Perhaps it is just travel anxiety? I book hotels a few hours in advance and stats like "only 2 rooms left", are usually correct when I check with hotel reception. At least in Europe booking.com is much better than competition. It has loyalty discounts, transparent pricing and consistent experience. Reviews and descriptions are actually useful, not BS. Emails I get are usually "place you looked at become 30% cheaper".
Not sure what illegal consumer practice are you talking about.
Reading through the points from the page you posted - I think internally only actions related to that were basically to add more info (e.g. popup/hover or just "on our site") to clarify to people that same as every other marketplace on the Internet ... coughAmazoncough ...
Things we show are just things we know about and have in our "inventory".
And actually after some of those changes - I believe some customers started to complain that reminding them how "X other people are looking at {name of hotel} for your dates" felt much creepier than "X other people are looking at {name of hotel}" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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PS. Only reason I wrote a quoted "inventory" is that unlike physical goods with real stock. When you're renting accommodation - on top of physical rooms, there's extra dimensions due to different dates, meals (because in many hotels restaurant can't support everyone having breakfast, half/full board/meals) ...etc.
> Not sure what illegal consumer practice are you talking about.
> I was part of "Consumer Psychology Team" at Booking.com for years. That team was/is one way or another involved in pretty much every functionality you mentioned
You were part of a team that cooked up new ways to harm consumers.
Playing the same word games here too is a bit tasteless. When your company is forced to "align practices presenting offers and prices with EU law following EU action", that means you've done something illegal, and you were caught. Nothing else matters.
I hope you realize that picking out only bits and pieces that fit your predetermined view is basically just reinforcing your personal biases, and not bringing you to see the bigger picture.
Though as long as someone doing that is impacting only that person - I don't mind.
However, I would appreciate if you didn't follow taking those bits and pieces you've selected. And then taking them out of context that I've said/wrote them in - re-combining them in ways that would bias others reading just your "curated" version.
Some of your work was unethical and harmful, work that was later on found to be illegal in the European Union. All of this is part of the public record.
It's never too late to reflect on that, and work on making things better at your company, instead of acting surprised that something illegal was called illegal on HN.
AFAIK none of my own work, nor work of the people I was team lead off was unethical, harmful or illegal. Neither in EU or elsewhere.
Before jumping to further conclusions - I would encourage you to look at actual differences in website before and post that announcement you're referring to. Wayback archive should work - though some of this stuff might have not be shown, or shown differently to bots; otherwise over years there have been a bunch of articles covering persuasive techniques with examples/screenshots of Booking.com.
And then perhaps even ask specific questions based on those observations - and maybe, just maybe someone can answer them without actually breaking the law.
Though since it would be against the law for me to give too many technical and business details (employment contract, regulations related to publicly traded companies ...etc). Only way I can think off for you to get a peak into implementation - would be to become a colleague.
And finally - I will agree with you on that last sentence. It's never too late to reflect on things. That includes not acting surprised (or in denial) to hear that some "big company" you thought is doing bad things - is not.
Oh and definitely keep up with the good fight. Based on news with actual specific details of lawsuits and outcomes (some of which I initially only found about when they were used as examples in internal ethics workshops & trainings). There's a lot of companies out there that should be getting more scrutiny both internally and externally.
Author here. Maybe, it's a fun idea. I have toyed with providing a fuse filesystem for access to a pack but my time for completing this is limited at the moment.
Many packfile-deduplicating backup tools (bup, kopia, borg, restic) can mount the deduplicated storage as FUSE.
It might make sense to check how they do it.
I'd also be interested in how elfshaker compares to those (and `bupstash`, which is written in Rust but doesn't have a FUSE mount yet) in terms of compression and speed.
Did you know of their existence when making elfshaker?
(Copying from Q&A) Before starting out some time ago, I did some experiments with bup. I had a good experience with bup and high expectations for it. However, I found that quite a lot of performance was left on the table, so I was motivated to start elfshaker. Unfortunately that time has past so I don't have scientific numbers for you measured with other software at this time.
As an idea of how elfshaker performs, we see ~300ms time to create a snapshot for clang, and ~seconds-to-minute to create a binary pack containing thousands of revisions. Extraction takes less than a second. One difference of elfshaker compared with some other software I tested is that we do the compression and decompression in parallel, which can make a very big difference on today's many-core machines.
Win95 had very strict and consistent UI style. Office2k and Win2k were peak of this consistency. After that came WinXP and mismatch of inconsistent UI styles.
