bogidon

Chiming in with something I've posted in the past that I've found reduced about 80% of this spam mail and only takes 10 minutes to set up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070730

For sure. Except I don't think this site provides "official interaction with US government stuff". My expectation is that the government was involved only to create the regulation and the implementation was left to the credit bureaus. Which of course are incentivized to make the conversion rate of this site as low as possibly. So offputtingly sketchy is probably a good thing for them.

In my experience lots of unwanted mail comes from credit card offers, insurance, etc. Turns out that unless you have an account with them, all these financial service companies get their prospective mailing data through the credit bureaus. However there is a 2003 law that required the bureaus to create an opt out mechanism, which is available here: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/

Doing this has cut out 99% of my spam paper mail for the last year. Would highly recommend for sanity and as an easy way to cut down some on environmental impact. You can opt out for up to 5 years through the website or permanently by writing a paper letter. I did the latter through one of the "you write digitally, we'll send physical letter" services you can find on google and it's been great.

I just spent two months apartment searching in NYC. I talked to many brokers but not one was interested in actively searching on my behalf. The market is incredibly disadvantageous to renters right now. Maybe parent is sharing experience from a different time or has broker connections I did not.

As an aside I also tried to automate my apartment hunt. The main thing that matters in NYC is time to respond. Unfortunately Zillow, StreetEasy, etc are not very easy to automate on the messaging side due to bot countermeasures. It was an incredibly time consuming, manual process. Happily found a great place though.

Oh that’s awesome. Thanks for sharing.

I have a poor understanding of electrical engineering so I am not sure this would actually work. But I've wondered if one could make a fairly cheap gadget for turning a decent USB-PD supply into a somewhat useful hobbyist variable voltage DC power supply.

Especially with USB-PD 3.1 which has an adjustable voltage supply mode [1] so you are not constrained to only a handful of power profiles. I think in theory you could offer 5V, 9V, and 15-48V.

It would be cool because it would be much easier to carry (keep in your backpack) and I imagine cheaper than a benchtop power supply so long as you have access to a capable USB-C charger. But I'm not sure what you'd be missing out on versus a proper benchtop.

[1] https://www.usb.org/usb-charger-pd

I still have an iPhone for now (am waiting for mobile Linux to become just a little more mature) but I’ve turned off iMessage. When I get asked about how I can be reached by IM I tell people they can find me on Signal.

Been doing this for about two years and now ~80% of my personal conversations are over Signal. And most of these friends are not very technical.

I love my little successful rebellion against the walled garden. And it will make my eventual transition away from iOS much easier.

Just a somewhat related personal anecdote, sorry to deviate a bit from topic.

EDIT: Yes, Signal is centralized and I would have loved to use Matrix. But the clients are bad. Email me if you want to build a better one

Big plus one. In order to encourage (what I strongly believe to be much needed) experimentation with personal messaging we have to break away from having each. new. client. establish it's own network. Otherwise competition in this field will always be limited. Matrix I believe is currently the most promising answer to this problem.

I only started feeling a sense of actually understanding CSS (as opposed to working on it based on acquired intuition) when I started reading the official specs. I think that most other material is an abstraction over those that usually doesn’t explain the broader context surrounding a feature or its edge cases / interactions with other features. For example here’s the spec on positioning: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-position-3/

I’ve found directly useful information in specs that was not commonly pointed out in tutorials/stack overflow/etc when discussing those features (not remembering a specific example right now unfortunately). Can say the same for JavaScript.

I think in general when learning about an API it’s best for understanding to read primary sources. And thankfully the W3C specs are quite good documents and not too inaccessible in my opinion.

"millions"

https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1445164521102979080?s=2...

I was surprised recently to learn about the back/forward cache (bfcache) [1], a common browser optimization that sort of does what you're describing but stores a more complete snapshot of the page, including the JS heap. I'm not sure if it's used in this new FF feature (the article doesn't give details about the mechanism of unloading).

However the bfcache unsurprisingly causes edge cases in JS-heavy pages/SPAs, and a prevailing solution [2] is for the page to force a reload when it is restored from this cache rather than explicitly handling those edge cases, nullifying the optimization.

[1] https://web.dev/bfcache/

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/13123626/14665201

I like to chime in with this one when possible (due to a deep resentment for credit card offer spam). In case you didn’t know, you can opt out of the credit industry’s vast marketing machinery.

It’s a bit obtuse, as you’d expect from the bureaus, but I am thankful for this bit of regulation: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/prescreened-credit-and...

Have been hoping for something like this for probably a decade – and your product looks great.

Also have a question about the pricing. I’m happy to pay at the current tiers, especially to help getting y’all bootstrapped. But I’m curious if reducing the pricing will be an objective for you as you scale? I’m not sure I see myself maintaining the current expense indefinitely or it making it easy to recommend to less technical friends/family.

From the actual spec[1]:

> All EPR cables shall be Electronically Marked and include EPR-specific information in the eMarker as defined by the USB PD specification. As defined in the USB PD specification, EPR cables are marked as 50 V and 5 A capable. All EPR cables shall be visibly identified with EPR cable identification icons as defined by the USB-IF. This is required so that end users will be able to confirm visually that the cable supports up to as high of PDP = 240W as defined in the USB PD specification."

