1,337 karma · joined August 15, 2011
I was under the impression that the police in the US are not required to be truthful and it's perfectly legal for them to give false legal advice if it'll make their day go smoother?
But yeah, without seeing any "real" code written in Dragon, makes it very hard to evaluate its ease-of-use.
Certainly laying someone off when they are on holiday feels like a dick move, I guess that's corporates for you. I'd be interested in Aslak's viewpoint, as I'm guessing he's still there, and may well be the source of Matt's confidence that community assets will be handed over to the community.
But I'm glad Matt is reasonably happy. I'm absolutely certain his next venture will be successful, and that SmartBear lost a very valuable asset here.
Not a massive problem for us... can imagine it might be a problem for many though (service agreement or no) - it does annoy me when status pages don't show an accurate status though. Makes me feel like the point of them is just to pretend they care.
You see, a lot of humans do. In public speaking, in meetings, in the pub or meeting people unexpectedly on the street.
The brain hears a question and is on a go-slow, either too little coffee, too much coffee, too much stimulus or churning bigger questions, like why the hell did I wear this shirt and how am I gonna hide that massive grease stain and damn I wish I had a spare jumper in my "Oh, hi -- umm - uhyeah, no, it's umm... it's, well, it's umm going well thanks -- yes I am, thank you -- yeah, it's only been oh, umm, a month, umm... oh three months actually -- umm, yeah, she's umm, no I mean sure, she's not the, umm, I mean she's got, umm, a lovely"
(And then the car-crash of a conversation ends with them pointing to your starbucks cup and saying "Anyway, I gotta go - enjoy your coffee!" and you shout back "Yeah, you too" then realise they haven't got any kind of drink in their hands but at that point you really don't want to care, you just want to be walking. Away.)
Because in situations where the brain feels rushed, the brain tells itself "YOU NEED TO ANSWER NOW" and so, without any training otherwise, usually says umm or other filler rubbish in the (not-so-conscious) hopes that the other person won't realise that you're frantically scrabbling to find real content and coming up woefully short. And the real content that does come up, if it does come up, arrives in the most unhelpful way, and you end up saying horrible things and wish you'd just stuck with "umm".
Even in a presentation, where you've practised a million times and your cat is frankly bored of hearing about your financial projections for the 15th time in a row, but you get in that room and you see the slide and you realise it doesn't tell you as much as it told you when you wrote it, your mind fills with.... "ohhhh... I know this.... this was the one, about.... ohhhhhh....." and your mouth says "Right. Umm... so we, uhhh, on this one, ummm, so as you may be aware, well some of you.... ummm..."
Maybe some people's hesitations aren’t communication failures but successes. But some hesitations are not about truth. And often they compound themselves, making more little hesitation babies as you hate yourself a little more for the unintended hesitation that sounded meaningful that just passed out of you.
And maybe the answer is stupidly simple: Cut yourself some slack. Allow pauses. Learn to ride the awkward silence. Learn to laugh at yourself under pressure and practice witty things to say to replace the filler.
But that's not as easy as, well now you have the answer so what's the problem. That actually boils down to "retrain every neuron in the linguistic centres of your brain that have been growing since the age of 6"
That takes some practice, and as annoyed as your cat may be that it's having to listen to yet another presentation, it can't replace the pressure of real life. Hence, I guess, a tool that helps you measure your progress in real life.
Because sometimes "your goal" is just to get through one day without feeling like an absolute muppet.
"Do you even still love me?" "Umm..."
"Do you think Jack deserves this promotion?" "Umm..."
"Do you think this software solves the problem?" "Umm..."
"Surely you realise Donald Trump is the true incarnation of the coming messiah?" "Ummmm....."
Those Ummms may well be massive pitfalls. Alternatively, those ummms might accurately indicate that the entire premise of the question is dubious or flat-out false, depending on your delivery.
A person who uses ummm too much may well have severe problems communicating effectively, and a tool to help them only use ummms deliberately and meaningfully might be useful. A person in a presentation may wish to give an air of humility and approachability, in which case the ummms may be helpful - or they may wish to give an air of authority and certainty, in which case that meta-message is shattered by excessive umms.
Intent-based communication is subjectively valid, and one can argue that expecting and requiring perfectly honed communication might be a form of implicit bias and prejudice. I appreciate the idea that, as a societal issue, reducing our dependence on homogenised thought delivery is worth a wider conversation, but I'd say this is the wrong level from which to attack that systemic change. You don't attack scalpel manufacturers for the proliferation of plastic surgery.
Yet one could argue that a communication is - objectively - only as good as the way it is received. And while the majority of your communication might not need that level of certainty, for many people practice is the only thing they require to achieve the appearance of confidence. And democratising the ability to learn that skill doesn't seem to me a bad thing.
Things like:
> the authors have very explicitly stated on numerous occasions
... appeal to authority, and then fails to mention even one of those occasions, instant ignore
> First, the fact that multiple strains of the virus were found directly in the market is a very strong indication that there were multiple spillover events at the market. Second, it has now been established that wild animals that are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 were being sold at the market during the time period when the outbreak began.
This feels like an attempt at causing a "baffled by BS" response, something HN is particularly immune to - though I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and presume you're simply trying to use the correct nomenclature. In reality, you've not said anything here that contradicts anything I've said - multiple spillovers simply indicates that an animal reservoir existed before or concurrently to the initial outbreak period - it doesn't give any evidence for or against any particular primary source. If the unfamiliar terminology doesn't cause people to instantly skip, the lack of new insight will.
> Third, the concentration of cases at and around the market, but not around the Wuhan Institute of Virology
Generally speaking, I wouldn't expect there to be a large number of cases of a disease spread at or near a facility that deals with the testing of viruses and has strict containment protocols. Don't know about you, but I would hope they know how to wash their hands 99.9% of the time - I would hope a virus finding its way out of the campus or shared between professionals would be an extremely rare event.
That said, it would be interesting to see a side-by-side study, with the same statistical techniques, of a similar type of lab. There have been other lab leaks every few years, but as the paper points out, the large amount of attention brought about by the pandemic means a lot more data about this leak than we usually get.
> People who have followed the scientific investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 over the past 2.5 years know that the lab leak theory was always highly unlikely
... and it's exactly this intuition that stokes skepticism. Because if something was always considered unlikely, that's rarely the basis for sound science.
> Their theories are becoming more convoluted and contrived as the evidence rules out each version of the theory
Again, this statement suffers from low sample size, lack of examples, and uneven evaluation. A supporter of your POV presents a new hypothesis? Tries to find evidence to support or refute it? That's great! Science at work. A supporter of the Lab-leak theory presents a new hypothesis? It's just an absurd convoluted and contrived new theory because they couldn't get their last one to work.
And again, people skip over it, because the bias is obvious, and it doesn't come close to answering the question that laypeople are searching for answers to - i.e. where did SARS-CoV-2 originally come from.
Anyway, hopefully this has helped you see why a rational rejection of your arguments in this particular space is not evidence of tinfoil hats clinging to irrational conspiracy theories. By all means, bring your faith. Bring some evidence too, and many of us would love to join you. But without the evidence, a certain assured opinion is not going to help you here.
You may have chose your language precisely, but you've read meaning into the text that wasn't there.
An epicenter is NOT where a thing started, and it's not in any doubt to even the most die-hard conspiracy theorists that the market was "the early epicenter". The fact that the initial major spread event happened there is pretty clear, the question is where did the virus originate - where exactly did it become the coronavirus we know and love? Did it mutate into that form by being passed between animals stored in the market? Was it brought to the market from bats caught in the wild? Did a lab employee doing highly sensitive transmissibility research pop to the market on their way home to give their spouse a hug?
The idea that these are "settled facts" flies in the face of papers like this that go to great lengths to hedge their language. There are things we know. There are things that are likely, or less likely, or unlikely. There are things we have been prevented from knowing.
There are lots of opinions. There are people with settled opinions. There are settled opinions that have come about with the best of intentions (worries about stoking sinophobia and anti-science thinking, worries about lack of accountability and governmental deceit). There are those shouting their "truths" with the best and worst of intentions, whether aiming to promote truth, or peace, or clickbait.
You may have chose your language precisely, but your language is shouting about your settled opinion, not settled facts.
