chimeracoder

> They’re calling it "opt-in," but it doesn't look like that's actually true? You can’t know whether someone you’re talking to -- who may not understand the implications -- has enabled it. In group chats, it looks like a single person turning it on eliminates signal protocol for everyone in the chat.

People already can export backups of the messages they receive, in plain text, and publish those on the Internet if they way.

Signal's threat model has never included "you are directly messaging an adversarial party and expect to retain control over redistribution of those messages".

> Considering that sunscreen in general is pretty garbage at blocking UVA, it isn't nearly as effective as traditional methods like a hat and a shirt.

While the US has no regulations around UVA protection, that's not true worldwide.

Europe and Australia both regulate the use of the term "broad spectrum". In Europe, that means the UVA protection needs to be at least 1/3 of the UVB protection to be able to use the term. I believe Australia is even stricter - all sunscreen is expected to have a baseline level of UVA protection.

Japan has PA ratings that go all the way up to PA++++ to specify the exact level of UVA protection.

1/3 the level of protection might sound like a significant difference, but it's not, especially since UVA is far less damaging than UVB is.

> They don't always say that

We're talking about chemical sunscreens here, and they should say it because they do require it.

> More importantly, it is cheap enough to be always used as a baseline verification

> It's like unit testing vs full user acceptance testing. You can and should do both, but the latter isn't for every PR.

You say all this as if it weren't already happening. OP was surprised human testing was being conducted at all, not that non-human testing wasn't being done (which is a claim nobody made, and which isn't true).

> In my imagination, the lab would have some a testing process that spreads a precisely-controlled volume over a standard surface area, textured to be similar to skin, then measures UV transmission percentage vs wavelength with a diffraction grating and photocell. Or something like that!

With this approach, how would you measure the effectiveness of the sunscreen when it's been absorbed by the skin (which is necessary for the sunscreen to work properly - that's why they always say to wait ten minutes after applying before going out into the sun)?

There's a reason in vitro and in vivo are both studied for clinical trials of medications. Sunscreen isn't any different: you're using a product making a specific claim about a clinical outcome, so that needs to be tested.

> Has Go become the new PHP? Every now and then I see an article complaining about Go's shortcomings.

These sorts of articles have been commonplace even before Go released 1.0 in 2013. In fact, most (if not all) of these complaints could have been written identically back then. The only thing missing from this post that could make me believe it truly was written in 2013 would be a complaint about Go not having generics, which were added a few years ago.

People on HN have been complaining about Go since Go was a weird side-project tucked away at Google that even Google itself didn't care about and didn't bother to dedicate any resources to. Meanwhile, people still keep using it and finding it useful.

> With passwords, no account was even lost in the scenario for a recovery flow to start

Given how common mandatory SMS 2FA is for banks, if thieves stole your unlocked phone, they have stolen your account too.

> The without recourse is the part that matters...

Yes, and I'm saying that part isn't accurate either for the story you're portraying with passkeys or for the status quo. That's not how account recovery flows work.

> More like abuelita gets robbed at gunpoint and made to unlock and clear out her bank account, then has no recourse at home because her device was taken.

You are describing the current status quo, without passkeys. This is already possible.

Well, except maybe for the "without recourse" part, because there are some legal and policy avenues available for dealing with this situation.

> We're kinda proving my point.

> Clearly this has been a grave mistake

Are we? Has it? I don't see anyone's life and career being ruined. If you're saying that the "grave mistake" is that you've made a statement and now other people are disagreeing with you, then I'll say that's factually correct, but I don't really have any sympathy for the position that you've been wronged in any way.

> I've edited what comments I could to reduce a further flame war.

> As we can see from this thread, you guys are actually super easy going and don't get emotionally triggered at all.

This is the third time you've made this exact accusation in this thread (although you've edited out the previous instances).

It doesn't sound like you're trying to stop a flamewar. It sounds like you're trying to start one. But not very successfully, it seems! Because thankfully people aren't falling for what's looking more and more like very obvious bait.

> They may not be in the zeitgeist anymore but they would still love to ruin your life & career for not doing a land acknowledgement before you step into every public space.

Complaining about land acknowledgements as an example of the "far left" tells me that you don't actually have a handle on what the left actually looks like, as opposed to how it's portrayed through right-wing outlets.

First, there is literally nobody who would "ruin your life" for not doing a land acknowledgement, but also, the people doing land acknowledgements in 2025 are not the "far left". They're not even the left. Most leftist organizations don't do land acknowledgements at all!

EDIT: Since you updated your comment to include another favorite whipping boy:

> they would still love to ruin your life & career for not doing a land acknowledgement and pronoun announcement before stepping into public spaces

Again, "the left" is not ruining your life for not doing a "pronoun announcement", because they don't want pronoun announcements to be required in the first place, and in fact voice serious complaints whenever they are.

Both of the things you mention as examples of the "far left" - mandatory land acknowledgements and pronoun announcements - are things which you will find in very few actual leftist spaces. Where you will find them, however, is in mainstream spaces run by centrist or small-c "conservative" people, like corporate HR meetings. You will also, incidentally, see them on far-right media, which happens to be extremely obsessed with the concept of these things representing the left, despite the fact that actual leftists rejected them years ago.

