blackbrokkoli

> I played with this idea some with a startup called Perch, which intended to turn old smartphones into security cameras or modern webcams.

> Petty crimes are currently very interesting to people to catch in this sort of age of online shaming. This is evidenced by the stolen package bomb videos.

I hope you do not take this as a personal attack, but I consider this line of thinking...well, fucked up. Just because an idea is remotely viable in an economic sense it seems to be instantly within the Overton window of serious consideration.

> However, it is still possible to do terrible things in broad daylight and get away with it.

Like manipulating the self-assigned greatest democracy in the world as a foreign actor via, you guessed it, mass surveillance and analysis. I would rather prevent that instead of pleasing some digital mop and peoples craving for "vengeance" on criminals, but oh well.

Well, 300 million people are currently living under an administration whose election was most likely heavily influenced by mass data collection and analysis.

Nobody cares if you and your friend read each others diaries or whatever. The problem is the metaphorical diary being owned by a global entity, along with two billion other diaries. Locked behind shoddy security and regarded as sellable for the right price at any point in time.

As a German I was thoroughly (and rightfully IMO) teached to treat the opinion of "haha personally I just don't look further than a few meters beyond my nose and the world looks quite fine now" as danger, not as an excuse and your statement are falls quite clearly in that category. Just because you don't see nothing doesn't mean nothing is happening.

What can a start-up driven cloud mass surveilance do in that regard what a 1950-tech alarm system can not?

Why not look into the countless measures other nations with far less crime or individuals have successfuly done which coincidentally also are not opening an attack surface for sinister activities as large as Alaska?

Fully agreeing within your premise. Digitalizing the grandman standing at her window 25/7 does not change the world.

But you missed the part where not you (or your HOA) implements it:

> Services model. Part of the purchase includes a technician showing up and doing the installation. There would be no DIY component.

> Subscription only. The product would be a hardware/software/services bundle with an up front fee and ongoing subscription as default.

So, you have scale. Someone owns all the data. Or three companies, same difference. The state of the "art" security in this sector is beyond laughable (Xiamoi camera showing feed from other peoples camera [0]) and even if not, just buy the dataset. And then the real shit begins.

Give me that dataset of say 20% of the Americans and a decent laptop and I blow Cambridge and their silly facebook data out of the water.

Recognizing people gets ridiculously easy - instead of 7 billion people I only have to identify you out of maybe 100 persons frequenting an area. Cue all the low hanging fruits like your affairs, about all disabilities affecting gait, your bedtime regularity. Let me assume the role of a big store chain: I can not only see plants and garden equipment you buy, but also how you use it and how often you break stuff or let your grass grow brown. Nice!

All these habits, unfiltered, unlike in the internets! How regular is your daily routine? Are you up to some risks due to little sunlight and sport? Your insurer would like to know! Your other insurer would also like to know, should you be considered a traffic risk considering how angry you take your driveway sometimes? But your other insurer has already pattern matched: Is probably an anger management issue. Your future job interviewer thanks you for this red flag!

But hey, you did avoid getting your electric pepper mill stolen that one time, probably!

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/cache-issue-causes-x...

> 4. ADT 2.0: Digital neighborhood watch.

That this is not only a market, but a "wish" which seems to get traction even here on HN confirms to me that the old joke "1984 is not a manual" is more relevant than ever, and scarily not only in regards to the usual suspects, corporate and nation states, but people themselves.

Can anyone explain to me why anyone would advocate a profit-driven, systematic eradication of soul and character around each and every human residence?

Why would you trade the vibrancy of your young urban block or the sense of trust and community in your suburb against prevention of low-impact black-swan events like serial packet thiefs?

Why would you surrender your home, not only your safe haven in life but also your gateway to low effort exploration of your surroundings to wide-spanning AI surveillance and automated purge of any nuisance?

Maybe I am just weird or out of touch but I can absolutely not get in my head how people surrender to such a dull dystopia based on an apparent fetish for weaponized gossip and abnormal levels of fear of petty crimes...

> Constraining the user to simple tools encourages creativity and allows the system to be more quickly understood. This supports the removal of complicated features.

Oh god, no. This horrible idea escalated so far that there is now a billion dollar industry (RPA) automating braindead tasks just because software can not be arsed any more to include API, code/CLI based access or, to steal the wording, complex tools at all.

IMO this is another round of weirdly religious adherence to "UX" schemes which ends in massive damage, like the unconditional love for whitespace everywhere.

Please stop using "simplicity" as a cop out to prevent having to build software that, for example, has basic things like stack deletion. The result will just suck.

