I'm thankful for having had people in my life that have given me opportunity when I frankly didn't deserve the opportunity. I'm very conscious to make sure that I pass that kindness on when it's appropriate.
This is absolutely, unquestionably, spot on. It's a societal level change that's required to unpick what we have right now. It's incredibly complicated and there's issues everywhere.. but I think we can (mostly) agree that our current system doesn't benefit the many. And that can't be the way we want to be forever.
Open question; What's the long game on securing the way credit cards work? Who's working on something interesting that could thwart the whole 'name+number+ccv' leak thing that's been perpetuating in this industry for decades?
I'm just reaching out for anyone who knows about any grand plans, initiatives or rehabs of how credit cards currently work. Keen to read more.
This is a solved problem, really, some banks are less keen on implementing it: generate single use / single purpose credit card numbers in your ebank / mobile app. Leaks are total useless. Also, more than a decade ago already many European banks were sending a text SMS above a treshold and only approved on a positive reply. Today you'd likely offer sending a push notification.
You have 16 digits on a Visa/MasterCard, the first six is the bank identifier and the last is a checksum digit thus you have 9 digits to "waste" -- and you can recycle them.
Bank of America has discontinued their ShopSafe system for single-use credit cards. Citibank seems to still have their virtual credit card system, but it requires Flash. Are any banks currently embracing it?
The impression I've gotten is that since most of the costs of fraud are on the bank, rather than the cardholder, there's not much incentive for the cardholder to go through the trouble of using single-use cards. And so it's a better investment for the bank to develop good fraud detection algorithms.
In my anecdotal experience, the fraud detection has gotten really good. Every time in the past decade that someone's gotten hold of my credit card number, the bank's caught it nearly immediately.
Specifically, in the EU new Payment Services Directive 2 requires two-factor authentication on online payments. Banks and issuers do not bulge, as merchants pay most of the fraud cost, so government and regulators need to intervene.
Funnily enough PayPal and Stripe were lobbying against this "harming of consumer experience."
Single purpose cards only work for details used for securing online transactions. Many compromised cards come from breached small business POS terminals.
Active confirmation of purchases would be great if it were available, but I. Not aware of any US card issuers that allow you to opt-in to such a service.
I learned about privacy.com here on HN and it has been very helpful for me. You can create virtual cards for single-use or recurring payments. Each card can only be used by one vendor. You also set a max amount.
Exactly, some implementations can even lock it to a single "message" (what you see on the credit card statement) so that it can't be used for a different purchase. Needs cooperation from the merchant not to put the subscription date in the message but otherwise, it's not exactly rocket science.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. You've got a point. There's no perfection in the App Store when it comes to review, but it's an ecosystem that is built around trying to create a sense of control and privacy. Sorry if you don't disagree but I reckon facts overwhelmingly disagree with you if you do.
That's not to say in any way ANDROID BAD or anything like that, it's just a broader attack vector that you're up against with Android unless you're a very careful experienced customer. Most people aren't. :/
I didn't downvote but I understand why others did (I would have if it wasn't already grey).
It's incredibly frustrating to read these pro-walled-garden-arguments. By the same argument you could say that the people in Hong Kong or elsewhere should just shut up and accept that their leaders will know what's best for them.
I worry about a future where these locked-down devices will be the norm for all of us. Don't defend Apple for locking you in. That's ridiculous.
One crucial difference is whether you can opt-out. Another big difference is the stated intention of the party/entity: i.e. Apple is not a company "of the people, by the people, and for the people".
My objection is that it's not that useful to only look at whether a party wants to restrict freedom. Personally, I don't think that's a very useful dimension at all -- I don't consider the existence of a road limiting to my freedom to drive wherever I feel like it.
Also didn't downvote personally, but I can certainly see why someone would.
Fundamentally, the problem exposed by this particular piece of malware was the ability for it to persist across removals and device resets, not that it was "sideload-able" by the user. Malware persistence should not be possible on a well-designed system, especially one where applications are generally untrusted and sandboxed. Had this been malware that requires sideloading but could be removed when noticed, it wouldn't even have made the headlines at all.
The problem with making the walled-garden argument here is like saying nobody will get sick if we just put everyone in isolation all the time. Like, sure, it is _a_ solution, and assuming the isolation is perfect, it _does_ achieve the goal... But this merely sidesteps the problem, and anything that slips through the wall (which as pointed out by other commenters, does happen on iOS too) will be just as dangerous as before.