> I've never lived in NYC - are median studio apts in West Village really $6k? Website looks awesome but I'm hoping that the data isn't true

The West Village is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country. In around 2010, it was the most expensive zip code in the country.

That's due to a combination of: old buildings, very little new construction, extremely gentrified neighborhood, and NYU eating up all of the real estate in the neighborhood.

That said, the map is slightly mislabeled: what's labeled as the West Village is actually Greenwich Village, and the West Village is a subset of that. This map labels places as far east as Astor Place as the West Village, which is not correct.

> Strange. I remember reading nothing but complaints about Pocket when they bought and integrated it. I guess it grew on people.

They bought Pocket to assuage complaints from people that they were "selling out" by including an optional button in Firefox (which never even loaded any code until it was clicked) that allowed you to set up an integration with your Pocket account and send articles there. They were clear that no data was sent to a third party unless you explicitly clicked it and went through the steps to set it up.

Despite that, purists were unhappy that Firefox was doing literally anything at all with a third party, so Mozilla decided to buy Firefox in an attempt to put those complaints to rest, since it would no longer be a third party.

In the end, those purists didn't stop complaining - they just moved on to different complaints. If you're curious to see for yourself, you can look up the conversations on HN and cross-reference the usernames against other topics involving OSS purism and Firefox.

In the end, everyone lost: longtime Pocket users lost a product that they had enjoyed because it got acquired by a company that never really had an active interest in the product itself, Firefox lost because of the negative PR which contributes to their declining market share, and Mozilla lost because of the massive waste of money this was.

> I’ve been at sea when a 3m tsunami passed, we barely felt it.

How far out at sea were you? And how did you know at the time?

Yeah, removing the quotes from the title in the submission (which may have been done automatically or by a mod) completely changes the meaning of the title as read.

> my understanding is that Visa/Mastercard police their perceived brand risk primarily through broad statements that are then interpreted by payment processors in detail. Visa aren't the ones saying "Women having sex on their period is an extreme sexual activity", they're just saying "no extreme sexual activity" and the payment processor has to figure out what that means leading to the former claim.

You're not wrong but that's only part of the story. What you're describing happens, which leads to overly-conservative interpretations of the unwritten policies. But the card brands do also have explicit rules that they expect downstream players to adhere to.

Confusingly - and this is where your impression (which is common) likely comes from - the card brands themselves provide different rules to different downstream providers, so it's not like there's one single, consistent list of rules for Visa globally (for example). It's not law and they are not bound by precedent or even an expectation of consistency.

> Content widely accepted to be immoral and/or illegal such as non-consensual pornography (that is explicit content posted without the consent of those filmed) and child sexual abuse material is forbidden. This is what the pornhub thing was about, allegedly, and why verified content is still allowed.

"Allegedly" is a very operative word there. Pornhub was actually extremely aggressive about removing CSAM and nonconsensual content, to the point where Facebook was actually a far larger problem for those actually concerned with stopping CSAM[0], with three orders of magnitude more instances on Facebook than all Mindgeek websites (including Pornhub) combined.

However, groups like the ones I mentioned only targeted Pornhub, because they don't actually care about CSAM. Their goal is to eliminate pornography and all "immoral" content, where "immoral" is defined according to an explicitly religious, right-wing interpretation of the term. That's not a secret; that's how they advertise themselves, and that includes the group in question here, Collective Shout[1], although the latter is now trying to hide that tie via futher censorship[2].

Because going after Facebook doesn't fit into an agenda of banning pornography, you'll never hear them mention one word about CSAM or other horrendous abuse that happens on Facebook and is facilitated by the platform.

> Furthermore, material considered a brand risk is also not allowed but payment processors a step down are the ones who make the guidelines on what that means in practice.

That's not quite true. Processors can set their own restrictions, but so can Visa/Mastercard/etc, and they absolutely do police perceived brand risk, which includes not just pornography, but also completely nonsexual content as well.,

[0] https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebook-a-hotbed-of-child-sex...

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/After-payment-processors-promp...

[2] https://bsky.app/profile/acvalens.net/post/3lufjdqmhxs2v

> That's an interesting effect but I really don't think that's a significant driver here. It really seems to me like they're just being threatened by activists, journalists, and activist investors.

Right-wing groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media (the groups behind the shutdown of Xtube, and the all-but-shutdown of Pornhub[0], as well as the short-lived ban of pornography on OnlyFans) are definitely the driving force behind these bans, but fundamentally the card networks are ambivalent at best when it comes to anything that could be remotely considered pornographic.

[0] Pornhub still operates, but they removed all "non-verified" content, so it mostly serves as an marketing outlet for studios and OnlyFans creators, and all of the older content that was never verified was removed entirely.

> It is European law, as in EU law, not law from a European state. In EU matters, the teleogocial interpretation, i.e. intent applies

I'm not sure why you and GP are trying to use this point to draw a contrast to the US? That very much is a feature in US law as well.

> That was before Uber...

Get outside a major urban area and it's extremely difficult to find an Uber at the hours when you'd expect to be leaving a party to go home.