Huh - turns out this is quite a pointed description of something I think I already subconsciously tried to achieve for some time without being really able to define it.

I usually try to build quite extensive documentation and task trackers for every project I am attempting. Now that I read this article I think a lot of it is indeed the feeling of knowing what to do next immediately after an arbitrarily long break and preventing the feeling of being "finished" just because I completed one feature/subtask.

Certainly worth trying to optimize for what the article is describing - does anyone has experience with this in a more general fashion (writing is a very unique thing IMO) or regarding software projects?

I'm a bit astonished how here on HackerNews there are articles all day about how sophisticated and surprisingly complicated and convoluted stuff like hosting, IT security, people management, scaling, updating etc is and yet it is somehow ultra suspicious that a page with massive growth had to change in a non-lineary way over the course of two decades with rapidly changing culture...

Wow employing 300 people to keep up with a massively more popular internet on much more differentiated devices in times of information platforms manipulating national elections is not exactly 300 times as expensive as employing one dude to do odd jobs around the house?! Must be mismanagement!!

Wow administrating a site which went from changing slowly to changing at inhumane pace and serving those pages with media formats which did not even existed at the beginning to a growing global population does not just include changing a checkbox on hostgator?! Must be scammers in their IT!!

I realize this comes off as very salty - I actually don't have much stake in this personally but I despise the pseudo intellectual criticism here in this otherwise very down-to-earth community.

PS: Comparing things to cancer is the Hitler-comparison of biology.

Paper maps will prevail as long as not-rich people are interested in (real) outdoor activities.

Paper maps have a consistency and security no digital navigation device I ever owned or saw ever had.

I realize this is a kind of "get off my lawn" argument one could also make about digital vs analog newspapers, or books.

The key is: If my Kindle decides to do some weird updating and requires re-downloading all my books, well I guess I won't read on my subway ride home. If my map does that in northern Scandinavia, well now I am fucked.

Just print 5 maps and laminate them and you're pretty safe against weather and time. Not so much with a digital map.

Print something and it will show that print as long as it is not physically destructed. Not so much with a digital map ("oh, our services don't work in this country ha ha. Did you not read the t&c?")

Sun glare. Off the grid for three weeks. Weight. None of this is a problem with analog maps.

I guess you can solve most of these problems by throwing lots of money at god knows what military/navy device, thus I specified non-rich people. Or you know, just use a paper map.

The fundamental problem here seems to be scale (like often in tech).

I don't think it is correct to say that algorithms "enabled discrimination against job applicants". Otherwise we wouldn't have discussions about ageism or the amount of personal information which should go on a CV. Closed loop systems are also not something AI brought upon our world, otherwise the term "white privilege" would not have made it into public consciousness. There are racist hiring managers and interviewers who mentally discard anyone looking like their ex for sure.

The key is: All these effects are fairly contained in comparison. Companies can be sued, people can be fired and even systemic biases can be evaded in a lot of cases. I am not trying to say that e.g. sexism in hiring is harmless or anything, I'm just trying to weight two evils.

We do enter a disturbingly dystopian world when the AI-hiring start up brings their fancy algo to the mighty gods of cloud computing and just scale into infinity. Now suddenly hundreds of companies and millions of people are hit by the biases. Having discrimination at that level, personal damage compensation becomes a warm gesture at most just because the cultural deterioration done by subconsciously establishing a group as subpar workers is plain immeasurable.

And if you think about it, this exact problem transcends hiring. You have the right to kick everybody who is carrying something resembling a paint spray can out of your mall to prevent vandalism. You may discriminate some people just trying to get something done about the flies in their kitchen, sure. Happens. But if GoogleMaps, or Cloudflare, or Netflix does it, they are ever so subtly nudging the tech interest, or the information accessibility, or the quality of life, or the probability to get hired by minus a fraction of a fraction of a percent. For a billion people, or for all Hispanic people in the US, or for everyone using sub $300 phones.

That is a very real, very dark problem we should be all aware of in its greater context!

Love the implementation and the UI - excellent job on using screen estate and best practices like small sticky header. Such information density while still looking modern is rare!

However I can't help but notice how much this shows just how meaningless and toxic news have become (or always have been).

About every single tile seems to be either

* boxed emotions, mostly in form of a dramatic two digit body count without even hinting at the underlying causes or why this should interest me other than because "oh my good poor people".

* statements of opinion by people who are highly paid to write such pieces, which may have some value as a Litmus test for the general-general relationship of entities X and Y, again while completely failing to convey relevance or context.

What do I gain from this, besides a faux warm feeling in the chest that I'm now an "informed voter" or something?