The real solution is to "buff up everyone's immune system" and make it easy to restrict and treat malware apps when they inevitably end up on a device, walled garden or not.
Again I feel like I'm reaching out to be educated here.. but if Safari is attempting to validate URLs for safe browsing using the Google API (which it states it will do, quite openly), and Google products is quite clearly blocked in China so it resorts to Tencents API (which it states it will do, quite openly).. why does this seem to provoke anger?
I mean this in the most equitable way possible, I'm more trying to understand where Apple has done anything wrong here?
Here's a broad and perhaps a bit naive question on this;
Reddit, Imgur, and any other site that uploads significant amounts of images from significant amount of users.. do they attempt to do this? To de-dupe images and instead create virtual links?
At face value it'd seem like a crazy amount of physical disk space savings, but maybe the processing overhead is too expensive?
I once built an image comparison feature into some webpage that had uploads. What I did was scale down all images (for comparison only) to something like 100x100 and I think I made them black and white, but I am not sure about that last detail. I'd then XOR one thumbnail with another to compare their level of similarity. I didn't come up with this myself, I put together a few pieces of information from around the web... as with about 100% of things I build ;).
Not perfect, but it worked pretty well for images that were exactly the same. Of course it isn't as advanced as Imagededup.
People do deduplicate files to save on space, except it's usually based on exact byte match using md5 or sha256. Some don't due to privacy issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2438181 (e.g., MPAA can upload all their torrented movies and see which ones uploaded instantly to prove that your system has their copyrighted files)
There's no way to make the UX work out for images that are only similar. Would be pretty wild to upload a picture of myself just to see a picture of my twin used instead.
But I do wonder if it's possible to deduplicate different resolutions of an image that only differ in upscaling/downscaling algorithm and compression level used (thereby solving the jpeg erosion problem: https://xkcd.com/1683/)
The cnn methods in the package are particularly robust against resolution differences. In fact, if it's just a simple up/downscale that differentiates 2 images, then even hashing algorithms could be expected to do a good job.
To (most) people commenting and reading this, the question 'why would you pay that much money for a car' is just about context.
To much of non-first world countries, buying an iPhone Pro Max would evoke the same question. That amount of money symbolises food for a long period of time.
Unfortunately your context shifts out a lot. It becomes normalised to buy an iPhone. It becomes normalised to pay a lot of money to buy a house, and if you're lucky enough to build wealth the normality bar just keeps being raised.
And then, poof, you just bought a supercar. Or a Patek Philippe. Or whatever other expensive thing that has no real purpose beyond it's a thing that you like.
I feel the same way with private jets. But a private jet was a completely trivial sum of money for me, maybe I would. Hard to say.
If I could afford either a jet or a Bugatti, there isn't even a question in my mind. Not a moment's hesitation. Jet, jet, jet, jet, and more jet. Heck, even if I could afford both, I think I'd just buy two jets.
$3 million is enough money to buy a decent used 8 seater twin engine or an L39 fighter jet and still have $2.5 million left over for thousands and thousands of hours of operations, maintenance, etc.
Hell, it would be enough to buy an F5 supersonic trainer and gun it for a few hundred hours over the ocean
Hmm, if I could afford a $3m car, jet fuel and maintenance would probably not even be on my list of relevant points.
Bizjet? No ta. I could have a lot of fun with a Folland Gnat, Hawker Hunter or L39 Albatross though. My environmental efforts would take a bit of a hit. :)
Same here. I can't see the point in an iPhone Pro Max though.
Although I think even if I had $3b I'd rather have an old mark 1 mr2, or an AE86. Or a modern lotus elise.
Would you be able to fly your own jet? Because you would be able to drive your own bugatti, immediately. No jet license, jet physical, jet training, jet regulation.
I'm sure if you can buy a jet, the cost of a pilot wouldn't be pennies comparatively. That aside, the point being made above is utility.
The difference between getting an iPhone 11 Pro Max and a $3m car is that the former can be objectively beneficial, if you're someone who uses their phone for business all day long, even a 5% improvement in how efficient you are has significant impact on how much money you make.
A super car, especially in the city, has zero benefits, and if anything it's the opposite in some cases. The only use is showing off and making yourself feel good about it. A jet on the other hand can have significant advantages and as in the iPhone example, really increase your efficiency.