I've had to teach people to use PCs many times, it used to be so much easier for this reason. You'd teach someone that "this icon mean THIS" and that would be that, but today that is impossible because there are five different graphics/ideas for each thing (plus of course iconography used to use analogies from real-life, like a pen for Word, bin for throwing stuff away, folders, etc).
Windows 10 never really reached self-consistency in six years, and it seems like Microsoft just doesn't care at this point with Windows 11 now just layering more contradictory concepts on the unfinished Windows 10 ones.
"Guide" and "stop" are not only English words, but present in lots of European languages. "Shop" is a common loanword from English in lots of these European languages.
I think most people just don't want to be under someone's control. At least, that is the case for me. Simple as. People not returning to their wage cages is a non problem. Spend less on childcare, spend less on food, commute less, improve health, spend exactly the needed time to achieve assigned tasks. WFH options are good for everyone except for megalomaniacs.
Precisely. It turns out many of us were working to cover the expenses of working! Without commuting, day care, eating out, and so forth we're saving an enormous chunk of money.
Asking us to return to the office is asking us to effectively take a pay cut and reduce the hours we enjoy with our families.
I don't know about most, but I know that I personally don't mind going to work if I have a nice office. Open spaces are not nice. Having people behind my back bothers me for some reason, it makes me feel on the defensive and I'm not able to focus as much as I want. Open spaces also means that wearing a mask is mandatory, and 8 hours of mask-wearing gives me headaches at the end of the day. I do however like being able to take a day or two a week to WFH, as it's nice to be able to take care of the laundry or tasks like this during a work day.
My view may be biased by being young, not having a family and living alone. Though I'm glad that my older collegues are able to spend more time with their family. My parents didn't have WFH when I was young, and I can easily see how a day or two for each parent could have made everything better.
As a final point, as I don't have a very active social life, going to the office fills that "interacting with humans face to face" need for me. That's not a reason to force others to come, of course, but if society switch to more WFH, I hope alternatives will emerge for people like me that have a more "passive" style of socializing. Vocal chat just isn't the same, and webcams don't help.
Depending upon your location and interests, there are probably various activity clubs (like hiking to pick a random example) around where you live. Certainly I don't depend on the office (aside from travel/events) at all for socializing--though I did at one point much earlier in my career.
There are activity clubs, bars, lots of thigns like that, but that's why I talked specifically about "passive" socializing. I would call these things "active" socializing. I personally have a hard time with these kind of things, so in a way WFH could make my life a bit harder. Again, it's not a reason to stop people from doing it, or anything like that, but it's still a consequence of the shift, and I don't know how to solve this.
> I think most people just don't want to be under someone's control
I'm not sure it's as black and white as that!
I've worked from home for a number of years and I used to think people were insane to want to go into an office but I've changed my tune in the last year or so for one simple reason: hardly anyone is set up to work from home!
At my last company (small, only 21 employees - they got rid of their office earlier this year), I was one of only three people in the video calls with an actual home office. Everyone else was working from a living room, bedroom, or in two cases, the couch with a laptop on their knees.
One of the couch-workers left at around the same time as me recently for a company that worked from an office for the very reason that she could work from an office.
It's horses for courses: some people like it and have an actual space to work properly and others don't. In my case I have a desktop computer, two monitors, a comfy chair, a motorised stand-up desk etc. I'd never get this level of comfort in an actual office.
As well as the physical space issues, there is the psychological aspect too. I spend 5 days a week in the house all day by myself. I'm a contractor so making office friendships isn't something that motivates me (doesn't mean I hate everyone, just some people :D). I'm fine with that. I have a couple of friends I've known for many decades and that's enough for me. I can also get work done no problem and still put the washing on, nip out for groceries etc.
I know of colleagues that crave the human interaction... which is fine. I don't. I get enough from my family and the daily (and mostly pointless) video calls.
However, if I had to work from a laptop at my dining room table, It'd suck hard!
I had run LineageOS for some time. It works, but FDroid is missing too many apps, even opensource like Signal. I have to update apks manually every few months.
Signal team fought a long war against any forks or unauthorised builds of Signal. There are (or were) FDroid repositories with Signal compatible builds, but Moxie stated that any such build will be considered malware. Signal team was making such builds increasingly difficult to produce.
Official F-Droid repo doesn't allow proprietary dependencies on which Signal depends for some messages (push?)
Signal is open-source in the "look at it, but don't even try to tun it" way. I'd rather support a protocol that supports federation and encourages alternative clients.
Not upvoting or downvoting, but Matrix is an experimental choice at this point. I have some hope for the near future, but so far Matrix protocol is far from an established standard.