(P.S: "The paper is much more definitive than you're claiming" - since the sentence I wrote was just a chain of quotes from the paper, without any real commentary, I'd be interested to know how you feel the paper was "much more definitive")
"It started"..."solidly established" - that's enough inaccuracy for most HN people to ignore the whole of your post.
Compare that with the context and abstract of the paper you've cited: "the earliest human cases", "circumstantial evidence", "earliest known COVID-19 cases", "spatially associated with vendors", "insufficient evidence to define upstream events"
At this point, it is all opinion vs opinion based on circumstantial evidence or the lack thereof - and claiming anything else is either a) Faith or b) Misrepresentation.
> And whenever someone writes something not very obvious (eg Fruit salad for apples oranges and grapes...
One day, people will learn that their specialised understanding of terms, when not synchronised with an entire world of users, need to be viewed in the lens of the audience in which it sits.
In the layperson's sphere, even to the technical professional, the counting of bits is incredibly rare. The fact that the telecoms industry has crafted this case-based confusion is (naively) foolish or (cynically) immoral.
If you're not willing to presume that articles by the layperson are likely to be referring to bytes unless otherwise clarified, unfortunately that unwillingness is where the problem lies - not with the people using the language as shared with the 99.9% of the rest of the world.
That said, you do have our sympathies for your confusion. There are lots of words that our industry have introduced to the world and immediately lost the nuance of, and it will only continue.
Please, continue to bang the drum with your colleagues. Telecoms professionals should be completely precise where that precision matters. Here it does not - and the drum is just distracting noise.
That is to say, you are using null to encode some kind of meaning, when really this is not what null is supposed to be used for.
That's not to say I think we should be morally disapproving of people who do that - I use things for their unintended purpose all the time, and it bugs me when people get on a high horse. Use what makes sense to you - and I love this change for exactly that reason.
But the general theoretical approach is that if you want to care about the value in a field, you need to give it a value. Null is for the valueless, and if that isn't an allowed state, you should simply set the field as not-nullable. Theory is fine in theory. For a practical database that exists in the real world, this option is a good addition.
In general, if the data owner says you must take it down, you rarely have a leg to stand on unless you can claim some kind of protected use (e.g. reporting or criticism)
[1] https://www.mondaq.com/copyright/53690/google-news-service-i...
Can you share your research? Because the cease and desist letter they link to clearly says "images and data"...
> Maintaining this data for over 200,000 products is a costly endeavour and asking them to offer this for free would be a huge ask.
No. Whoever (as someone pointed out, probably Brandbank, they supply most of the supermarkets with data so if it isn't them, then it's likely a scam) has already received full pay for the data they've supplied - if they're charging you again for the data, that's just greed (sorry, I mean "perfectly valid capitalism") - even at 14p/entry or whatever they're charging.
Some people here have mentioned that facts can't be copyrighted - it reminds me of a problem in 2011 that the people distributing timezone data to a bunch of open source projects were sued because a 3rd party software house "owned" the rights to that data[1]. I don't know where that landed (timezones still work in linux, so I think they found a workaround) but most projects like this capitulate rather than risk the cost of court.
But yes, the product descriptions and images may be copyrightable - certainly, Brandbank do all their imagery in-house, and any typos in the descriptions will be owned by them, because some person being paid peanuts - likely somewhere in the Philippines - is having to sit down with a photo of the can of Campbells soup, reading and re-typing the descriptions word for word.
It's just... ugh.
Your premise is that acting on the desire of an unfair advantage is the greater immoral act, and the act of accepting the payment for an unfair advantage is less morally bankrupt.
In each of these scenarios, the person being bribed has the power. They have nothing to lose if they reject the bribe.
Yet, if they have nothing to lose when _accepting_ the bribe, that is how corrupt regimes start.
Of course, one could argue that it depends on the corruption. In your case of a building authority, imagine one that always says no regardless of the request. Maybe they let through the odd high-profile project where someone in the project is chummy with the director of the authority. Arguably, this building authority is already corrupt, and merely hiding behind the excuse of bureaucracy. (We don't tend to think about social capital as a form of bribery, but it very much is)
In the case of the driving inspector, they are potentially licensing an individual who will get others killed. Morally speaking, any future deaths are at least partially attributable to the driving inspector.