"The only use is showing off and making yourself feel good about it."
Do you never buy anything for visual, tactile, or other aesthetics? Or is that what you mean by "making yourself feel good about it"?
I don't think modern Bugattis are attractive. But that's a personal opinion, like what art you like. Nothing to do with "status" or other peoples' opinions.
I have 20/15 vision and I'm sure I could pass the physical. Training and licensing doesn't seem like a big deal; there are lots of pilots and they somehow made it through.
Regulation is definitely heavier than cars — nobody makes you file a flight plan before you drive to the store — but there are tons of private pilots who seem to find it worth enduring in exchange for the fun and freedom of flight.
Besides, I can _already_ drive my own car. A faster car isn't actually much of an upgrade in capabilities.
I think most people require a license and training to drive a car and there are definitely regulations. A PPL (there's no such thing as a jet license in the US, at least) can be knocked out in a month if you're dedicated.
> To much of non-first world countries, buying an iPhone Pro Max would evoke the same question. That amount of money symbolises food for a long period of time.
The median yearly income in the very very poorest countries in the world is $500-1,000. So an iPhone might be 3 years of salary.
Most of these supercars are worth more than what the average American would make over 40 years.
Beyond the fact that rural environments in poorer countries don’t even have the structured economies needed to make some of these comparisons, there are orders of magnitudes differences at play here.
There might be some people who think “if I had that much disposable income why would I spend it on that?” But these aren’t iPhones. These are private jets. They are fundamentally out of reach for everyone and are immense signs of wealth.
There’s surely a bunch of engineering and cool shit to nerd out on from it, but there’s no democratization of the super car. If these companies wanted to they could mass produce and sell at 1/10th the cost. But that defeats the purpose of these cars existing.
>If these companies wanted to they could mass produce and sell at 1/10th the cost. But that defeats the purpose of these cars existing.
I'm not so sure if that would be feasible. In the case of say a limited edition Hurican I don't think there is enough additional engineering cost that can justify doubling the price of a $500k car for special editions, but I'm also not sure if mass production could drop the price for a new one down to $50k. The amount of specialized equipment and expertise involved in building these things are immense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVjtpr6LUuE
After all, while the new c8 corvettes have near-supercar levels of performance from a numbers perspective for a $60k car, the exterior and interior quality is so far away from that of supercars and hypercars it's not even funny, and GM is still taking a loss on every 'vette sold. The companies listed in the article just make extremely bespoke and specialized vehicles, and I'm sure mass production would only cause quality control issues. Besides, there really aren't that many people that can afford such expensive toys, mid-tier luxury brands like BMW and Mercedes already have many $100k cars (AMG's and M cars) sitting on lots because of a lack of demand; It's not because people don't want them, they just can't afford them.
Also, note that unlike your regular Honda and Toyota, for many limited-production supercars, their value actually go up over time. So you could argue the 2M car is a better deal than your average family sedan.
Of course, these cars cost a fortune to insure and maintain, and they are absolutely not practical for daily use. I’m just saying the reality is more complicated.
> for many limited-production supercars, their value actually go up over time
It depends.
Daily driver cars are depreciating assets. A supercar in fantastic condition that has little / no miles is an appreciating asset. A Bugatti supercar with 150k miles doesn't really have a large market, so it's likely to take a huge loss to sell in a reasonable amount of time. It might sell faster if it is parted (sometimes rare vehicle owners will pay way over list price to get replacement parts fast so they can get their prized possession working again quickly).
The thing is, there is something about very high end sports cars -- and especially supercars -- that isn't present in most cars: the physicality of it all. Let's forget about "luxury" gizmos and gewgaws, which trickle down into everything over time in a very democratizing way. Everything has that eventually.
-- ----- -----
Do you remember the last time you saw a pre-Aventador (so Murcielago, Diablo, Countach, Miura) V12 Lamborghini hammering down a road at 40+ mph (65+ kph), and not dawdling about looking for attention? If so, you probably remember something you actually felt. In your body. A shockwave, even as a pedestrian, imparted by that V12. It's a lot more real INSIDE the car.
Drive a high-revving (8000+ rpm) mid-engine Ferrari. Once you're well into the depths of what the second camshaft profile offers, there is legitimately a frequency in which vibrations are transmitted into the chassis that will literally make your spine tingle.
