Beyond that, trying to separate online from offline identities can be a factor. If using different identities, establish why you’re doing this prior to doing so in an ad-hoc instance, and then, make sure you’re not departing from that reasoning or the sum of yourself regardless of the identity presented.

Might be helpful to state:

- what your current business model is;

- business models you attempted, but abandoned;

- reasoning of why the current model is broken besides an existing company having a monopoly;

- what you’re break even profit needs are

- what jurisdiction you’re in and plan to target;

- prior experience in the hospitality industry.

——

Lastly, (1) do you have any proof of “hotels hate this commission” other than your assumption that no one likes spending more money on a transaction than needed? Ask because unless you have researched this, the reasoning for why hotels use booking services might be that it’s cheaper than marketing their inventory themselves. (2) My understanding is the largest player in this space is now Google, how do you intent to deal with Google?

No problem, agree with your intent, but appears you understand it more likely than not will result in problems. Thanks!

PS - While it unclear in this situation, other issues with proxies & mini-URLs is that they might easily be used to mine IPs, set cookies, launch attacks, etc.

Agree that the official source link is the link to post, which you appear to understand - yet then claim to violate due to the reasoning you described. Once the blocks happen, all the links you posted will be broken, please stop doing this.

Raising VC funds outside of greater Bay Area is not only harder, but generally per equity traded, you get less in return. Generally, these cluster investors cluster around an asset-type, industry, jurisdiction, and proximity.

Bay Area startups raised roughly $46 billion in 2019, compared to Europe in sum raising $36 billion; if you’re raising more than $10 million, not attempting to raise funds in the Bay Area is likely poor choice.

Curious, in the article, you mentioned - “we believe that open source will eat SaaS's lunch in many product categories” — what to you is the core filter for “SaaS vs Open Source” product market fit?

While I would be the first to agree the world increasingly makes it easier to go on “auto-pilot” - this largely is by choice for the average person and I would argue has been around as long as written history.

Being critical of people for doing this will not help, nor will assuming the average person becoming more engaged will align with the outcome you would think would be reasonable; for example, the world working together to insure a positive future for Earth and beyond.

I don’t know what the answer is.

No, under the assumption the pizza business is laundering money, they are real pizzas. Key to business laundering money to appear real to audits, surveillance, etc.

Reason to give away pizzas would be to cutdown on marketing costs, since then you’re only filter for a “customer” is people that take random free stuff.

Similar but different setup is a fake lottery, where the winner was is preselected to win and the tickets are given away free to the public who have no chance of winning but provide there information. As long as the method of controlling the winner remains secret, it would be hard after the fact to prove the “randomly” selected winner was not random; clearly people do get caught and there are ways to detect people are doing this.

One last example would be a dry cleaning service, where they offer limited amount of to good to be true offers, then stock the rest of the clothes being “laundered” via cheap used clothes purchased at second hand stores.

A lot of these patterns show up in due diligence for business acquisition, especially mom & pop lines of business.

Thanks, good point, was aware of that, but others might not be; never seen a good explanation for their legal structure, both as it relates to the present & future.

I have checked both URLs for 990s, only way I found it was via a link in the footer of Signal’s Wikipedia page.

Yes, that’s correct; meaning if you go to your profile, click “show dead” then click “comments” on the main navigation, then keep scrolling down, clicking more until you find a comment marked [DEAD] but not also [FLAGGED] — then click the users profile, then comments, then click through there comments; some will not be [DEAD] because a user had “show dead” on and unghosted the comment if they had enough rep.

Yes, that’s correct, if you have enough rep you’re able to “unghost the dead” and “see the dead” at any rep simply by creating an account, clicking “show dead” — though always assumed a user would notice or they’d just stop posting. Though there’s to my knowledge no easy way to only see the shadowban users aside from writing script that watches the new comments.

Pro tip, if normally people vote or comment on your comments, you’re not getting either, access HN via a private session without cookies and not signed in, then click to where your comment would be, if it not visible, you have been ghosted; to be extra sure, then create a throwaway account, click profile, turn on “show dead”, load the profile that might be shadowban, click comments, and if the comments say [DEAD] with no [FLAGGED] you have been shadowban; email mods if you have questions via the “contact” mailto link in the footer.