Your argument seems to be purely emotional disdain.

> Yet it seems to happen far less often

Citation needed. And if so, that is a reason to draw a line where on one side is "not-science"? That is just absurd. Does a car A stops being a means of transport when it subjectively breaks down more often than car B?

> very least, in less publicly impacting ways

Excuse me?

* A literal century ago someone failed to translate a German study so know about every child in the western civilization gets a good dose of distrust in science when they get indoctrinated that the tongue has separated regions for taste which is ridiculously easy to refute for yourself in about 15 seconds.

* The coup of the cereal industry to fund some studies telling everyone that breakfast is the most important meal of the day still misguiding health guides today.

* Schrödinger telling the world how stupid it would be to assume quantum principles in the visible world, still happily recited with the complete opposite meaning by about 500 media entities per day.

* Scientific entities failing to have any impact on people about the dangers of X-rays until people got impotent from having their shoes measured via X-rays in the local shopping mall

To be clear, this is not intended as some sort of smear campaign to science itself. I want to illustrate that all science is vulnerable to even dumb mistakes and that this dumb social sciences ain't real meme is only slowing down much overdue conversation!

I hope you do realize the irony in just declaring that something was "never meant to be a science"...

Science is about constantly evolving via falsification of theories.

You might want to base your definition of what can be science on something different than an unsourced appeal to authority from 300 years ago?

This is fundamentally one of the many disastrous outcomes of scientific publishing being controlled by greedy conglomerates.

For the uninitiated: If you want to publish a scientific paper today, you basically sign up to sign over the rights to any publisher that's interested (please someone publish me). That publisher will then review that paper in a more often than not mostly undisclosed process and publish that paper. Everyone knows that to be a high-regarded publisher one must have a very own typographic formatting: Unreadable font, weird multi column layout to prevent accessibility and tables disregarding standards are a good start. Afterwards, the paper gets published on the publisher website, which again follows as little agreed upon standard as possible. Data is of course excluded, study itself is in PDF. Also put up a fat paywall, don't want those pesky poor people be scientifically literate. Give a few cents of your $70 fee to the authors, it is not an unethical business you're doing here!

THIS is the systemic error people seem to be so happy to ignore because they're neck deep in social science not being real science memes.

This prevents interesting new startups for fact-checking or meta analysis, which are e.g. happening in journalism because that field has a lot of the things science is sadly lacking.

This creates a drift between extremely rich and rather poor countries/unis/humans in scientific ability.

This generates a tar pit for scientific process.

This wastes billions in funds because of people unaware of each other doing redundant studies (and not referencing/refuting/supporting each other in the process neither, of course) because they are literally better search engines to find Harry Potter fan fiction than there are for finding studies.

And finally, this of course allows anything from honest statistical mistakes to snake oil sellers to slip through and doing generations worth of damage, because correcting, fact checking, re-researching, comparing, meta research, anything is slowed to a crawl.

So please stop embracing scientific elitism and gatekeeping for this is exactly what brought us here in first place...

People always need to put a single face on everything, a name to hate.

In public perception, wars are never the result of socioeconomic balances tipping. It is always a personal battle. Churchill, Hitler and Stalin. Bush and Bin Laden. We do not need to acknowledge the rotten core of the medical industry in the US, just arrest the bad guy - Shrikeli. Musk is Tesla. Gates is Microsoft.

And it could not possibly be our societal values causing climate change. It must be these guys I can count on one hand with their pompous jets flying everywhere, we think as we sit in our SUVs pondering whether Amazon will keep their promise to deliver the new single IOT lamp socket today...

People tend to get lost in mathematical technicalities in these discussion. Yes, even really dumb limitations leave 100k+ possibilities open, much more than you can brute force with a three-strike-lockdown. But that's not making it ok. Even if some crafty hackers on the other side of the world find a way to crack my account I'm confident the bank will look at the possible PR and legal costs and just refund my money fully, yes, yes, wonderful. That is not the problem.

The problem is user inertia. Let me speak as an averaged one, mixed with my own deeds prior to being knowledgeable in cyber security.

If I'm forced to remember my password because my password manager gets shut out or because of weird requirements, like uppercase letter + two numbers + non-alphanumeric, I'm nudged to use the same variation of my "default password" I used before, 27 times.

"DognameBirthyear&".

"+KeysThatAreCloseOnTheKeyboard1234+".

And of course, I use a slight variation of that for everything. Shady web-server-under-the-desk web forum in 2007 three of my friends were on. Indie game servers, another classic. Bank. Google. It also was my facebook password which I gave to my bff once to check if that cute boy really liked me. It also can be guessed by obtaining my ID and watching me super slowly type the added non-alphanumerical at the end.