Heck, this is true even in some suburbs of New York City.

> Unless we're arguing that people simply didn't socialize before cars existed.

No, the argument is that cars changed how society is physically structured, to the point where society at large is designed to center car-based transportation.

In many countries - including the US and most of Europe - this is transparently true.

> Obviously? I think I've had this phone call myself a few times, although in my experience it was never from a statistician and they didn't give me as much data, but I'm pretty sure the story is mostly accurate.

Yeah, the original retelling even states up-front:

> The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.

It's pretty common to alter minor details of stories in order to make them easier to follow, not to mention that the entire account is also written several years after it happened, when details are presumably less likely to be completely accurate. Obviously the dialogue is reconstructive for narrative ease; no reader would look at that and assume it's intended to be a verbatim transcript.

Unless the author here can cite specific things that make it truly impossible for anything of that shape to have occurred, I'm not seeing anything that justifies the conclusion "there's a lot to the story that's obviously made up".

> That’s always a good idea, but they’ll still be able to tell when someone is home because the outbound internet traffic will increase.

Sure, but not necessarily who is home, since they won't have the MAC address of your device(s) connecting.

Also, traffic volumes are a lot noisier of signals than you might think, given how much automated and background stuff we have these days.

One takeaway from this is that there's a strong privacy case for disabling the built-in wireless network from your ISP-provided modem/router and using your own, to reduce the number of ways that your ISP can surveil you.

> an alternative interpretation is that the union workers know more about how to safely do underground work than accountants and supervisors do.

As someone in New York who supports congestion pricing and public transit, I will say this: yes, there is a ton of waste and mismanagement at the MTA, and the TWU is unfortunately frequently one of the impediments to progress here. They have a history of opposing things like industry-standard safety improvements, sometimes even things which create jobs for their members, for arcane political reasons that require a deep understanding of their internal politics to comprehend. It would be nice if the TWU were a more consistent force for efficiency and progress, but they are not. You can compare to unions elsewhere in the world, or even to other unions in the US, and the TWU still winds up as an outlier in many of these areas.

That said, OP is pointing the finger at the wrong party. The MTA is overseen by the state. The responsibility for these inefficiencies and cost overruns lie with the state legislature and the governor. Andrew Cuomo, who was the governor at the time that article was written, famously washed his hands off the MTA. He was so brazen as to even publicly claim that he had no authority over them, at the same time as he was making unilateral management decisions on their behalf, including ordering the MTA to write a check to an upstate ski resort, to bail the resort out after a low-business season.

Fortunately, the money from congestion pricing is legally earmarked by state law and under a settlement from a federal lawsuit (the lawsuit was unrelated to congestion pricing, but the funding was offered up as a settlement term), so there's a lot less wiggle room for things to go wrong.

Congestion pricing is a solid policy win. That doesn't mean the governor (Hochul) and the state legislature don't need to step up and do their jobs - which means real, material oversight - but criticizing congestion pricing on those grounds, when it's one of the few budget items which actually has been legally overseen and structured - is completely off-base.

Did you try searching for it? The first result on Google for "daringfireball.net flat design 2013" is https://daringfireball.net/2013/01/the_trend_against_skeuomo...

Tack on site:news.ycombinator.com, and you'll find the top comment too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5081618

> That's quite a rewrite of history considering Windows Phone and Microsoft's Metro interface launched a full three years before Apple's move to a flat design in iOS 7.

Even Android had moved to a flatter design pattern 1-2 years before iOS. While Material Design wouldn't be released until 2014, you can see them moving in that direction from Gingerbread to Jelly Bean, particularly when looking at the system components and first-party apps, since this was before the concept of a unified design language across third-party apps had been formalized.

At the time Apple introduced their flat design in June 2013, they were the odd ones out. In fact, I remember a Daring Fireball article posted in spring 2013 (a few months before WWDC) praising Apple for leading the pack in flat design, and HN excoriating it for making what was at the time a clearly preposterous claim.

> I've always thought of these VC fueled expeditions to nowhere as the opposite. Wealth transfer from the owning class to the middle class seeing as a lot of these ventures crash and burn with nothing to show for it.

That would be the case if VCs were investing their own money, but they're not. They're investing on behalf of their LPs. Who LPs are is generally an extremely closely-guarded secret, but it includes institutional investors, which means middle-class pensions and 401(k)s are wrapped up in these investments as well, just as they were tied up in the 2008 financial crisis.

It's not as clean-cut as it seems.

> What hosted products has Apple dropped? iCloud might stop supporting old devices but that doesn’t stop you from keeping the data on device or accessing via a new device.

Apple is a bit of a weird case because historically they've been a hardware company first and have done very little in the way of consumer services. But they're just as happy as to kill off consumer products if they want to; they just have a more limited selection to start from (which is itself another layer to the "problem" of trying to use them as a replacement - you can't rely on a product they don't offer).

> and I will never trust Mozilla with any service again.

Who will you trust? Google? Apple? Microsoft? It's not like any of the other behemoths have a better track record when it comes to long-term maintenance and availability of hosted consumer products. If anything, Mozilla actually has the best track record out of them all when it comes to long-term offerings.