> supports federation and encourages alternative clients
Currently, the only featureful matrix server (synapse) uses gigabytes of RAM just for a handful of users (see also progress on dendrite and conduit). As for supporting alternative clients, Matrix ecosystem has an overdependence on 3rd party web widgets (eg. Jitsi) for client features because they are not supported by the protocol itself yet, making it harder to implement a native client with good performance and all Element features.
As i'm writing this, i realize nheko client now supports WebRTC audio-video calls when a recent GStreamer is available, congratulations on that, and good luck for the multi-platform implementation!
It may be the only one. I was simply aware of this example. My point is not that Jitsi cannot be selfhosted but that using it in your client means your client requires a full web rendering engine to provide that feature, making clients more resource-hungry. To be clear, i'm great it exists at all. It has provided useful services for tech conferences like FOSDEM. I'm just concerned with interoperability and the webification of everything.
Using HTTPS for transport as part of the matrix protocol is great for punching through firewalls, i'm just not convinced the rest of the web stack is well-suited to social networking usecases with a lot of information pouring in. Web engines and the DOM model were designed for static data, not for highly-dynamic information, although there's ongoing R&D around virtual DOMs to optimize those usecases.
Why doesn't Signal maintain an F-Droid compatible build? (if there's a dependency problem, then they should considering dropping it, release a Signal lite perhaps)
Making your own F-Droid repository was harder a few years back, and UX client-side was bad. Nowadays setting up a 3rd-party repo is as easy as scanning/approving a QRCode (for example for Newpipe repo).
Not that i approve Signal's attitude on this topic at all, but there are (were?) technical reasons for which they would do something else. Of course, F-Droid maintaining proper LibreSignal builds in their place alleviates the concern, and that's what Signal team famously opposed. For the uninformed, F-Droid has very serious review/build process for apps and i don't think malware was ever distributed on there (and antipatterns are listed in the UI client-side).
Yes it's a shame that Signal is not on F-Droid, but there's a self updating apk available[1] for side-loading which doesn't use Google Push Notifications if not available and as for why it's not there on F-Droid here's their official response[1], Which IMO makes some reasonable (against forks using their servers) and unreasonable (against normalizing side-loading) justifications.
> some reasonable (against forks using their servers) (...) justifications
How is that reasonable in a centralized client-server model? That's precisely what we find unreasonable with Twitter and others shutting down or making life hard for 3rd party clients. Why would it be more acceptable from a free-software service?
The network effect says a centralized protocol like Signal has "zero" value without reusing the same servers. All this because Signal maintainers have an ideological argument against decentralization, which received many great responses including this one from a Jabber/XMPP client developer: https://gultsch.de/objection.html
In all cases, Signal servers control who has an account, what permissions and what can be posted. You can't just extend the protocol to enrich your client by abusing Signal's servers, but you can make your client compatible with Signal protocol (interoperability). Preventing that is rather user-hostile.
The reason why I felt there's some reason to Signal's stand on forks was because forks not standing up Them having their own F-Droid repository is to the quality standards, not adhering to feature parity while consuming their resources might not go well with their funders.
Signal having its own repo on F-Droid is the viable solution for them but they don't seem have any intention of doing it.
I don't agree with Moxie's reasoning against federated technologies, TBH I prefer email over any real-time communication due to its federated nature.
F-Droid community was interested to package Signal but at the time upstream had a hard dependency on Google Play Services (which according to my/F-Droid quality standards is pretty bad), and made it clear they didn't want any unapproved builds using their servers. This would include reproducible builds from the same source code as is standard in F-Droid official repo. Still, such builds would hypothetically have the same quality standards and feature parity with upstream.
I agree, Even the standalone apk which can use web sockets for notifications still has Google Play Services and so the F-Droid repo should be a separate code base without GPS.
Btw it seems I had a brain fart when typing this -
>The reason why I felt there's some reason to Signal's stand on forks was because forks not standing up Them having their own F-Droid repository is to the quality standards...
The reason why I felt there's some reason to Signal's stand on forks was because forks not standing up to their quality standards...
This exact issue years ago made me think less of (and stop using) Signal rather than F-Droid. You're better off with XMPP or Matrix, plus an ordinary SMS app.
Stellar UX are always welcomed, But the network effects of a chat application are too high of a variable for to just rely on stellar UX to be successful.
Case in point: There was a chat app called Hike[1] in India run by the son of the leading Telecom Billionaire. It had more features(free SMS, Stickers) and arguably better UX than WhatsApp according to its users(100M). But it could never gain over WhatsApp's initial market size in India(Why change what works?).