This opens the very real possibility of revenge of ex partners, witty people at the coffee shop gaining access and the like. Crimes are committed overwhelmingly by people knowing the victim. No fancy AI is gonna help you with that, reasonable withdraws in the middle of the day in your time zone from your own MacBook's IP address. Good luck with customer support. You are enabling THAT with your dumb requirements.

And why?? You are a bank, hire someone who knows their job and does not just act on blog spam FUD or whereever you got the idea of exactly 5 digits numbers only. No, I choose to be mad about this because there is no excuse for such horrifying UX and security.

Just enforce a minimum limit of like four characters to prevent breach by putting down coffee mug on keyboard, enforce a maximum limit so you don't fall victim to an embarrassing flavor of DOS attack. If you feel fancy, throw a bunch of money at haveibeenpwned to check whether people are putting dumb passwords and let your local RegEx wizard check against all other silliness. There you go. I even waive you the $150k fee for that extraordinary piece of consulting.

Everybody here is drowning in their conspiracy theories...it's just culture.

Why do we shake hands, other than to give the other person our germs so that if I have a deadly disease the other guy will die too? Well maybe because it's just established. To show that you have respect for the other party, even that you are willing to follow customs. Calm down everyone!

Everybody here is dismissing the idea that business could be affected because book stores are in some kind of other category - what about tech and software like

book2: language learning platform

Galaxy Book2: Samsung Product

book.com: Barnes & Nobles URL

duelingbook.com: Yu-Gi-Oh! Simulator

books24.in: Online Billing

book24.ru: Web book store

bookweb: American bestseller association

...

I understand the idea of trademarks and would not call it a bad one - it makes sense that companies want to protect their name from direct copycats in the same sector. It is fair that some companies protect deviations from their actual name, too (Twitter, tweets. Microsoft Windows 10, Win10). But nobody calls "Facebook" "book" and it's not like they have a palette of products with the word in it, like iPhone/iPad/iOS or something. If somebody can explain how they're possibly acting in good faith here please elaborate, but I hope they get shut down, especially since it is well established that megacorps can just keep bullying regarding trademarks and the like, even if they are clearly wrong [0].

[0] https://nissan.com/

Yes, I don't think we are disagreeing here. Perhaps I should have said intention of regulation instead of regulation. The past events showed that the regulation was rotten, not watertight and prone to abuse. Thus there was a restructuring from the ground up, not only in the law but also in culture, and so Facebook's behavior is triggering all the red flags.

Right, a technically private institution which is built on capital of all EU member states and tightly knit into the complex web of EU entities is literally the same thing as a social media giant who denies even conducting business at scale in Germany or France to dodge taxes and comes freshly out of manipulating the US elections for profit.

Germany is not perfect, neither in ideology nor in execution. Neither is the EZB or the EU, for that matter. But this is just bad faith arguing.

Sorry, no. This is just reckless. I'm trying hard to assume good faith here.

"Wait and see" is a good approach to see whether your new electric city bus line is working or whether people prefer your website logo in red.

You can never, ever take back what became basic necessities on a nation level while being even remotely democratic. Once people have it, they won't give it back.

And you seriously think Facebook is to be given any such power, even after Cambridge Analytica? We're talking about currency, and billions of people. Lifes are very much at stake.

But sure, let's wait until Facebook uses Big financial data to get some populist party manipulated into power and a mere few thousand people die from the consequences, than be all enraged on reddit for a week and unable to change anything? I'll keep my typical German mindset, thanks

I'm of course not familiar with the specific mindsets and the history of this decision, but I want to share a bit of cultural perspective from Germany that is so far not really considered in this comment section:

Germany is very, very keen on preventing powerful entities from acting outside of regulation and similarly, if not more, on preventing a single entity to get in control of everything. This is largely due to some foobar in the last century, which I'm sure everyone is aware of.

So if Facebook, 10x of Germany's population comes around the corner with a proposal akin to "Hey do you mind if we just skip the paperwork part and just control currency, while actually being a social media tech giant" there going to be up against every trick in the book. This is not hypocrite behavior because Germany allowed some fun regional currency project no one is aware of some time ago. This is much more protecting the idea of the German society.

And personally, as a German, I'm really glad about it. You remember the hundreds of cases of worked with a scummy developer on an app once, now I'm blocked out of my email and all my files stories? Now imagine that, but with money and with a company who never even bothered to pretend it isn't evil - this is gonna be a no, thank you!