Both are important. I also wish devices had some UI to easily show the capabilities of a connected cable to the user. I could not find actual visual representations of the the "identification icons".

[1]: (page 143) https://usb.org/document-library/usb-type-cr-cable-and-conne...

Curious if we can put said oil back into the earth we extracted it from, or if there are reasons that ecologically would be a bad idea. It’s interesting to me thinking about restoring the environment to a state prior to human interference.

It is indeed the FTCs official option: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolici...

> If they want to erode public trust by using it to advertise their products, that’s their choice

Companies are people too!

Yes. I do not get 803 calls at all anymore. Am on iOS 14.4.2. I also use T-Mobile Scam Shield so I can see all the calls that have come in from the carrier’s perspective, so before iOS blocks them.

It’s interesting, of the last 24 calls from the 803 area code (most recent was yesterday) only 9 were identified as spam by T-Mobile and blocked by them. The others were blocked by the WideProtect app. Certain all of them were spam.

(I lived in SC 10+ years ago. The only people I met there are in my contacts and excluded from the blocklist.)

One hack if you get those robocalls that match your area code. Get a new phone number for an area code you think you’ll never go to and use a smart blocking app[1] to block the entire area code.

It’s a brutalist solution that’s not for everyone, but it has restored my sanity.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wideprotect-spam-call-blocker/...

I wonder what’s the ballpark of what spammers are making and spending. And if that really is significant enough profit to the carriers to prompt inaction on an issue that clearly degrades the experience for the rest of their users.

Or maybe this issue couldn’t be solved unilaterally, where one carrier could offer much better spam protection as a competitive advantage, and the industry is too decrepit for group effort that doesn’t have direct implications on their bottom line.

They do have a Surface Pro X with their ARM "SQ" chips which they work with Qualcomm to make. It's nowhere near as good compared to the M1 according to the layperson's benchmarks I've seen though.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-pro-x/8qg3bmrhnwhk

Forked from these a while ago for the macOS part of dotfiles. My dotfiles support both macOS and Linux, and most of my configurations are also extensible on the local machine only though ~/.zshrc_local, ~/.gitconfig_local, etc (which in turn load private dotfiles I wrote for my company machines, but I digress)

Here they are in case you're into the dotfile trading thing: https://github.com/bogidon/dotfiles

In case anyone else is wondering who the surrogate mother was, it was a domestic ferret:

> This work builds upon recent advancements in cloning processes developed by ViaGen Pets & Equine, which successfully created embryos from the frozen cell line and implanted them into a domestic ferret surrogate.

More informative article: https://www.fws.gov/mountain-prairie/pressrel/2021/02182021-...

CAN-SPAM should be extended to make it required for commercial mail to add this header.

Hey! I was thinking about funding while reading the article. I would love to have a conversation. Please do reach out to the email in my profile if you have the time.

Hmmm. How many companies claim to put users first? And of those how many actually do? Oh right.

I would not put a fintech in charge of said trolley.

> What are concrete examples of "US government to take a lead on building charging infrastructure?“

They don’t need to take over right of ways. The DOT (or whoever) could help by aiding standardization of chargers and payments, creating a program to fund design of street-side chargers, provide incentives (in the form of taxes perhaps) for cities to meet EV infra quotas.

> why continue to subsidize the overprovisioning of transportation capability in the form of largely unused, quickly depreciating equipment with low watt to work efficiency?

Oh trust me, I really feel this. Maybe you’re right that any incrementalism in reducing carbon emissions is wrong, and we should go all in on the optimal solution, ie ban cars and redesign cities. But even if the govt did radically depart from the past 50 years of stalled infrastructure, and went all in, it would still take a long time until an alternative to the personal vehicle is practical to all urban/suburban dwellers. Long enough for a switch to EVs to be unjustifiable from a climate perspective, probably (I would very much like numbers)

But yes, I am just as tired of the mantra of lesser of two evils. But maybe that’s just how democracy is destined to unfold.

EVs are projected to get cheaper than internal combustion by mid-decade [0]. There are lots of American city neighborhoods where EVs will be inaccessible without street-side charging.

In response to GP, I definitely expect the US government to take a lead on building charging infrastructure (especially with a federal administration that doesn't actively dismiss climate change). A failure to demonstrate competence building green infrastructure in the next few years will quite possibly lead me to seek greener pastures elsewhere (EU). Thankfully San Francisco included charging infrastructure and street-side charging in its 2019 EV roadmap [1].

That said, public transit is by far the better green tech. But since private vehicles won't be going away overnight, might as well transition them to something cleaner.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/22/electric...

[1] https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...

Indeed. There are some projects called Rail AND Trail, and imo this distinction should be talked about more.

For example, a 32 mile old railroad in Santa Cruz, CA that is being revitalized for electric trains AND getting a bike path built alongside it: https://www.railandtrail.org/discover.html