dpark

You missed the point.

> If you haven't used your $whatever in a year, why do you want to use it now? Replace $whatever with whatever you want and you'll see how absurd this question is.

This is a silly statement specifically because the choice of “$whatever” determines whether it’s “absurd”. It’s definitely not absurd to assume that a year old sandwich is trash, while it is absurd to assert that an unaccessed safe deposit box is trash.

But of course you also pay the bank for your safe deposit box. If you stop paying then they absolutely will discard the contents (or send them off to the state, depending on laws). No one stores abandoned junk for free. If you want you pay Google for your account I bet they’ll keep it even if you never log in.

I would personally not want my account recovery tied to an account I rarely use. That seems full of unnecessary risk. What if you forget that Gmail password? What if it’s compromised and you don’t even notice for almost a year? What if Google decides to change their retention for unused accounts to just 6 months?

That’s a very narrow reading. The parable was in response to the question “who’s my neighbor” in the “love thy neighbor” statement and Jesus basically said “even those you hate”(i.e. the Samaritans).

> I’ve never heard of any such group in my entire independent Southern Baptist life.

I grew up in the South and distinctly remember the Southern Baptist preachings against interracial marriage based on selective (mis)readings of the Bible, against homosexuality based on selective readings of the Old Testament (pick and choose indeed; hate gays while eating your BBQ pork). I remember the constant calls for boycott of Disney parks because of “gay days”.

I don’t know what it’s like I’m a Southern Baptist church now, but I seriously doubt it’s changed much.

If you leave your ham sandwich in the office fridge for a single week, anyone is justified in throwing it away.

The trouble is you think that you are in possession of a ham sandwich that Google is taking away when in reality you’ve left your ham sandwich in Google’s fridge and they are sick of storing the obviously-abandoned sandwich for you.

See also: https://xkcd.com/1150/

He’s not a hacker in the sense used by people here. He’s a glorified script kiddie. His group couldn’t even deploy ransomware with two admin accounts. They aren’t competent.

“If you haven't used your dirty tissue in a year, why do you want to use it now?”

“If you haven't used your ham sandwich in a year, why do you want to use it now?”

“If you haven't used your receipt in a year, why do you want to use it now?”

Ah, yes. I see what you mean. Truly absurd.

This feels like you just have that retort in your pocket waiting to use it because it didn’t seem relevant here.

What does this even mean? Why have the junior engineer if they aren’t irrationally invested in the code the write?

Probably something about the personal time and effort invested in a thing. I would feel much less personally invested if, for example, I created an outline of a story and then paid a ghostwriter to fill it in.

98% of HN commenters reply to the interpretation of the article they feel most capable of arguing against, which is usually the least charitable one.

If the client has that, they definitely don’t need an external party to ask Claude to do code cleanup for them.

> It's de-personalized

I had an interesting conversation with a junior engineer who made this observation. She shipped a feature, we gathered data, and based on data we pivoted to a different design. She called out that she wasn’t attached to the code because AI wrote it. Not that she didn’t care about quality or effectiveness of the product, but the personal emotional attachment to the code itself was not there. Probably a healthy thing. I’ve seen senior engineers defend mediocre code because they wrote it and changing it was an ego hit.

Apparently they were nylon instead of polyester. So less comfortable, yes. Plastic blade, maybe not.

Problem is do you trust the government to produce a proven reference design and test data? I have doubts that the best automotive engineers are working for any governments.

More likely any reference design would come from a private company and the regulation would end up establishing an effective monopoly. Everyone has to implement the reference design because the liability is too high for not implementing the government-blessed one.

Yeah. I’m not certain if the Amazon ones were actually the same as the ones I linked. But extremely similar at least.

It’s been a long time. Very plausible that we did get the ones with the styrofoam sometimes and I just don’t remember. I know we got the cooler bag sometime.

Optimizing for dollar cost. Human time costs more than the extra packaging.

Results would doubtless be different if they were optimizing for minimal environmental impact or produced waste.

They must have been using different crates for you (different region or perhaps era). For me they were standard plastic bins[1] with a separate “cold bag” inside for frozen stuff. No actual styrofoam I recall, although this was also over 10 years ago so I could be misremembering.

