spunker540

Direct-to-consumer businesses have taken off due to the internet. It’s never been easier to start a sock company or glasses company etc. Historically you had to get in to the big box retailers to sell anything non-local but the internet has flipped that on its head. Even big platforms like eBay and Shopify (and even Amazon) are offering small businesses and individuals way more opportunities to sell than they would have had pre-internet.

Furthermore in a direct to consumer world, incumbency matters way less. People had fewer options pre-internet (whatever was at their local store) and now brands largely compete on quality (reviews/ratings) rather than pure placement and marketing.

I agree that claims like "the earth is flat" and "vaccinations cause autism" should probably be removed - but the trump ad in question while likely to be false, does not constitute an outright falsehood. If you ask anyone on the right they'll say it's probably true and at the very least just as truthful as any leftist political ad.

Furthermore, in the 1400s an ad claiming that the world is round would have been deemed outright false, and in the early 1900s an ad claiming equality between all races would have been deemed outright false, and in 2001 an ad claiming that Iraq had no WMDs would have been deemed outright false -- yet all are now known to be true.

Thus you end up with 3rd party clients gaining access to data of others who never granted them explicit access (aka Cambridge Analytica) through friend connections.

Yeah I’m a software engineer for GAFAM, am fully tech literate and I like my Echo Dot. I’m simply not concerned about the privacy issues. I have yet to see evidence that they are using my data in any way that I would object to.

I thought it’d be fun to go back through my two years of recordings to see if it captured any accidental conversations, and it was so boring to go through. They are entirely expected questions like “what time is it” “what’s the weather today” “set a timer” “what’s the cubs score” “when do the cubs play” “how many games back are the cubs” “how many games left are in the cubs season” “Do the cubs even have a chance at this point”

I don’t get why accountability “requires change”— could you explain?

Part of the problem is a lot of internal conversation about suicide can actually trigger surviving people with suicidal tendencies. It’s a pragmatic recommendation supported by the medical community to limit communication related to a suicide; it’s not just a PR move.

It’s called suicidal contagion: https://www.hhs.gov/answers/mental-health-and-substance-abus...

I totally agree with this. I fall into the latter camp and generally stay quiet in order to avoid saying something wrong or foolish. But throughout life I’ve seen people surpass me who are initially less knowledgeable but who aren’t afraid to make mistakes or look foolish.

One most obvious case was when I studied in France for a semester. Even though my base knowledge upon arrival was higher than some of my peers, I was generally shy and embarrassed around native French speakers, while others who weren’t ended up getting a lot more experience and making a lot faster progress.

Could this work as a website? Seems like the easiest way to avoid depending on App Store

There is a good incentive for them to do it, just like any other business decision they make. There should also be a large monetary incentive for someone to create a more open platform if people really cared about it as much HN does. The problem is most people could care less. I will never hear my mom say she wishes she could download apps that aren’t on the App Store.

Personal computers are probably the only reference point in favor of “install anything you want”. Walkmans, TVs, game consoles, MP3 players, household appliances, automobiles, flip phones etc all come without the ability to run custom software. I think the only reason PCs didn’t start with an App Store model is that they predate the internet, so there was no way for them to really control distribution.

Frankly I think there’s a reason why no more open model is succeeding — the demand is not there and the app stores provide the utility most people want. I used to jailbreak my iPhone but there’s really no need anymore.

I’m not biased at all, just a patriot, and I think the government should inflate the wages of all software engineers in the entire nation to $1M in the name of national defense.

So are they allowed to make point in time backups / snapshots of their phone or is that also “copyright infringement”? Usually copyright infringement focuses on distribution for piracy and/or fraudulent sales — this is neither.

You are allowed to copy it, you just can’t sell copies of it.

I think your rsync-dropbox analogy is a good one, but I also found your statement about how it's a gender thing to be somewhat sexist, (it almost sounds as if you're implying that rsync is for men and dropbox is for women because in general men are more inclined to do difficult things than women).

What about Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Slack, LinkedIn, Reddit? There’s countless social media/chat/video/news aggregation competitors to FB. In what category of business do you think it has a monopoly?

Ads are at least usually marked as such rather than through fake accounts controlled by bots with an agenda pretending to be real people.

I agree it's a little overblown. But Github should really figure out quickly how to not expose emails like that.

I think many developers don't realize how accessible it is -- typically the email is set in some .git profile that you set up once, maybe not even in connection to github. It's not obvious that when you're using Github, your email from that file is being made public.

Also this is somewhat worse than your typical email leak because the email address can be tied to all the github activity, which in many cases includes a lot of professional activity. Targeted phishing (aka spearfishing) has a lot more to go off of.

"Even if the N.S.A. was listening in, they couldn't get his credit card number" -- what a prescient quote for 1994, pre-Patriot Act, pre-Snowden.

The reason you're getting downvoted is it seems like you believe encryption should be illegal unless it has a govt backdoor. Encryption is just math, so it's a hard thing to criminalize and to enforce. Furthermore, if the government has a backdoor to all encrypted data then that means China and Russia and any independent hacker would be also searching for that same backdoor and once they find it everyone's screwed. It's really impractical to think that the government could enforce backdoors into all encryption and it'd be exceptionally dangerous if they required all US companies to comply with backdoored encryption. Not to mention the privacy implications of never being safe from government surveillance.

I don’t think it particularly favors either. Neither benefit from pro-life/pro-choice debates on HN.

People have dozens of conversations every day that don’t match with the hundreds of ads they see every day. But then once or twice coincidentally a conversation preceded a relevant ad and the user jumps to the conclusion that their conversation was being listened to without noticing that 99.9% of the time the ads have nothing to do with any topic of conversation. Its occam’s razor or confirmation bias or some other phenomena HN likes to point out.

Are they obligated to maintain feature parity across apps and websites? Is focusing on one or the other acceptable to you? If I prefer an app, and a website doesn’t have a high quality app or the app constantly pushes me to the website, is that also user hostile? It sounds like your definition of user-hostile is “things you don’t like”.

Also the app can send notifications to force re-engagement.

Exactly, if people can demand this of Google and Facebook it means they can demand this of every single company! People act like FAANG are the only companies with any influence and any user data.

I was there in the winter once too (to ski), the blue lake was frozen though, covered in snow, and the entire week the temperatures never exceeded 0 Fahrenheit!

Really? The only time I see differing political opinions from people I know is on Facebook, because it’s typically weak ties rather than close ties who sit on the other side of the aisle, and Facebook is the main way I keep up with weak ties.

Pro-immigration reading: this is great and shows how much value immigrants add to America.

Anti-immigration reading: this just goes to show that there are too many immigrants in America.

I think that's a really cool idea but at the same time I think about the mobile carriers and how it used to be the case that you could only pay-per-minute or pay-per-text or pay-per-GB and overall unlimited plans seem to have won out. I wonder if that trend would apply with entertainment too.

We don’t currently have those ethics codified now and it doesn’t seem like too big a problem. I think very few situations actually arise where someone has the time to decide between killing two different individuals.

Why do you feel that way? if photoshop was free, would you be okay with it?

Do you think kids should only be exposed to free software for their whole lives and then enter the real world with no hands-on experience with anything enterprise?

Should they be allowed to require reading copyrighted books in English class? Or only public domain books?

What about their graphing calculator? Only open source graphing calculators?