Final nail on the coffin for Hike was when WhatsApp was made available on the 4G feature phone released by a competing Telecom operator and loads of people got to experience WhatsApp on their first ever Internet enabled compute device.
Yeah or any kind of cartel, really. It's hard enough for a small coop to fight economies of scale, but in many areas you're facing an actual mafia.
Somewhat off-topic, but what's the situation with DIY non-profit ISPs in India? If you're not familiar with the topic, you can look up NYCMesh (New York), Guifi (Spain), Freifunk (Germany), FFDN Federation (France) or Rhizomatica (Mexico). Another interesting development in the telecoms field is https://jmp.chat/ promoting and developing free-software for cellphone<->XMPP/SIP interoperability.
ISPs by itself are heavily scrutinized entities in India, Even Starlink hasn't able to get its license yet AFAIK. I've seen couple of small for-profit ISPs come up and disappear in the form of both non-innovative distributors of bigger ISP and innovative original technology ISPs like WiFi Dabba(YC)[1](Not disappeared, but changed USP from mobile Internet to home broadband & moved the HQ from B'lore to Delaware).
As for non-profit ISP, even if possible it definitely cannot be open i.e. without oversight as in the examples from other countries you've sighted. Closest I've come to community run networks I've seen are LoRA networks.
jmp looks great, Google Voice has been shutdown in India can I use jmp as a replacement?
Edit: I've submitted jmp to HN as I didn't see any large discussions on it.
> non-profit ISP (...) cannot be open i.e. without oversight
That's also the case here. In France you need to declare your ISP activity to the telecoms regulator and follow some regulations. In Germany too there are regulations, but Freifunk as an activist collective ignored them in order to protect their users' privacy, and went up to the supreme court and won their right to operate a privacy-friendly ISP.
> jmp looks great, Google Voice has been shutdown in India can I use jmp as a replacement?
JMP is great from what i heard. It may not be as featureful as Google Voice yet, but there's active development and the user support (i hang out in their channel despite not being a client) is the best i've seen across the entire telecoms industry, and by far. The maintainers are very happy to work on new features and open to suggestions, but due to being a very small organization they're prioritizing obviously new features requests on a "who would pay for that?" basis.
You may be interested to learn that stellar UX is an important point for the snikket.org family of XMPP clients, despite not being there yet. There's an upcoming UX study if you'd like to take part: https://snikket.org/blog/simply-secure-collaboration/
If you install signal from the apk they(moxie, signal) provide it works without google play services and it will update itself automatically, just requiring you to click a confirmation every few weeks.
Calyxos ships with Signal installed. I think it's an install time option? And it updates in an identical fashion.
By auto-update I mean it opens a prompt asking you to update. If you choose not to update it eventually stops working because they change the protocol periodically.
I use lineage, and the signal apk from the website, and signal nags me to upgrade -- that doesn't happen automatically as far as I can tell. I've disabled the "install unknown apps" permission, but I don't know precisely what "unknown" means in this context.
You need to manually update apps from Fdroid due to artificial limitations introduced by Google for third party app stores - only Google Play and possibly device vendor apps stores can update apps automatically on non-rooted device.
This isn’t correct. My family live in the countryside and they’re more than an hour drive from the nearest rail station. There are buses but only a couple a day and they take a very long time. Their situation is pretty common.
Yeah, usually people who talk about good public transport in any country are talking about the (big) cities (probably the only place they visited).
In cities in Portugal and Spain the public transport is good as well, but I lived outside those in both countries and you have no chance without a car if you have any urgency to get somewhere. A bus once a day (early morning) to pick up and once (early evening) to drop off; so if you rely on public transport, you lose 1 entire day if you go shopping.
well if traffic is generated by 1% of the population and if that traffic is already very crowded, it's almost true. that would mean the streets are very narrow.
Totally inaccurate. While yes, you can get in densely populated areas almost anywhere near jy with a public transport, in countryside more and more lines are being stopped and car is a necessity
The deer themselves are a problem in the northeast. They are greatly overpopulated and eat the native understory, preventing the next generation of trees from growing past adolescence. As the existing trees slowly die, there will be none younger to replace them.
This also clears out the competition to the benefit of non-native plants, which the deer don't eat. Some of these plants are invasive, such as japanese barberry, and render large areas untraversable. Not to mention the bramble is an excellent home for rodents, another major tick carrier.
If you want to reduce ticks, deer are a critical element of their lifecycle.
The mice are the main component to the lyme lifecycle. There is a researcher working to give mice immunity using crispr.