I suspect part of your position hinges on a malicious intent in the initiator. However, power and responsibility are not separable - and cases where there are possible consequences, morality must be judged in part on the basis of that responsibility.
As I say, we're getting into the weeds - these hypothetical situations are in many ways divorced from the original question, so let's look at that:
- A person is kicked off an online communications platform. Nobody is quite sure why, but there are some pretty likely conclusions.
- The platform is known for bending the rules for high-profile accounts
- The person can prove that they are not breaking any consistently-applied rules (assuming valid interpretation of vague rules should be judged on whether their peers are allowed to post similar - and in this case, she pointed out that her content is well within moral norms for the platform)
- The platform offers no accessible recourse (except for those with social capital) and not just bureaucracy, but hidden bureaucracy dependant on the whims of a hidden adjudicator who has nothing to lose for interpreting the rules harshly.
- Very limited harms if accepted, potential loss of revenue, personal content, position in a (digital) society, freedom of expression etc if rejected.
In this case, I'd say the briber has, at the point their account was terminated, already lost a lot to the corruption of the platform, and yet the bribe was still over-paid. Saying that theirs was the more immoral act seems intensely unfair, when they did the only thing they felt they could to re-gain justice.
Consider, for example, flights to a corrupt country. To get through customs unscathed, every passenger is required to bribe the staff at the airport.
Just because the passenger pulls out their wallet and hands over a bribe at the first sign of friction, does that make the passenger more guilty than those who set up this corrupt system? Those that benefit from the corruption?
It must always be those with power that we hold to account. That's not to say that those who participate in the system should have zero consequences (which, in these examples, is not the case - they've paid something, whether with their wallet or with their flesh) - but until those in power are fully held to account and the systems are changed, you are blaming the victim, even if they did initiate this form of corruption.
Hopefully she isn't an idiot and has downloaded everything she cared about from facebook.
But the fact is that we're all talking about this, inside tech spheres as well as outside. A literal real-life "who do I have to screw to get my stuff back?" moment.
It means that no matter how little you respect what she has done, she may have just changed the world. Or, we'll forget in five minutes and Metabook will continue to ban people with impunity.
Just my opinion, but someone being willing to lose something they sold their body to win back is reasonably respectable. Certainly they've done the world a big favour, whatever their motivations.
Software that, for now, under Google's current interpretation of the rules, is allowed to use their OAuth without paying these fees.
The question I'm asking is, what happens next year when Google decides to silently change their interpretation of the rules? Do you, as a FOSS email client writer working on JohnnyMail, risk a massive yearly bill of 1/6th or more of your salary that you are contractually obliged to pay - or just say "Sorry Google, you've outpriced me" while their interpretations are still favourable?
It's not "undoubtedly better for end users" that free email apps be excluded from Gmail. It's not better for end users that open source software developers are given a sword of Damocles hovering above their heads. Sure, it's undoubtedly better if these free apps can be guaranteed to be secure, it would be even better if Google could do that in a way that didn't cost a massive amount or a surprise bill.
I'm glad you had the resources to be able to go through the process, and that you found it a useful process to go through. But it doesn't justify the uncertainty.
For all my fear mongering, I should point out that the only reason Google are saying this is to cover their backs when they decide to levy the maximum fee on an unsuspecting competitor. If they don't consider you a direct competitor, you might be ok. They have no reason to use this policy to alienate the majority of desktop applications that connect to email.
But they also have no repercussions if they do.
(I'm presuming the word "accessing" is used here to mean any use of a third party server, regardless of whether read or write - because the whole idea is pointless if transmitting is not included in the definition)
It also includes any email client with a built-in VPN, or potentially any client that can use a VPN (remember, it's at Google's discretion)
> [accesses Gmail and also accesses other servers]
... because that's all that convoluted line means. Break it down:
- Access to "restricted scope Google user's data" (in this case, all we care about is Gmail)
- AND ability to access data from or through a third party server.
It's that last bit that people seem to be getting confused about. For example:
- if your app accesses Gmail and Hotmail accounts, then your app is doing both
- if your app accesses Gmail and also checks today's weather, you're doing both
- if your app accesses Gmail and sends basic usage telemetry. Or checks for updates. Or has plugins that provide spam checking or virus scanning... you're probably doing both
- if your app has ANY plugin system, it could be argued that your app is doing both.
While the language may be unclear, "third party server" is probably intended to reference any non-google service.
And my overall point still stands: YOU do not get to decide what triggers their security review. All you have the right to do is pay the bill.
Do you have evidence - in writing - to the contrary from a Google official?
Abridged wording and my non-lawyer interpretation below in case I'm not clear:
> Every app that [accesses Gmail and also accesses other servers] is required to go through a security assessment from Google empanelled security assessors. [...]
> In order to maintain access to restricted scopes, the app will need to undergo this security assessment on an annual basis, [... costs usually] between $10,000 - $75,000 (or more) [...]
> This fee may be required whether or not your app passes the assessment and will be payable by the developer."
Complete side note, I'm shocked at how terribly Linux is still doing at the whole hi-dpi vs lo-dpi vs everything in between.
But yes, generally speaking the gold standard is CSS rems - it presumes that a user has somewhat configured their machine comfortably, mind. But if you use that text size as a relative measure for all the text on their screens, you can scale your interface elements knowing that if 1rem is a good readable size for a letter, all headings etc should be bigger, no interactive element should ever be smaller than 1rem (and should probably be a fair bit bigger on mobile devices), you can define margins around this measure too.
It isn't perfect, but it'll beat UA most of the time. You'll stop worrying about the definition of high res and low res, and instead focus on the comfort of the individual - which might be a bespectacled octogenarian or an impoverished student on the same system.
The only other exception I've seen recently is because of genuinely lacking features e.g. WebMidi, or where a really small outfit just doesn't have the time to ensure 100% compatibility with every browser yet, so puts it out there with heavy warnings.
But IME, it is vanishingly rare to find a website that says "Nope, can't do this with firefox" and flat-out refuse to serve you without a very good reason, and when they do, they're idiots if they use the highly-spoofable UA to do that check.
(But I would love to see counter-examples - as I say, I'm sure they exist, but outside the corporate world, I haven't seen it in a while)
So the usual solution is feature detection, where the javascript and/or CSS learns the true capabilities of the browser, and switches features on and off accordingly. Of course, if you depend on generating a lot of capability specific content on the server side, this may be an issue - but in that _extremely_ rare case that's easily worked around by asking the js to redirect to a URL with specific capabilities baked in (or loading a specific javascript file)
As someone who has done this too, I wouldn't be surprised if it violates some misuse of computers act - but I'd rather that than be responsible for the security of someone else's finances
Over a year ago, I noticed that somebody's paypal was set to my gmail account. They had also used my account for payments to Donald Trump (I was getting hilariously desperate and pleading messages for more donations) Banggood, and Amigo Loans (as guarantor)
I was able to get information about different addresses they have lived (Ireland - not sure how many Trump supporters live in Ireland, which was weird), what other email addresses they had, etc.
In the end, I logged into their paypal (surprisingly easy) and changed their email address to the correct email address, and emailed them their new password.
I still get the odd one-off email from other places, such as a damp report for a property in Hemel Hempstead, but at least I haven't had any more paypal messages. I sometimes wonder about the legality of what I did - obviously I did nothing malicious, but I suspect it contravenes the letter of at least one law. But the thought of being made in some way responsible for the security of someone else's finances filled me with dread.
[edit: this information might be out of date - looks like there isn't a central forum for this in French any more, however forums do spring up periodically]
But yes, English is - these days - predominantly handled within a descriptive framework, and dictionaries such as Miriam Webster [1] and Oxford English Dictionary [2] point out that they only exist to describe usage.
There may be an argument to be made about definitions within scientific fields; but without the dictates of a cohesive authority, it's very hard to claim this as truly prescriptive. It is up to groups of expert practitioners to come to consensus on the definitions. And you can argue whether that is the very definition of prescriptive (because they prescribe the word's usage on the rest of the world) or descriptive (because they as the predominant users of those words are describing the academic usage of the words)
But I have yet to see an English dictionary that claims to be fully prescriptive. If it did, it would have dubious authority to do so. Similarly, I feel like we're so many miles away from a consensus on the Computer Science definition of "an Abstration" that my original point stands.
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/descriptive-vs...