brerlapn

I know this is a bit in the weeds, but I recently got an LG V10 on T-Mobile, and there is an option in the Calls menu that allows me to "Reject calls from all private numbers". I can also add numbers to a call reject list, as well. My previous HTC One M8 had the reject by number (but not for private numbers), as well.

My dad has a V10 on Verizon and they don't have the reject private calls option--so it would appear that some carriers are removing functionality that is otherwise available on at least some phones. Figured I'd share because I had before assumed it was a technical problem to block the private numbers, and have been happily surprised now that I don't get calls from "Unknown" anymore.

Regarding the Vitamin D3 and K2 quotes, I have seen the same information from multiple sources. Vitamin D3 is what your body produces, and what you would get from eating fish. When I've read up on the topics I've never seen any counterpoints that you should be preferring D2 or K1.

Pickpockets have been a perennial concern on the DC Metro system. One of my coworkers had his iPod pulled out of his hand, resting on his stomach, while he was sitting with his eyes closed. Transit isn't somewhere I'd want to be blind to what was going on around me.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (http://nmai.si.edu/) has a lot of publicly available resources and references that would definitely be worth incorporating at least as additional resources.

Having worked in identity management, I suspect that some of the benefits are oversold. The chain of identity proofing for a traditional driver's license involves both "who is the person who holds this document?", "how do I know the document is trustworthy?" (i.e., not a forgery), and to a lesser extent "is the information on this document accurate?".

It's hard to imagine how a bar or venue would be able to rely on an electronic record of a license displayed on a device that is not under the venue's control. Physical driver's licenses have anti-counterfeiting measures such as holograms or secondary shadow photos of the bearer that require more than just a good laser printer to fake. It would be trivial to write an app that faked all the functionality of a license that I show the bouncer on my phone, so they would be unable to rely on it to answer "is the information being displayed [age, name] accurate?" without some sort of additional transaction with the central license database to verify the license. Such an additional transaction would add a lot of friction to the simple act of flashing a license at a bouncer or bartender, with all sorts of potential for outages (see, e.g., Virginia's IT outages since they outsourced the state IT en toto to Northrop--DMV's unavailable for days at a time). If you owned a business, would you allow your ability to even be open on any given day dependent on whether your state was managing their data access well enough to be available (and with low enough latency to the transaction not to interfere with running your business)? That's just one slice of business, and I haven't even gone into potential issues of the data trail such transactions would create, or the heightened damage identity theft would pose, or the immaturity and blindspots in government identity management policy development.

I think governments should absolutely be exploring ways to make data like identity-proofing via driver's licenses widely accessible via services for use by citizens and businesses, but even there I'm a bit skeptical as most organizations are horrible at controlling access to sensitive information even at the internal level, much less making it available via an API. TSA PreCheck (the vendor's relevant experience) is such a different beast in it's use case from a broad credential like a driver's license that it's hard not to expect gaping security and policy issues to emerge as they start to roll these out.

I geek out about identity tech, use 2FA wherever I can, do this professionally, and am currently wrestling with a couple of Yubikeys for even more 2FA fun, but I can't imagine opting in to an electronic driver's license, and if anyone asked me I'd vehemently advise against it.

From the article, you don't hand the police your phone--you would authorize the officer via the app to view your license on their own device or laptop.

There can be odd behaviors with third party apps, too, and if you get dependent on that service you're at their mercy if they don't fix the issue.

I mentioned in a separate comment, Sunrise substituted a generic email address for mine in an invite response, but with my name ("Brer Lapn <invite@sunrise.am>"), which when someone replied to the group began to propagate across multiple co-workers' Outlook as the autofill address for my name. I missed email from some people for a week before one of my coders noticed it and let me know, at which point I had to get colleagues to forward me any message with that address, contact the sender and ask them to remove it from their Outlook autofill settings, and repeat ad nauseum until correspondence started coming to me again.

I sent a bug report, they responded "we'll look into it" and never heard another word about it, so for all I know it is still happening. If we'd have integrated that into the company processes rather than just my using it to consolidate my calendars it would have been a serious problem.

Integration of third party tools with Google Apps is nice, but having been burned using Sunrise and having had more than enough troubles using Gmail outside of the web app (such as via Outlook or Thunderbird) or native Android client the shine on Google Apps is a bit dull for me at this point. I'd be much happier working with services that use well-defined open standards that work with my choice of client software.

I know that Sunrise isn't a Google-apps specific software, but after: * a co-worker sent me a screenshot of a meeting invite I had accepted via their app (along with a facetious question "You get a new assistant? Who's 'Sunrise' and is she cute?") that makes Sunrise branding too prominent for it to be appropriate for a professional environment, and * finding out that instead of masking a response with my email address it had sent it from a generic "invites@sunrise.am"-style email but showing up as my name "Brer Lapn <invites@sunrise.am>", and having to then contact over a dozen colleagues who had been emailing the black hole address at Sunrise--- I'd say these services are less suitable for business purposes than the standards that Fastmail uses (and publicizes). Fastmail has never screwed around with my emails or calendar invites, and unlike Gmail I can use multiple different clients without it filling my drafts folder with autosaves.

TL;DR, if I had a say I'd be running our company tools on Fastmail rather than Google Apps (although deliverability is definitely something I'd consider a showstopper, I've never had an issue with FM).

That is a pretty interesting idea for a sub-plot, and can be worked in more realistically than the amnesia/split-personality kind of plot that is more common (Memento, Tyler Durden). Sort of an exploration or investigation of a character's cultural/community genealogy.

SlateStarCodex had an essay in April that examined this study pretty carefully:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/15/trouble-walking-down-th...

He looks at some odd experimental choices in the study, and goes into some depth about other contradictory studies. I thought it was a pretty balanced and thorough analysis.

I've been thinking about this, as well, and would be interested to see your thoughts on it, even if just a cut and paste of your advice to ak217. My email is brerlapn at fastmail.fm. Much appreciated...

You can install the Amazon Video app on Android now via the Amazon app. No Chromecast, so I haven't really used it much, and it doesn't look like you can tell it to download shows onto your SD card instead of internal storage. I'm guessing I'll end up using it for limited times when I wouldn't have a TV anyway, like airplane trips.

I run an ad blocker on all my browsers except IE (which I generally don't use unless a site like Fandango has made it impossible to finish a transaction while using Disconnect/uBlock, in which case half the time I'll just abandon the site and go to a different vendor). I make a habit of whitelisting sites that I find valuable and don't engage in sketchy advertising practices. I even pay for Newsblur as my RSS reader so that I can pull the actual page up in the viewer and allow for the site to get my clicks. The rules laid out in TFA would go a long way to easing my blocking even further, and when I used Ad Blocker I enabled the acceptable ads list. In the past few years, though, I've also started to see advertising networks as potential malware threats and think advertising standards should incorporate security standards, as well. When I go to a page that NoScript shows has 30 or 40 scripts with unrecognizable names, I'm less likely to go back to the site at all, much less whitelist any of the blocked domains. If I was running an enterprise IT department, I'd be more likely to blacklist advertising domains than timewaster sites because of the threat of malicious payloads through those advertising networks.

TFA lays out ways to make advertising more humane for viewers, but I am curious how aware or involved with technical approaches like VRM or Kantara Initiative's User-Managed Access (UMA) to making permission-based advertising more feasible. In the past year I bought two new high ticket items--a new car and a new laptop. I had to do two phase of research for each of them--what is even out there as far as features and then who offers the features I think are interesting. I would expect that a highly qualified lead would have made any advertising much more lucrative during either of those phases (advertising that I would have actually welcomed) than a bunch of simple broadcast ad views (which I mostly blocked anyway). I would love to see advertisers and browser developers work with groups like those to make advertising not just less obnoxious but something that I could actively consider useful.

It's funny, but I actually have more innate suspicion of people saying "it's not so bad" than I do of the doomsayers--and I know better. One of my favorite quips is "just because it confirms your worst fears doesn't make it true." (And I often have to use it as a mantra to remind myself that I know better than to believe whatever bleak headline someone just shared on Facebook.)

For those who find Rosling interesting, I'd recommend http://www.gapminder.org/ , which includes the tool he talks about in his TED presentation.

Would this be used in conjunction with an authorization API to control access to the interface? So you would have an OAuth API to be able to even make a call to the ABI, which then has the built in security features of limiting security-threatening system calls, or would CloudABI have it's own access control as well as capability-security? Or am I muddling the concept?

I've learned a bit about APIs, but this is a new (and quite interesting) concept, particularly as far as security goes, but this looks quite interesting.

I've been known to drink Budweiser. Does that mean that I believe that women will suddenly find me sexy and the Swedish bikini team will appear as I pop off the bottlecap to lavish me with scantily-clad attention?

You are conflating the marketing copy of the company with the intentions and motivations of the users. Just because something confirms your most cynical expectations doesn't make it true.