Generally, the deer are only overpopulating (at least to the extent you describe) in areas that aren't hunted, which also tend to be highly populated. It seems many people enjoy seeing the deer in their backyards and don't want their almost-pets to be killed, especially if it means it might have to be done on their land. How do you propose dealing with that opposition?
> Generally, the deer are only overpopulating (at least to the extent you describe) in areas that aren't hunted
Central Massachusetts has a very active deer hunting community. I never have any trouble filling my freezer with free venison every fall. But the deer population is still four times the sustainable level as set by the state Wildlife dept and local conservation groups.
Hunting isn't necessarily enough to control the population.
It depends on a number of factors. Access is a huge one where I'm at. Public lands can be basically hunted out while the deer have moved onto private lands where nobody hunts and created huge herds (30+).
If your area doesn't have the access issue, then I would guess it could be an issue with the number of hunters - if there aren't enough, then they can't harvest the number required to bring down the population (or the limits make it difficult - seems like that's the case the way they handle doe permits). Many states have a program that allows hunters to donate their deer to a food bank through a participating butcher. This can make a big impact in areas that allow more harvests (MD allows 10 doe per year/season without any special permits).
Both small mammal and large mammal hosts are required in the deer tick lifecycle.
White-footed mice are the most common host for the small mammal portion (but there are many options), and deer are the most common host for the large mammal portion.
Deer are easier to count and control than mice/voles/moles/chipmunks/etc.
So controlling deer populations is more likely to be successful in breaking the deer tick lifecycle.
So sayeth a publication from researchers at the University of Connecticut, at least.
I'm sympathetic with the almost-pet Bambi-loving crowd. But Lyme is real and not at all cuddly. Bring back the wolves!
Coyotes have been introduced in the east in the past. They generally don't kill healthy adult deer (maybe), but they do kill a decent number of fawns. They aren't enough to fully control the population, especially in the suburbs.
The advantage of going after the mice is that they can use crispr to give them immunity. It could be used on deer, but would probably have more push back. Tick tubes have already been shown to be effective at the small mammal level.
Yep, coyotes are not pack hunters in the way that wolves are.
Interestingly, the coyotes in the US East are apparently hybrid "coywolves". They are larger than western coyotes, but still not big enough to take down an adult deer, and they still do not hunt in packs.
If you have a large area to cover, Tick Tubes(tm) can get expensive. You can make your own pretty easily for about 1/20th of the price: toilet paper rolls, cotton balls, and Permethrin diluted to ~3%.
Definitely. I bought tick tubes which target the mice. I've had one on me since putting them out in late April. I think they're working but need more time to test.
In my area there are over 120 deer per square mile currently. This number was historically 10, when predators existed. Studies have shown that around 30 deer per square mile is when biodiversity starts to suffer.
I live in the forest and manage my lot with guidance from foresters and nearby park rangers. It may take a hundred years for these current trees to die, but there's nothing to replace them. You can walk the understory and see knee-high trees that can't grow further because the deer prune their leaves.
In thought the moose problem in Sweden was big. That is just ridiculous. We have a moose population that is waaay higher than ever before because we killed most large predators, and the people responsible for keeping the population down (hunters) want a much larger population than is environmentally defensible.
There have been times of higher deer population. The population was much higher in PA when my dad was a kid. It currently sits around 30 deer per square mile, which 3 times higher than pre colonial times.
Presumably because the programmer likes that element of western culture. Are programmers supposed to conduct a poll among global stakeholders before they implement an easter egg?
This reminds me some review or article i read many years ago about OS/2 2.0 (the one before Warp) that wrote something along the lines of IBM tried to use a color palette that would be appropriate for all cultures around the world and ended up making a user interface with colors that looked very bland for everyone :-P
Oh come on, ABBA was probably the most global phenomenon ever coming out of Europe. Everybody is an ABBA fan, even if they haven't discovered it yet ;)
I’m in my late 30s and have never understood the Abba obsession. I’ve heard some of their music and it doesn’t really do it for me. And the weird way everyone acts about Abba, like you see in this thread, just reinforces that for me.
It's probably at least partly a 'you had to be there' situation to remember how popular, globally, that band was back in the 70's. The fact that they weren't from the US or UK made them stand out even more.
I like seeing reflections of creators’ personalities in code. It’s a little reminder to not take myself so seriously, to remember that these artificial systems called computers were totally created by humans and finally, that creativity in code is one of the human essences imbued in these systems.
I wonder if AI’s will create Easter eggs in their creations? Would they see them as a form of play, or only as a form of waste? What would that say about the eventual differences between a human and an artificial mind?