Get into a motorsport-derived Porsche. The air-cooled ones have a buzz about them by lacking the insulation of water-jacketing. Though the newer ones, past 7500rpm, twist their sound into a chilling, baleful howl. All while it's telling you exactly. what's. going. on... through its freakish levels of precision and feedback. You can put any knucklehead in a modern proper 911, have them go through a corner at twice the speed they would've normally considered, and the car basically will have made it absolutely clear they can go faster still next go around.
-- ----- -----
There are other things too with materials. Where everything feels fantastic to touch and hold, and some devilish CNC work, machining and precision. Though for very high-end metal (granted, less so in the past 5 years, 10 for some brands) there is a real physicality to the driving experience that gives those cars the "soul" that other cars do not have. Some older more accessible sports and muscle cars have done it similarly well -- older Nissan GT-Rs, some Corvettes, Mitsubishi Evos, RX-7s, some particularly playful compacts and well-sorted muscle cars.
The thing is... as everything else becomes increasingly homogeneous aside from body/character lines, headlamp and grille graphics, interior themeing -- particularly on the power train front -- that is what's going to differentiate manufacturer A from B. The new Porche Taycan Turbo S reviews all laud how brilliant the engineering is, and how well it handles, and how quick it is, and the usual build quality. Well and good. Though all the journalists have admitted that it has no soul, and ergo they just can't really give a rats. "It's nice. It's fast. Buy it if you want it. Cheers." Your Tesla you're so thrilled about? You're going to eventually acclimate to that torque. Then everything will have that torque. Congratulations, that will soon be the new normal... and a very different character (and I'd say less exciting) of torque delivery than other types of cars have offered.
For most people, a "good car" is fine. Great. Focus on comfort, safety, reliability, TCO and emissions. It's the pragmatic choice, and I fault no one for it as it's the correct choice. In fact, I'm a pedestrian and public transit user well over 99% of the time! Though realize that for some of us, we like driving, and doing it in something interesting in ways that is difficult to quantify. Not commuting. Driving. At 3AM in the middle of nowhere. Having an adventure with our good friend: the machine.
I have to say, as someone who's been somewhat critical of Facebook's dealings for the past years, I read the entire thing and I can't pick up on anything that doesn't seem like a reasonable thing to say to your team.
Is anyone able to educate me on why there seem to be some air of hawks swooping on Zuckerberg because of this?
I think it plays into "corporations control the government, there's no democracy" narrative.
Essentially means, it doesn't matter what's your position on immigration or gun laws or healthcare, what will determine the administration is the candidate's relationship with Facebook.
I think it feeds from the distrust towards the political system more than the distrust towards Zuckerberg.
If you think about it, the concerns are not entirely baseless. Facebook can analyze the public interest towards the candidates, analyze the candidates campaign and tweak Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp to boost the campaign of the friendly candidate when penalizing the other candidate's campaign. They can do this through tweaking colours, changing the mood of the public(they experimented with that), slowing down interactions that channels where the unfavoured candidates flourish, detect behaviour differences between the candidate supporters(maybe republican share more videos and democrats more written documents? facebook would know) and boost those, affecting the virality of the information flow. What are the users gonna do? Go use Friendster?
I mean, I don't say that FB does these but I can see how some people would want to sharpen their pitchforks when a corporation weights in a political debate.
I'd argue the press has always chosen the political winners (sometimes by accident by always talking negatively about them) and facebook as the new kingmaker is not much different than hearst, gannett, murdoch or soros anointing someone. the main difference is facebook actually abandoning any cohesively human choice in who they pick, shifting blame/responsibility towards an algorithm they write and control but want to remain sentientish in its own ways. i do see some reckless abandon in letting mathematical output get a nearly final say vs just admitting to and owning the existence of editorial discretion.
>changing the mood of the public
its the same type of thing the press has been doing since forever, just more targeted. the change is in scale (both more macro AND more micro) not kind.
> I'd argue the press has always chosen the political winners (sometimes by accident by always talking negatively about them) and facebook as the new kingmaker is not much different than hearst, gannett, murdoch or soros anointing someone.
There's an important difference you're missing: The press isn't monolithic and it's also self-consciously part of the American democratic political order. Facebook is monolithic and it seems to want to shirk its democratic responsibilities much of the time.
I'm not sure I see it as monolithic in its press displaying reach. Facebook, Twitter, GoogleSearch/GoogleNews/Android/Youtube, Apple each have their own way of controlling peoples attention and driving what sites people view, what apps people open. Facebook may or may not be the biggest of those four, but Facebook does not have a monopoly on peoples attention. One could argue Twitter is much smaller than Facebook, but its concentration of celebrities and journalists brings into question its overall utilitarian influence and impact, as opposed to just its raw MAU. The attention of one influential person may change way more in the world than 1000 nonfluencial people.
Because taking a single line out of context is great clickbait. The entire transcript on the verge was posted on HN yesterday and died with 10 upvotes and no comments. This story is much less interesting with context.
> "I don't want to have a major lawsuit against our own government... But look, at the end of the day, if someone's going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight," he said in the recording.
> "It doesn't make election interference less likely. It makes it more likely because now the companies can't co-ordinate and work together," he added.
Microsoft fought releasing data subpoenaed from its Irish data center. Apple fought backdooring iOS for the FBI. AT&T fought against being broken up in the 70s. So why is it surprising that Facebook would fight against it?
I read it as Zuckerberg considering democracy an existential threat to FB, more so than FB a threat to democracy, and thinking that might is right.
Sure, FB is nowhere near special in that, but just because it metastasized all over the place doesn't mean it's not cancer. It's reasonable, just like it was reasonable for Exxon to keep what they knew about fossil fuels and the climate on the down low, reasonable within what I would consider a pathological framework of values.
> I read it as Zuckerberg considering democracy an existential threat to FB
I don't understand how a reasonable person can read it that way.
Here's the full quote:
> That doesn’t mean that, even if there’s anger and that you have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies ... I mean, if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. I mean, that’s not the position that you want to be in when you’re, you know, I mean … it’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things. But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.
I do not understand how you can interpret that to mean anything other than that the "existential threat" is "to break up the companies". And it would be a far stretch to somehow move the goalposts to say that breaking up the companies is somehow fundamentally an aspect of democracy.
Unless you are willing to tie opposition to anything that any elected official has ever proposed as opposition to democracy itself, I guess.
I read the whole thing, but thanks. And if you misrepresent my position without even asking for clarification, you not understanding it hardly comes as a surprise.
> other than that the "existential threat" is "to break up the companies"
The government derives its legitimacy from the people, and running a corporation is a privilege granted by said government. If it wants to split companies up because they became too powerful, that's perfectly fine. To get all "let's fight" about that is like a dog thinking it actually should sit on the couch because it has teeth.
> Unless you are willing to tie opposition to anything that any elected official has ever proposed as opposition to democracy itself, I guess.
It's not general "opposition" based on reasons that respect the reasons the other side has, it's pure self-interest. I, very much reasonably so, think that that meeting is the tip of an iceberg, and that when Zuck says "go to the mat", he means go to the mat.
> And it would be a far stretch to somehow move the goalposts to say that breaking up the companies is somehow fundamentally an aspect of democracy.
No, but the ability to do so very much is, and should be in no way dependant on the legal prowess or pocket depth of the company subject to that operation.
If you can't put a muzzle and a leash on companies that have the ability to fuck with democracy in a very real and serious way, especially if they show no sign of having any moral compunctions about doing so, you don't have a democracy, you have a theater group in a mall.
Sure, and if you believe that the ACLU and edward snowden are fighting against democracy, then I'll admit that your position is quite possibly logically consistent.
Because Zuckerberg already testified that election influence and interference was not a serious threat, it is newsworthy that he turns around here and says the opposite, that companies would not be able to control interference threats in the face of a breakup.
Also newsworthy is the existential nature of the legal battle he openly talks about, whether or not there is legitimate reason to be broken up as regulations do have a purpose. Especially since in the same audio he admits there are election influence threats to worry about, it seems to pit facebook directly opposed to the democratic system and regulations meant to uphold democracies. Saying we will use our deep pockets which are deeper than the U.S. regulators—to fight any regulatory action (which seems reasonable now) is like saying we will fight against democracy and being fairly regulated because we have more money and power than the people and government do in any legal battle. The rules, it seems, will not apply to FB or any company of similar size and power.
>There's no bombshell revelation in this leak but we get some good insights into Mark Zuckerberg's major preoccupations - regulation and new competitors.
It’s just a unique opportunity to be a fly on the wall in a high profile meeting.
