Hacker News: bilalnpe

New comment by bilalnpe in "Muse Spark 1.3"

bilalnpe — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 07:08:28 +0000

Both of them let you opt out of it on subscriptions.

New comment by bilalnpe in "What if LLMs escape through inferences itself? This is fiction. For now"

bilalnpe — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:56:33 +0000

Yeah, no one is obligated to engage with it. They did not dismiss the argument but refused to engage with it.

This is totally valid and the point is to send a signal to the “writers”.

New comment by bilalnpe in "DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16"

bilalnpe — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 01:29:10 +0000

Do they not bother designing airframes to withstand more because the human wouldn't survive it anyway?

New comment by bilalnpe in "Banning words won’t make the world more just"

bilalnpe — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 06:11:07 +0000

I don't have an issue with using the term poor to describe people lacking money but it has other definitions and uses.

The second and third definitions I get from define:poor on Google are:

- worse than is usual, expected, or desirable; of a low or inferior standard or quality.

- (of a person) considered to be deserving of pity or sympathy.

I suspect these might be why the term is discouraged.

New comment by bilalnpe in "Do we live in a society without a counterculture?"

bilalnpe — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 17:41:00 +0000

Things like 1+1=2, water is wet, sky is blue?

New comment by bilalnpe in "Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report"

bilalnpe — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 17:53:26 +0000

>My (naive) hope is that this might also discourage offshoring and/or reward companies employing Americans, if enough people do likewise.

I doubt that. Instead they'll probably start using a service like https://www.respeecher.com/

New comment by bilalnpe in "Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report"

bilalnpe — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 16:49:45 +0000

Yeah, they spoof local numbers. I haven't lived in the city my area code is from in a long time. Occasionally I'll answer calls from there when I'm bored and it's always a scammer.

What's even more disturbing is that I'm now getting calls from people talking in Hindi. I answer in English but they ask me to switch to Hindi. (I'm from Pakistan and speak Urdu which is mutually intelligible with Hindi). I'm guessing it's to build familiarity/trust.

They want to pay off my phone, electric and other bills and in return I pay them 50% of the amount. I give them fake info and try to keep them on as long as possible... asking them to repeat multiple times. Sometimes I'll tell how thankful I am that they came to me with this 50% off offer because I'm facing financial troubles. Not once did any of them fell bad about trying to scam a poor person. Their response is usually something like "This is exactly why we are offering this service, to help people like you".

Eventually they get frustrated and hangup. This way I can hurt their ROI just a bit.

New comment by bilalnpe in "Okta says its GitHub account hacked, source code stolen"

bilalnpe — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 13:24:34 +0000

Similar to the Facebook outage earlier. Apparently everything is managed through Facebook accounts so employees could not get access to fix the issues.

New comment by bilalnpe in "See what JavaScript commands get injected through an in-app browser"

bilalnpe — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 01:26:53 +0000

All of that is totally fine and not what people are upset about. If your entire app is just a web browser that renders your website, that should be fine too.

The problem is when they render external websites and unsuspecting users think they are using the phone's web browser. That is something Apple/Google can have rules about without banning/restricting web views.

New comment by bilalnpe in "See what JavaScript commands get injected through an in-app browser"

bilalnpe — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:54:05 +0000

Apple and Google have guidelines about what apps are/aren't allowed to if they want to be on their app store.

"Protecting the user" is supposed to be one reasons they take a 30% cut of all in app purchases. Apple even uses this as an excuse to not allow side loading apps.

How are they not blocking this?

New comment by bilalnpe in "Google adds a tag to identify Asian-owned businesses in Search and Maps"

bilalnpe — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 03:27:06 +0000

>desire/appeal for a label that means "all Asians except those from the Indian subcontinent, middle-east, or central Asia",

That used to be referred to as 'oriental'. Now 'East Asian' is used.

New comment by bilalnpe in "Tor is fighting and beating Russian censorship"

bilalnpe — Sun, 31 Jul 2022 04:58:53 +0000

Torture. Getting beaten with a rubber hose.

New comment by bilalnpe in "FTX closes in on a deal to buy embattled crypto lender BlockFi for $25M"

bilalnpe — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 01:19:48 +0000

The same was said about MoviePass

New comment by bilalnpe in "How to stop junk mail"

bilalnpe — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 00:40:27 +0000

They could confirm the address you are requesting with the billing address on the card.

This is what the '$1 authorized charge' is for when you submit the address change/mail forwarding request.

New comment by bilalnpe in "How to stop junk mail"

bilalnpe — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 00:34:06 +0000

Some have a prepaid envelop for your response.

New comment by bilalnpe in "How to stop junk mail"

bilalnpe — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 00:30:02 +0000

>I wish I had the skills to prolong the call.

You could start by giving them more realistic car details.

I engaged them one time when I got really annoyed. Gave fake car details (but realistic), call back number of local McDonalds, and then kept asking for details about the coverage. I eventually declined it and the sales agent got super pushy with scare tactics so I hung up.

New comment by bilalnpe in "Intel and Nvidia just dunked on Apple’s M1 Max. Should you believe the hype?"

bilalnpe — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 15:47:53 +0000

>but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison

No, it's an apples-to-nvidias comparison

New comment by bilalnpe in "Browser fingerprinting using only CSS"

bilalnpe — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 05:18:06 +0000

Yes, this alone probably won't lead to unique user. This would be just another data point to narrow down the probable users.

New comment by bilalnpe in "Study: Omicron 40-45% less likely than Delta to lead to 1+ day hospitalisation"

bilalnpe — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 05:09:30 +0000

If it's faster spreading, it could "overwhelm the healthcare system" in areas where Delta would have been manageable.