Ashley Madison has absolutely no idea whether any particular user, if they are married, is on there to do anything with their profile other than browse, or whether their spouse knows they are on there, or for that matter if a couple is browsing the site together as part of their joint fantasy life, or if they are in an open relationship, or a number of other scenarios that have no impact on you and really provide no basis for you to cast judgment about their motivations--especially in an absence of evidence.

See again, my cite to David Brin's article on addiction to outrage.

IMO, you're getting downvoted because your judgment of people on AM assumes facts not in evidence (i.e., that users of AM are there to cheat on their unknowing spouses), and then judges those people based on those facts that only exist in your head. It's self-aggrandizing, and the tone doesn't come off as participation in a discourse about morality as much as a narcissistic statement about the identity you'd like people to assign you ("wow, duncan_bayne is hardcore judgey about those AM users. He must really be against adultery.") See also [0]. Finally, it's also a derail from the reasons people are discussing the story that is more HN-relevant (technical and security aspects, user data practices, etc.).

So to answer your closing questions - 1) "no", people discuss morality all the time on HN, especially in relation to economic relations, 2) Probably "yes", because your judgment says more about what you want to say about adultery than about the actual behavior of AM users (who could have all sorts of non-adulterous reasons to be on the site), 3) clearly "no" (see (1)), but jumping to that overarching assumption that people are downvoting your comments because they just don't like morality is part of that self-aggrandizing impression I'm talking about.

If this was a dump of Petsmart's customer database, and you posted a bunch of comments judging the Petsmart customers as deserving to be exposed because they bought their pet from a puppy mill and some PETA links, people would downvote you, too--partially for the substance and partially just for derailing the conversation.

[0] http://www.davidbrin.com/addiction.html

I haven't done a deep dive into how DDG works, but "In Partnership with Yandex" is on the search results. Yandex is a Russian search engine, and while you may find the NSA snooping intrusive and obnoxious, Russia isn't exactly a privacy-respecting libertarian utopia. No one ever seems to mention the Russian connection in discussions about DDG, though. If this is something you've considered and reckoned through to it not being a concern, I would be quite interested in your reasoning.

Your reply changes the definition of "opt-is". He's not saying "Hello is opt-in because you can choose not to use an active feature if you don't want to", he's saying it's not enabled unless you actually use it by clicking on it, otherwise it is an inert feature that isn't doing anything. You have to take actions (opt in) in order for it to be active. If Firefox included an extra theme with the download, but I had to specifically go in and choose that theme, it would be analogous. Ask Toolbar is not analogous, because it is operational as soon it is installed.

Rhapsody allows search by composer. Search "Gustav Mahler" and you get all of the recordings of his work, regardless of the orchestra or if it's in a compilation with other composers. Looks like Google All Music does the same; no experience with Spotify, though.

I share one of the higher-level commenter's concerns--the degradation of the sound quality. Being able to hear the valves on the instruments and the full range of music gives a much more immersive experience. I had a recording of Count Basie opening for Frank Sinatra (it's basically the hour before they recorded Sinatra at the Sands), and you can hear the audience's glasses like you were sitting in the venue. I love streaming for my DeadMau5 and background music as much as the next monkey, but I still buy the classical and jazz recordings on CD for those extra effects.

You're making a fair point--and feeling like you have everything on the line at every step is most likely going to ramp up someone's level of anxiety and stress with all the negative impacts that entails. However, I also think there is a counterbalancing point that framing life as an all-encompassing economic gamble actually reinforces that anxiety and stress by making it seem like economics is the whole of existence--and for folks who are feeling overwhelmed by feeling like their failure or success hangs in the balance it is likely to drown out a more healthy counter-narrative which is that you're probably not "ruined" if you fail. It'll suck (believe me I'm still paying shitloads of student loans for a career I quit almost a decade ago), but you can still have friends and community and value things in life that aren't work or career. People who are at the point of attempting suicide have drowned out all those positives with a tunnel vision on the pressure of success/failure that is blinding them to other possibilities (see comments above about people who survived jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge).

So yeah, the economics of operating without the feeling of a safety net sucks, but people who are starting to crumble under that safety net need to hear that the safety net isn't just their runway, it's also all the family and friends and life that they have or can build. Unfortunately in this particular case it sounds like she was in a transition and didn't quite have those solidly in place yet.

