davidjohnstone

I'm more of a desktop user, but I wasn't happy with what was out there so I made my own (but only for Melbourne): https://davidjohnstone.net/weather/melbourne . I'm tempted to turn it into a proper Australia-wide product. The BoM's data licensing fees (in the order of $5k/year) are a bit of a barrier.

Yeah, the network effect is strong, but there's never been a better time to challenge it. I think the potential of success is partly based on quality of the alternative, but also on the direction Twitter goes from here. It doesn't seem like the worst bet to make.

It seems its decentralised nature is a hindrance to some or many potential users[1]. My impression is that it's often treated as an alternative, but not really a truly viable alternative, and the field is wide open for something better.

1. For example https://twitter.com/hwkanderson/status/1588523823426859008

I'm skeptical that it's a viable alternative for most people, who don't care about the fact that it's decentralised.

Thanks, that's interesting. Yurou Zhong, in her book Chinese Grammatology, traces the end of the latinisation movement to a precise date in 1958 when Zhou Enlai gave a speech "当前文字改革的任务" ("The Current Tasks of the Script Reform"), where he announced the current tasks are to simplify characters, promote putonghua and issue and implement a pinyin plan, conspicuously not including further alphabetisation.

The comparison between Latin in Europe in the early modern period and literary Chinese in the Sinosphere for much of history is pretty good (and often made). Latin and literary Chinese are very different languages, but had similar roles in society by being the standard written language in a world where everybody spoke different languages (that were heavily influenced by, or even derived from, but different to the written form).

> This is only because the plan for simplified characters died midway through. There was a second round of simplifications that would have gone even further with talks of full phoneticization if that succeeded.

I was under the impression that most of the debates about moving from Chinese characters to alphabetic writing happened in the pre-PRC period. For example, Lu Xun supported Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] in the 30s. These proposals failed for a variety of reasons. Simplified characters were introduced in the 50s. Pinyin was also introduced in the 50s, but unlike previous latinisations meant to replace the Chinese characters, it was only ever intended as a teaching tool. I think there was still a thought to replace Chinese characters with alphabetic writing at a later stage, but, in practice, it pretty much died in the 40s.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinxua_Sin_Wenz

The New York Times' article on her life has a couple of corrections for things that look like they were written earlier and not updated with the latest when published. For example:

> The earlier version misstated at one point the length of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It was seven decades, not “almost seven decades.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/world/europe/queen-elizab...

I wondered the same. The main downside is that you need to do some processing to extract the entries from the dump and get the plain text of the fields you want.

I'm also a little surprised they didn't think Wiktionary was sufficient for languages apart from English. I could be wrong, but my impression is that it's pretty good for major languages[1].

1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary

I also made a fast-loading news website. It should be roughly as fast as yours. https://www.thenewseachday.com/

You put square brackets around parameters. e.g., routes/greet/[name].tsx

https://fresh.deno.dev/docs/getting-started/dynamic-routes

I read this a month ago. Excellent book. Incredible story.

You're right about the numbers often being expressed in W/kg, because power to weight is more important than power when going uphill. For big climbs (more than half an hour or so), that number is closer to 6W/kg for the best, or maybe a little more (especially if you go back in time a bit for some reason…).

2,400W is around (and possibly more than) what the strongest track cyclists can sustain for about five seconds.

Tour de France cyclists racing up mountains generally sustain around 400W, which is enough to go 25+km/h for hills that aren't too steep.

To improve compression of a sorted list of words you can replace the (initial) letters repeated from the word above with spaces before compression and add them back as an extra step after decompression. For example, if the previous word was "apple", the next entry will be " y" ("apply", edit: HN removes extra spaces, so this should be four spaces + "y") ("apple" will probably already be entered as " le" (three spaces + "le")). In theory a compression algorithm could handle this automatically, but in practice this gives better compression.

This is conceptually similar to what OP does by storing the (numerical) difference between the words. Also, if you have a list of numbers that aren't random, they generally compress better if you turn it into a list of the differences between the numbers.

A simple compression algorithm (miniLZO is apparently 6KB compiled) might be small enough and save enough bytes with compression to make it worth it for OP.

According to Wikipedia's list[1], it's the strongest earthquake Australia has had since 1997, and that one was in a remote part of Western Australia.

"A Seismologist tells @abcmelbourne it’s the biggest earthquake Victoria has experienced since European settlement" [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Austral... 2. https://twitter.com/bridgerollo/status/1440467927140999174

My understanding is that all numbers in the dump correspond with Facebook accounts, so this shouldn't be the reason.

Another option would be that someone else has that number listed for their account. Has Facebook always required confirmation that a number is valid? I saw one my friends' numbers in the data except the account had a different name.

I don't think that helps, because the address space of numbers is too small so anything is reversible. My solution to this was to generate 99 extra random numbers that start with the same digits as the real one and send them all to the server. The front-end then shows just the result the user cares about but the back-end doesn't know which is which.

https://www.thenewseachday.com/private-facebook-phone-number...

I don't know what there is to do other than to be aware that the combination of your name and number (and maybe some other details) are not private, so there's no reason to trust anyone just because they know those things.

As far as seeing what was leaked, you could find the data yourself (but I'm uncomfortable giving instruction on how to get it). It would be nice if it was possible to extend the tool to be able to send the information for a number to the number (because that's the only way I can think of that demonstrates ownership of the data) but that can't be done for free and it therefore seems too complicated to set up.

Done.

https://www.thenewseachday.com/private-facebook-phone-number...

You haven't heard of thenewseachday.com because I quietly put it up online last week.

I laughed, then had another idea: Rather than send the server one number to check, generate another 99 random numbers in the client and send them all to the server. The client receives the status of all of them and shows the status of the entered number. The server never knows the actual number, and the phone number address space is saturated enough that many or most of the random numbers are also real numbers.

Oh, you're right, there are some email addresses, but not many. In the first 10,000 rows of Australian data, there are 62. I could be wrong, but I think the extra data about users (i.e., location, email address, relationship status, workplace) was scraped from Facebook so it only includes it when it was already publicly visible.

> I'd imagine that could be more successful on here, heh.

You're right about that!

If I was to make a HN-friendly version, I'd probably make static JSON files that list all the numbers, indexed by the first four or so digits. When you enter a number, the first digits are sent to the server, and the appropriate JSON file is returned. That list is then searched client-side for the full number and the result displayed. The code should be simple and easy to verify that the full number doesn't leave the client, while maintaining the same simple user interface I already have. Variations of this idea could be more secure (i.e., only enter the start of the number and search for your number yourself in a long list) but less user-friendly.

I don't actually have any plans on implementing this though. I feel satisfied enough with what I have.

(I don't think hashing would work because the address space is too small and reversing is too easy. There aren't any email addresses.)

I don't have much insight on this. I accidentally downloaded that one first when I meant to download the Australian one, but quickly realised my mistake because the CSV file inside the archive was correctly spelt. Then I got the actual Australian one.

Interesting, I didn't know you could do that. When I write "I'm not saving the phone number you enter" I mean to convey the idea that I'm not doing anything else with that number. As far as I know, the number and any derivative products of that number only exists inside the request context and are not stored in any way. There could be bugs, or I could be lying, but I'm not doing anything underhanded like that.

It is the Australian version (although I accidentally downloaded that Austrian data first). I turned the phone numbers into local Australian numbers without the international code, where mobile numbers are always 04?? ??? ???.

I also made an Australian version: https://www.thenewseachday.com/facebook-phone-numbers-austra...

The data is separated by country and it seems it isn't perfectly consistent (i.e., the Australian data is one CSV file while the American data is six colon separated files), so there's effort in adding each additional country.

I also made an Australian version: https://www.thenewseachday.com/facebook-phone-numbers-austra...

I created https://www.thenewseachday.com/facebook-phone-numbers-us and https://www.thenewseachday.com/facebook-phone-numbers-austra... to check if phone numbers are in the data. So far I've only made them for US and Australian numbers.