[1] https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-9745G

I do too, but also sometimes the boxes are the correct size. With standardized bins I imagine they would rarely be reasonable.

> Go within an hour or so of opening.

Hah. It’s such a PITA that Costco includes an hour earlier entry on the top tier membership.

Amazon did that with an earlier version of their grocery delivery service. I assume the cost and logistics of managing and cleaning the bins just wasn’t worth it because their grocery service delivers in paper bags now.

One problem with the bins for normal items is that rarely will they be packed to the brim. I imagine the overall item density would drop significantly if they started using standardized bins instead of appropriately sized boxes for the items.

I don’t know about health care but a lot of stuff in the US is set up for megacorps and individuals but nothing in between. As an individual you can easily get a self funded 401k plan. As a small business you basically can’t.

Of course the US still biases towards megacorps who get to do things like distribute dividends taxed at capital gains rates instead of ordinary income like sole proprietorships.

Attacking someone for leaving Google because they are no longer comfortable with Google’s actions is some combo of virtue signaling and counterproductive purity testing.

You’re not influencing anyone’s behavior nor meaningfully educating anyone. You’re basking in your feeling of moral superiority while you look down your nose.

> Google worked with NSA on PRISM

Complied with legal orders. Do you have evidence that they did anything more?

> CIA on Iraq war

Are you talking about the Google earth data or something else?

> jigsaw was 2010

What does this mean? What did their jigsaw project do that I missed?

That’s one possibility. Could also be “it got worse”. Could also be a combo of the two.

This “holier than thou” stuff is lame. Shaming people for having a job. You working for UNICEF?

> what Google is doing today is just as morally acceptable as the things they were doing in 2017 were at the time. We just pushed the baseline down and normalized the ever worsening behaviors.

You can’t hold together your premise for 2 sentences. If you admit that the behaviors are “ever worsening” then you cannot logically believe that it was the same 9 years ago.

The real problem isn’t the revocation list itself. It’s just a list of numbers. If you get a credential that has been revoked it certainly tells you that it’s been revoked, but not much else. Assuming of course that it’s actually a revocation list being fetched and not a “is this particular cred revoked” call, because that would reveal that the cred is being presented to the caller.

The real question is how do you know when to revoke? How does the government know if a cred is being used by a minor or used broadly, indicating it’s been shared? These imply some sort of feedback from the entities accepting the creds and mean that the privacy guarantee is breached.

(I’m also not sure how revocation lists work with zero knowledge but maybe there is some crypto magic for that.)

I did not say it should be thrown away. I said that it can’t be done while preserving privacy the way advocates claim. It’s totally plausible that the trade-off is reasonable, but I also don’t think we should pretend that the trade-off isn’t there.

> You're now arguing about something which isn't even in the proposal from the EU

Yeah. The HN link here is not to the EU proposal. It’s to this dude’s article, which is very clearly what I was responding to.

> I guess to demonstrate to people that this already happens regularly with passports, ID cards, driving licenses etc

No. That’s not what he was doing at all. He very explicitly was not talking about a passport or ID card.

He was describing a physical analog to the digital proposal.

> This sort of solution requires a central issuer/authority to know about the tokens, there's no way round that as there is no way round governments issuing passports if you want border control.

You seem to have completely lost the plot. We aren’t discussing passports. No one is talking about anonymous international travel here.

Children drinking themselves into alcohol induced comas is fairly rare. Teenagers consuming large amounts of explicit pornography is not at all rare.

I agree nothing will replace parenting. The children who do drink themselves into comas are largely enabled by adults (who are also generally committing a crime). But there is harm reduction the government can and probably should do.

I have to say, as much as I think the article author here is naive, I also have to wonder if the net positives outweigh the net negatives. Uploading an id and face scan to a pornography site seems like the worst of all possible scenarios. Getting a government issue credential is better than that at least.

It’s not my invention. It’s in the article. The physical card proposed contains nothing traceable. “They issue a card that says only one thing: "over 18". The card carries official seals, signatures, and anti-forgery features.”

If you put an id on the card, then it’s a layer of indirection, but you’ve still handed them a unique personal identifier.

Traceable credentials are fundamentally not privacy preserving, because that’s what traceable means.