As an aside to this discussion, your extension is quite excellent and saves me the RAM of keeping profile windows open during some of the extended HN debates where profile info/bio was helpful to understand where participants were coming from, or even just to check things like karma/profile age before I follow a link. Glad you mentioned it here, as I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to go looking for a solution to that particular problem.

TFA clearly doesn't support your re-written straw man headline, and by comparison:

- Kresser: 21 citations to "scientific, unbiased, peer reviewed, modern research"

- NYT OpEd guest writer: naked unsupported assertion that "most of these assertions [about gluten], however, are contradicted by significant evidence" providing no references or scientific discussion

Which one is snake oil again? More ironic, the Kresser article does talk about gluten as an auto-immune trigger, making your dismissal seem even more knee-jerk. There are people doing serious work on nutrition, but you won't have much luck finding them in the NYT, much less the OpEd section.

Field Notes have the quadrille pages. The cover is cheaper and less durable than the Moleskin cover, but the pages hold up fine, and I'd rather have pages that don't lose integrity. If you're looking for a larger size notebook than 3.5"x5.5" then Moleskine definitely has an advantage--FN is pretty much just notecard size.

He was responding to the "guns are legal in the airports", which in many places in the US they are outside of the 'secure' area. I don't think he was disputing that TSA misses guns.

"Informed helplessness" probably isn't the best frame for the concept, but maybe more like a cost-benefit analysis for giving a shit (CBAGAS), or the Gaullic shrug ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). My brother and I both lived in DC once upon a time. We both got parking tickets, some of which were legitimate and some of which were made up by the meter maids because the DC government is banking that you'd rather just pay $20 than go through the hassle of an appeal (which they usually just ignore). I would get enraged; my brother would just shrug and say "cost of living in the city--you want to walk home from your favorite bar or to your favorite restaurant, this is what you put up with." It wasn't that he thought it was okay, he just decided it wasn't worth the mental energy to get mad about it.

I still get mad about them, but I can see that his perspective is far preferable.

I also found Seligman's What You Can Change and What You Can't to be informative.

For the author-- the mockup graphic of the HN front page was a nice tough and made me laugh out loud. I'd be interested in a citation to the quote referencing gambling and bullying, too.

Cryoshon, a reference to at least some books like Burns' Feeling Good, or a synopsis of the techniques (like how you would apply Seligman's personal-general-permanent framework to Burns' triple column cognitive distortions tool), would be helpful, I agree.

And while I personally think stoicism is an underrated and misunderstood philosophy, I don't think the article is really getting at what you ascribe in your last sentence, because the article isn't saying that your circle of influence is immutably fixed. Unlearning helplessness may mean having the wisdom to accept things you can't change, but it could also mean thinking of ways to increase your circle of influence to be more in line with your circle of concern. Most people would say slavery is within their circle of concern, but would also feel as though it was well outside their circle of influence. And to some degree, it is, but you can still increase your sense of influence by donating money to effective anti-slavery organizations, for instance, or paying attention to where your consumer goods are produced. But you can also reasonably reduce your circle of concern without it being a surrender by acknowledging that there are bad things happening in the distance that you aren't reasonably obligated to spend energy worrying about.

Deciding that your circle of influence is small, and that trying to change that is aspiring beyond your place sounds itself like learned helplessness, though.

You've gotten a lot of good advice here, and I just wanted to chime in on a related point to this--different anti-depressants may be more effective for you at different stages of your treatment. If you start on Lexapro/Prozac/Paxil, and it works great, but after six months you start to feel like it's not as effective, definitely talk to your doctor about looking at different meds, even other SSRI's. There are subtle differences in how they work that can make a difference (I'm not a doctor or bio guy, but they affect different receptors differently, even when they are primarily aimed at serotonin). Depression isn't a monolithic problem (it feels like it, but there can be multiple factors feeding into it), so as you do the talk therapy and the drugs your equilibrium between maladaptive cognitions, chemical imbalances, relationship and work patterns, etc. can shift, just be aware of how you're feeling (and if differently, how) and keep your doctor apprised. Also, therapy can be intimidating because you're talking about problems that feel insurmountable while you're depressed--but just spill it; they get less insurmountable once you've expressed them. Sometimes just hearing yourself say something out loud can make it obvious what the issue is, or how you could look at it differently.

Good luck, it's worth the effort. Something I read that I thought was useful to keep in mind when dealing with this stuff: you're not depressed because the world is shit; you think the world is shit because you're depressed.

Thank you for mentioning this. I would have likely never heard about the tour in time otherwise; an upvote isn't enough good karma for you, sir/madame!