Readit Newsnhf commented on The Restaurant Industry’s Worst Idea: QR Code Menus theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/fortran77
I've only seen this madness in the US. The first time they took my card away from my sight I went with them to see what the heck they were doing. Crazy system, unsafe for no reason, they can bring terminal to you in the same amount of time, no signatures needed either. All of Europe works as you described, few countries in Africa I've been in the same, I wonder how it came to be like this in the US.
A few reasons:
1. We adopted chip cards quite late, so a lot of legacy hardware still exists - including payment terminals built into restaurant point of sale machines with a magnetic strip reader, instead of a separate card terminal.
2. Wireless card terminals are not common in the US, outside of things like Square or Toast readers. Readers are usually hardwired to the POS and aren't able to be "undocked" and carried around.
3. Outside of contactless, signatures are still usually required, and people are still used to having the receipt printer at the host stand alongside the terminal, instead of built into the card reader.
This is all slowly changing, and I honestly chock a lot of it up to stuff like smartphone payments (remember, we got Apple Pay before having contactless embedded in the majority of cards!) and smartphone-based POS systems like Square.
If you're building a site or something, why would you use WeatherKit's REST API rather than using something like OpenWeatherMap?
Dark Sky had a big focus on "hyperlocal" weather prediction prior to the Apple acquisition.
If you're a weather app, being able to tell your users "it will start raining in 35 minutes but pass in 55 minutes" is a huge value add over "80% chance of rain in the next hour". I found it to be quite accurate down to the 5-10 minute increment when I used to live in an area with frequent summer thunderstorms.
nhf commented on Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco thelastdriverlicenseholde... · Posted by u/georgecmu
It also shows how none of our governments seem to care to prevent companies from testing dangerous products on the street with other unwilling drivers
That's not true with most of the prominent examples you see. All autonomous vehicle fleets in California operate under the approval of the state DMV, and do things like publicize crash reports: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
nhf commented on Ask HN: Recommendation for the mom of a near-college-aged “tech geared” student? · Posted by u/SAlpas
I would encourage your daughter to cast a wide net. Being technical does not always mean being an engineer or a scientist (computer or otherwise), and being an engineer/scientist doesn't always mean being technical.
Some of today's most interesting and exciting "technical" challenges have their roots in many disciplines. Cybersecurity can be tackled from a full range of perspectives, from the highly technical (e.g. cryptography) to traditionally non-technical disciplines like law, public policy, and design. The kind of deep thought our world needs on things like AI and ML needs people who are just as informed about the social sciences, psychology, philosophy, and economics as they are about computer science. Our ongoing debates about issues like content moderation or digital privacy need folks who understand how to think about people, including those who are at risk and vulnerable, and then translate that knowledge into the language of engineers.
And even though we've made progress on this front, our governments, courts, and legislatures are still running on a deficit of knowledge about tech, which is a whole different ballgame. (I'd encourage reading Bruce Schneier's site on public interest technology if you're interested: https://public-interest-tech.com/)
All this is to say: if your daughter wants to go the hardcore tech route and loves solving CS or software engineering challenges, more power to her! But I also hope that she doesn't feel limited or boxed in by the traditional definitions of the discipline.
nhf commented on Google Camera randomly changes some QR code URLs on Android 12 androidpolice.com/google-... · Posted by u/csnweb
Thanks for confirming the report. I'm curious - if you hand-wrote a URL on a piece of paper (or printed it out from a printer/displayed it on a different screen), and then scanned it with the camera, would the camera pick it up? Would the camera corrupt the URL?
Interesting question! However the OCR functionality in the camera (through Google Lens) runs a separate pipeline. Other bug reporters said Lens didn't have the issue when scanning QR codes so I doubt it would surface there.
nhf commented on Google Camera randomly changes some QR code URLs on Android 12 androidpolice.com/google-... · Posted by u/csnweb
So far, I've been able to reproduce a few transformations:
* www[0-9].example.tld -> [0-9].example.tld, e.g. www1.nyc.gov -> 1.nyc.gov
* example[ac|co|gov|edu].tld -> example.[ac|co|gov|edu].tld e.g. exampleac.uk -> example.ac.uk
My guess, as someone else further down the comments mentioned, is that some URL handling library is doing more than expected to its input. I filed an internal bug report referencing some of the public reports from a dev build of Android 12, so hopefully this will get triaged soon if someone hasn't already done a similar reproduction.
(I work at Google, but on nothing remotely related to Android.)
nhf commented on HSBC exits US mass market retail banking about.us.hsbc.com/news-an... · Posted by u/mgh2
Can't help with dirty history, but on paper Schwab is hard to beat. AFAIK Schwab and Betterment are the only two left that do worldwide ATM fee coverage.
My only downside with Schwab is the UI on their site. It seems very much geared to the boring investor, moreso than the checking account customer. Maybe some people prefer that, though.
Schwab's checking account has always been a loss leader for their brokerage so I imagine it'll stay that way. The mobile app isn't too bad though.
nhf commented on London's Oyster card: Are its days numbered? bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england... · Posted by u/edward
While I think it's clear that some of the currently Oyster-only features could be migrated (e.g., you can have a rail discount card on an Oyster card, but clearly it merely requires a way to link an Oyster card to the "account" of the contactless card), others are more challenging, like free travel passes.
I suppose you could just issue EMV-compatible cards where you grant the holder free travel, though I'd expect this would be more complicated than the status-quo (both in terms of needing to register IDs in lists that aren't particularly long currently, and in terms of needing a much larger standard implemented).
This is essentially what the new fare card in Philadelphia is. It's implemented as a prepaid MasterCard that can also hold transit specific passes.
I also tried Rosetta stone. It's a good companion to an other learning tool but not very good on its own.
I'm a fan of pimsleur language learning. It's old school but it works, if you do it consistently and follow what they ask you to do.