Hacker News: benaubin

New comment by benaubin in "Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network"

benaubin — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 16:22:28 +0000

our app is electron and you can open the chromium dev tools via the help menu. if you want to verify yourself.

New comment by benaubin in "Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network"

benaubin — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 16:16:26 +0000

in seriousness: we don't listen to your microphone unless you click the button that says "start transcribing" in big letters.

we dropped the ball with the support response quoted the top of the thread. we don't process your microphone data until you click the button to start transcribing, and remind the user to confirm they have two-party consent. we merely detect when a meeting app is using your microphone.

source: i work at notion, just checked the code. it's electron, you're welcome to check for yourself.

New comment by benaubin in "Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network"

benaubin — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 12:17:35 +0000

have any in mind? we're hiring :)

http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/notion/jobs/6345904003

New comment by benaubin in "Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network"

benaubin — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 12:10:00 +0000

To be clear: recording is opt-in. We also remind users to ask for two-party consent. (obligatory "i work at notion")

New comment by benaubin in "Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network"

benaubin — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 11:54:35 +0000

I work at Notion. We don't ship code that would let us listen in until users explicitly click start recording. We don't want to, we aren't in the business of selling data and this would be incredibly expensive - and destroy trust. We are cash flow positive so we can sustain our values for the long term. We build useful software and get paid by our users for it. It's pretty simple. Agree that operating systems should display prominent indicators when the microphone is in use.

New comment by benaubin in "Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network"

benaubin — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 11:50:51 +0000

it's electron so you can just open chromium dev tools and see almost all network activity - im pretty sure this is exposed to everyone in the debug menu. takes seconds. http proxy the rest. (i work at notion and do this all the time to debug)

Parachute use when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial (2018)

benaubin — Sun, 04 May 2025 16:13:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43887570

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by benaubin in "Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor"

benaubin — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 16:32:29 +0000

now you've banned several different arbitrary strings!

New comment by benaubin in "Building and scaling Notion's data lake"

benaubin — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 16:04:55 +0000

Notion employee here. We don't put images themselves in Postgres- we use s3 to store them. The article is referring to image blocks, which are effectively pointers to the image.

New comment by benaubin in "Understanding and avoiding visually ambiguous characters in IDs"

benaubin — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 17:36:25 +0000

> However, as the number of members in the set increases, the number of possible IDs increases exponentially. Case-sensitive: 53^8 = 62,259,690,411,361 Case-insensitive: 22^8 = 54,875,873,536

Nitpick, but isn't this polynomial to the members of the set?

New comment by benaubin in "More Agents Is All You Need: LLMs performance scales with the number of agents"

benaubin — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 02:08:18 +0000

I'd assume that there's a difference between picking the best _token_ across an assortment of randomly selected tokens, versus picking the best _string_ of randomly-selected tokens.

New comment by benaubin in "More Agents Is All You Need: LLMs performance scales with the number of agents"

benaubin — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 02:04:56 +0000

"'All You Need Considered Harmful.' Is All You Need"

New comment by benaubin in "Electric scooter company Bird files for bankruptcy"

benaubin — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 05:57:19 +0000

About 3 years ago, Bird used to be the only scooter useable on my college campus. And they were pretty commonly used. Then, 2 years ago, the bird app completely stopped working on my phone. Every time I tried to unlock one, the app would just show an endless loading animation. I tried reinstalling. I tried using different payment methods. I couldn't find any way to get a scooter to unlock, and the moment I needed one, I was always in a hurry. By then, Lime began to comply with my university's rules and their scooters were allowed to park on campus. I tried the app many more times, even a few weeks ago, and just... never worked.

I don't think it was just me - I stopped seeing Bird scooters get used by others. I still saw the occasional Lime.

It's entirely possible I'm extrapolating too much from my experience and a rough observation. But still, I'm kind of surprised it took them so long to fail.

New comment by benaubin in "Tabloid: The Clickbait Headline Programming Language"

benaubin — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 15:58:48 +0000

Needs async/await:

async: DEVELOPING STORY [DISCOVER HOW TO...]

await: STAY TUNED FOR [expr]

New comment by benaubin in "Tabloid: The Clickbait Headline Programming Language"

benaubin — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 15:02:40 +0000

This is actually a pretty neat idea. Should be pretty easy by just swapping out the tokenization loop logic. https://github.com/thesephist/tabloid/blob/e0d16ea54eced809e...

New comment by benaubin in "Tabloid: The Clickbait Headline Programming Language"

benaubin — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 15:01:09 +0000

10 [EASY|QUICK|WEIRD] STEPS = Range

[list expr] FOR [variable name] = map operator

Tabloid: The Clickbait Headline Programming Language

benaubin — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 14:10:13 +0000

Article URL: https://tabloid.vercel.app/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24578749

Points: 245

# Comments: 37