Set Duckduckgo as your default search engine and add "!w" anywhere into your search query. This will take you directly to the corresponding wiki article. It is a breeze to actually work with a search engine instead of against it!

There are >10k of these bangs, so I'm pretty sure you can even use this tool to directly search at other medicine related sites and portals (check here https://duckduckgo.com/bang) if necessary .

FFS USA, not every problem is a problem to solve by "the free market". You can see the America-Is-Great Mindset in a lot of these comments: Even the US has a problem with robocalls, so that must mean it's an unsolved problem obviously. So we have to solve it with our superior technology!!

Just no. Almost nobody else in the western world has this problem. How? Regulation. In Germany, if you get reported for unsolicited calling, the Bundesnetzagentur will come to you and give you a very hefty fine, per violation. Problem solved. I remember exactly four unsolicited calls in my life, two of them on a number which was published in a phone book for 15 years.

Spam calling is not something were there is net value created for society so we need an elaborated discussion of what is ok and what is not (like e.g. paid universities). It just sucks. Make it illegal, and then actually enforce that. The idea of creating a million dollar industry to create a telemarket arms race is...not good.

Defibrillators literally kill people after which you can manually revive them because their ventricular fibrillation is stopped. Maybe the metaphor is still fitting but I'm not sure you were going for it...

Not a bad article, but I still want to bring something up that I find problematic with a lot of communication advice.

How to actually act on it in a real situation? How do you remember and apply all these rules when you feel like the timing is off, when you're talking to the person who you know only works here because of weird circumstances and cares more about the opinion of the coworker next to them who always mocks corporate lingo? How do you deliver your delicate feedback in a situation where you both know you own the other guy? This stuff is IMO the thing that seperates the really good talkers from the rest of us - and I was never really able to catch up with such articles who seem to assume a limited number of conditions to adhere to; like an "advice giving robot" to steal their phrase. How do you improve in being an advice giving human?

The article misses the point a bit. There are 3D maps of the world, or rather, you can make your own on a weekend. Topographic data is out there for most things, the problem is just it's very inconsistent and of course, resolution. And I guess for the whole world you do need a decent computer.

To prove my point, here is some art I made [1] from open data (I think NASA) with Blender and QGIS, meaning free software stack on very much a normal computer. My model was the state Schleswig Holstein, a german county, but as said, you can find data for pretty much everything. The resolution is not astonishing, but enough to spot Germany's only high sea island, the "Wattenmeer" where tide causes some spots to lie below water level on average, the mouth of the Elbe and more cool stuff when you know where to look.

My point isn't to downplay the effort of EarthDEM, I just want to make more people aware of what is already very much out there :)

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/rZUTajX

Not a good article.

It slices across complex societal issues, like free speech and employment, hate, internet phenomena, social media amplifying, slaps some veganism elevator pitch on it and calls it a day. I don't think much of value can be extracted from it, since the length just doesn't do the complexity justice.

Also, this comment section is already mostly derailed and is degrading into anecdata and people discussing guessing what the article isn't about. Come on HN, you can do better!

Dropbox current direction just makes me sad.

I struggled with file management for a long time - balancing accessibility from phone, highly effective programming environments, backing up large quantities of not-small photos, that stuff. So I sat down one afternoon, drafted a directory structure, subbed to Dropbox and...it worked so well. Synced my configs between machines, got an Android app which could preview lot's of filetypes, rarely thinking about the whole thing. I always thought of Dropbox quite UNIX-like in a sense, do one thing, but really well.

And then things just kept getting worse. "Checking for changes" on my old shitty VAIO running Ubuntu went from taking 5 minutes to taking half an hour to taking 3 hours and never finishing syncing. Time sensitive file accessing got harder and harder because of continuous UI changes. I tried doing stuff with Smart Sync (or Selective Sync?) but got lost in the complex matrix of which feature does what on what OS with what plan. Webapp keeps nagging me about upgrading, even though I'm literally using less than 5% of my (paid) plan. Come on, show me some valuation as customer, or better, nothing at all.

This got long, so I guess what I'm saying is: Please go back to being a folder that syncs, and I'll be just be ok with your nonchalant mail that you're randomly raising prices.

Oh no, making millions with a literal scam gets you criticized?

Please just stop bringing this up in this context. They literally sold a single player game as multiplayer, along with a plethora of features which were said to be in the game at launch day which where never implemented. See yourself at [0].

The only reason this keeps being brought up is because Sean Murray has extraordinary talent at tickling the medias gamers-are-evil trope. This has nothing to do with payment methods.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no...