Now, looking at all the comments, some which intent appears to be helpful, makes me wonder if shadowlands for users are not as toxic as the behavior they seek to remove; that is they isolating a user, making they think no one cares to reply to them, etc.

Thanks, makes sense, though guess I would expect a non-profit to communicate this; don’t believe Signal even links to the 990 I linked to on their own website; possible they don’t want the public to (easily) know salaries, assets, etc - but unclear.

Right, here’s another comment on the topic by Signal staff too: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pthatcherg

Putting aside Signal officially declining to the add option to discover or manually add a server via the client, theirs nothing stopping anyone from going to GitHub, downloading the code for the server and client, editing the code however they see fit as long as it follows the legal guidelines.

Curious, where’s the “last use” in the documentation or code? Ask because I have seen other issues with the PIN vs docs and haven’t gotten to testing the recovery mode.

EDIT: Found the related docs, appears they had been edited since I lasted looked at them; for example, you can now disable PIN reminders:

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si...

And yes, “anyone who had communicated with you before the switch would see a ‘safety number changed’ notification if the number became affiliated with a new device” is correct, though so is my statement about new numbers adding the number. To be honest, I have caused the alerts to happen before, the other user had no idea what they meant, didn’t say anything, just clicked okay.

As far as I know, while the DevOps code is not open source, the server and app code are on GitHub; that is you’re able to roll your own version however it defined by the licensing; recent attack on Signal by security researcher used a self-compiled app as a proof of concept; Signal patched the issue.

PIN only stops registration for a fixed amount of time, believe 7-days, then the entity controlling the number would be able to reclaim the account. If the “attacker” maintained control, new devices that add the number from their contact list would get no alert; that is, the users would have to figure out the number is controlled by someone else.

Signal’s official statement on the EARN It Act is here: https://signal.org/blog/earn-it/

Anyone have a link to Signal’s 2019 IRS Form 990?

Most recent I was able to find was this 2018 version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23431076

How is this related to the topic of Signal’s financials?

Anyone wondering what this is, a “Form 990 is a United States Internal Revenue Service form that provides the public with financial information about a nonprofit organization. It is often the only source of such information.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_990

—-

990 is intended as a document For public release; the 2018 is the most recent 990 I was able to find for Signal, if anyone has a more recent one, please link to it.

Might be wrong, but believe the point was not that $1500 is unbelievable, but per the data you linked to - that the “median household income worldwide is $9733“; that and the OP posted $1500 is above and beyond there needs; worth highlighting that is household income, not individual income.

There’s a massive difference $811 a month and $1500 month; $811 is $9733 divided by 12, though really should be the divid by at least 2, since by definition household has at least 2 members.

>> “ since group chats are using Telegram's servers the encryption is not client-to-client”

That is, it is not end-to-end-encrypted (E2EE) — which is the whole point of apps like this.

Nonsense. Source?

Well defined 2D pattern stretched across as 3D surface would be easier to circumvent than a generic non-stretching mask.

Beyond that, thermal & inferred imaging of particular covered faces have easily been able to identify an individual.

Lastly, as I mentioned in my other comment, identifying a person is easily done via number of methods.

Please refrain from “presumably” comments, they help no one.

Source?

Here’s 2018 990: https://pp-990.s3.amazonaws.com/12_2019_prefixes_82-86/82450...

>> “ Slight off topic from the article, I was reading about the sting ray discussion here on HN yesterday. Signal supports some sort of mesh network communication right? Is that a work around for sting rays?”

Believe you’re talking about Signal using “domain fronting” - which is unrelated to stingrays; more information is here: https://signal.org/blog/doodles-stickers-censorship/

As for stingrays, here’s recent article on countermeasures: https://puri.sm/posts/taking-the-sting-out-of-stingray/

The intent of the blur is to hide the identity of the individual face that has been blurred. Average human sees a blurry face and assumes the person’s identity is safe. Research has repeatedly should this is false, especially when combined with other data.

Here’s another example of such research:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facial-recognition-systems-c...

>> “researchers said only 10 fully-visible examples of a person's face were needed to identify a blurred image with 91.5 per cent accuracy.“