Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | reorder9695's commentslogin

I don't know about all heat pump systems, but mine at least requires the water tank to have a resistive immersion too. If the tank temperature gets below some threshold the heat pump refuses to work and turns the immersion on instead until it's warmed up enough.

I wonder if someone could make a foss frontend for Google Drive/Dropbox/<insert product here> that transparently encrypts files on your device before uploading them, that would certainly make me worry less about those services.


Isn’t what Cryptomator stand for ? Am I missing something here ?

How about the metadata?

I would worry about them not liking the (true in my case at least) answer of "I don't have social media".

Isn't your Hackernews account a "Social Media" account? Maybe it is, maybe it's not. We have no idea what the Governments definition of a Social Media Account is.

Interesting point, they'd have to either give a strict definition or a list otherwise I actually have no idea what to put. What about my ancient XDA Developers account that I don't even remember the username of? Would anyone with a Google account need to give that as YouTube exists?

I would say this is a forum. Is a forum social media?

It is just a matter of time before they will actually mean "anything you've posted on the internet, ever" when they'll say "social media"

I always assumed "social media" is something tied to your real-life identity. For me, HN would not be social media.

But there are people here that give their entire life story in their profile, I would say that, for those people, HN is social media.

Though, the Trump regime may see things differently.



I'd be even more worried about their reaction to me only using tumblr and mastodon, I'm sure I'd be placed on a list for being a "political extremist" solely because of the general vibes there

Now that I think about it, not having mainstream social media or a smart phone would also put you on that list


American citizen living abroad for almost 20 years here. This happens to me ever so often when entering the US. Last under Biden, when I had been living in Jordan for a few years. I got pulled aside for a secondary inspection and the guy asked for all my phone numbers and social media accounts, and was surprised I didn't have Facebook—I just said I was a computer scientist and didn't like Zuckerberg. I gotta give him credit for being patient as he asked for all my addresses abroad etc. But this has been happening before Trump.

Yes, secondary inspection has a lot more checks, this has been true a long time and is true for many countries.

This is not what TFA is about though.

TFA is about collecting this information through the ESTA for all visitors of countries part of the visa-waiver program, before the visitor even arrives at the border.


You can decline to answer these questions if you're re-entering as a USC correct?

Technically, yes. You have an absolute right - as a US citizen - to enter the country. You have a right to silence - beyond identity/citizenship and possibly travel history - and legal representation as well. They can ask you questions about politics, religion, social media, etc. but there is no legal precedent for them not allowing admittance based on refusal to engage on those topics.

Of course this is all true to the extent that you don't mind spending hours or days in "secondary" since the government does have the right to submit you to inspection at the border. It is also limited by your willingness to pursue your rights, and the government's willingness to abide by court rulings.


I would like to see an analysis of the following policy proposal. Explore various ways for tracking how much citizen time the US executive branch is using and wasting. Make this information available to all branches of government.

I’m quite tired of the executive branch being able to trot out the “for national security” boilerplate argument with minimal data or record keeping to assess the efficacy of various systems and procedures.

I’ve been kept in some random airport security room for something like 2 hours while government officials try to sort out some accidental name collision. I got no useful explanation during or after. I am lucky I didn’t miss my connecting flight. I bet there is currently minimal incentive (if any) to reduce this citizen hassling. Requiring metrics on how much time squandering happens seems like a small step in the right direction.


Same.

Regular people give me weird looks when I claim not to use social media.


They wouldn't allow you in, then they'd deport you to Guantanamo Bay for being a terrorist. Probably. I assume.

Easy. Create several accounts with the most unhinged, regular post of the most racist MAGA themes, praising of the great orange leader. Just follow Stephen Miller for inspiration...

They will wave you trough the fast trail...


Honestly this actually seems like a pretty smart hedge

Once you get it set up (which can be a pain) arch with KDE plasma is very good. KDE is very windows 10 like and intuitive. Arch gets rid of that issue of a mix of different installation methods, other than installing yay, I've never had to manually install something beyond "yay -S pkg", the aur and PKGBUILD files do really solve this issue of painful installations.

There really isn't much to set up especially for anybody diving in with Kubuntu

I've never worn one out but I've had to replace two after they got filled with sand (once from being dropped on the beach and once just from my pocket I think). No amount of cleaning would fix them, luckily with cheap Chinese phones one ebay search and €10 later I had a new charging port board.

So it's legal to train an "intelligence" on everything for free based on fair use, but it's not legal to train another intelligence (my brain) on it?

No, it's also not illegal to train your brain. If you break into a store, and read all the books, you'll get arrested for breaking and entering. Not for reading the books. My (superficial) take on the argument is that they're hoping by saying "it's not illegal to read" no one will notice, and no one will ask how they got into the book store to begin with.

So why is it illegal to download a pirated copy of a book from the internet to "train" my brain? There's no breaking and entering there, right?

The answer is in the name of the law, copyright, the right to produce a copy. The original, ethical intent behind the law was to encourage people to create things. Someone could invest time and money into creating some art that had value, and then they were given the exclusive right to monetize it for some amount of time. You could create something, and I'm not allowed to copy what you created, and sell it without your permission, preventing me from doing no work but capturing all the money you could reasonably make off your work.

Want to create a song? You're the only person allowed to make, or authorize people to duplicate it. You're the only person allowed to control the supply of your effort. Eventually, the public good, and interest was supposed to take over, because in the end, you're right, it's just information. It was supposed to enter "the public domain" where anyone could freely use it. But then Disney got involved, and now it's a toxified weapon used mostly by unethical lawyers against curiosity.


Because you are making a copy? Moreover, in some jurisdictions only uploading is illegal. Downloading is fine.

You're close to an important point.

Our current laws are written to make it legal for you to copy the Quran via your brain — some people learn it by rote and can stand up and speak the entire work from one end to the other. This is intended to be legal. Fair use of the Quran.

I went to a concert recently where someone copied every word and (as far as I could hear) every note from a copyrighted work by Bruce Springsteen. Singing and playing. This too is intended to be fair use.

You can learn how to play and sing Springsteen songs verbatim, and you can use his records to learn to sound like him when you sing, and that's intended to be legal.

Since the law doesn't say "but you cannot write a program to do these things, or run such a program once written", why would it be illegal to do the same thing using some code?

The people who want the law to differentiate have a difficult challenge in front of them. As I see it, they need to differentiate between what humans do to learn from what machines do, and that implies really knowing what humans do. And then they need to draw boundaries, making various kinds of computer-assisted human learning either legal or illegal.

Some of them say things like "when an AI draws Calvin and Hobbes in the style of Breughel, it obviously has copied paintings by Breughel" but a court will ask why that's obvious. Is it really obvious that the way it does that drawing necessarily involves copying, when you as a human can do the same thing without copying?


> I went to a concert recently where someone copied every word and (as far as I could hear) every note from a copyrighted work by Bruce Springsteen. Singing and playing. This too is intended to be fair use.

Only the learning part is fair use. Playing an artist's songs in public does not violate the copyright of the original performing artist, but it does violate the songwriters' copyright, and you do need a license to play covers in public.

They're called Performing Rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performing_rights


It can also violate other laws and rules that are not relevant to copyright. Perhaps I should have digressed into listing that? I chose not to.

Performing rights are part of copyright law and thus directly relevant to copyright. Stop dissembling.

What? I didn't know that. Do you have a reference? I'm particularly interested in the origin — is this something that applies to countries with a common law tradition, a roman law tradition, does it originate in one of the copyright treaties, etc. That kind of question.

I quite like Matt Godbolt's podcast (Two's Compliment), more entertaining than educational though if that's what you're looking for.


I think a significant part of the pushback against the TV license is that it pays for the BBC, I believe many people are of the opinion that they'd be perfectly happy not having the BBC and not paying the licence fee. A significant portion of the people paying for the BBC have never watched anything on it.


I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant, I think that is unhelpful and potentially dangerous (some people think what happened in Tienanmen Square isn't relevant to the general population, do you agree?).

For a transgender person, I may have known them before they transitioned for example and may not necessarily be familiar with their new name, that's a reason off the top of my head that it would be relevant to me but not necessarily you.


> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant,

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't any presentation of information prepared by humans, information wherein someone else decided which facts were relevant? The only way around this I can think of is personal performance of all experimentation in human history from first principles. Unfortunately you will probably need to learn those first principles through reading things written by other humans.


> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant

Then don't read an encyclopedia, because the entire raison d'être of that medium is about distilling “broadly useful” facts about the world, with no pretense of exhaustiveness.


> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant

Then reading Wikipedia probably isn't a great idea.


Reading any encyclopedia, for that matters. The job of an encyclopedist is literally to distill “generally useful” information, it has never been about being exhaustive.


> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant, I think that is unhelpful and potentially dangerous (some people think what happened in Tienanmen Square isn't relevant to the general population, do you agree?).

I couldn't agree more, it's wrong to decide what facts someone else is allowed to know. Please tell me the most embarrassing details of your life?

Perhaps there's nuance and different standards we can apply when talking about individuals, especially individuals who have been bullied or abused? Than the standards we apply when a powerful group is trying to cover up a violent attack against another?

> For a transgender person, I may have known them before they transitioned for example and may not necessarily be familiar with their new name, that's a reason off the top of my head that it would be relevant to me but not necessarily you.

I have a very hard time understanding this example, you're concerned that you, who knew this person but only knew their older name, won't be able to find thier wikipedia page via searching for their old name? Which is true because their old name isn't listed on the page itself?

I don't find that very compelling, did you mean something different?


Presumably generally representing leaves turning brown as happena with deciduous trees in autumn?


As doctors often do in clinical patient records, of course. (To be fair, the article also looks like care team-to-patient messages, so I'm sure there's some "happy fall!" messages in there.)


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: