It’s possible to (mostly) avoid political stuff on those websites if one wants to, instead of refusing to use the sites completely. Just as an example, I rarely visit r/all, but I do visit specific subreddits that I’m subscribed to like r/privacy, r/pihole, and r/thinkpad. On Facebook, I never browse my newsfeed, but I am a member of a group for my apartment complex in the Stockholm area which lists local events and people selling stuff or giving away stuff in the community.
My point is that is that it’s possible to filter out a lot of the political garbage on those sites if one wishes, but it does appear to be getting more difficult since political stuff is appearing more and more often in places that I personally wouldn’t expect.
It’s easy to filter your reddit, and get quite boring results. (Who knows if that will change in the future, though? The old reddit interface could be taken away at any time.) But, Facebook and Twitter are a different beast. Facebook seems all the sadder since the groups can be quite good, and the prospect of staying connected with friends is obviously appealing.
How is a subreddit about privacy not political? It might not align to the two political parties in the US, but for sure I expect there to be an echo-chamber of people that value privacy more over other rights than regular people.
It is virtually impossible on Twitter, I know because I've used every tool possible (tweet deck, lists, occasionally muting people, changing the feed layout) and it just doesn't work because (a) Twitter is designed to bleed content from one tribe to another (b), because people have one feed where they combine work, private life and politics and (c) the metrics Twitter use are based on designs that agitate and divide.
Was keeping an eye on Twitter a Few months ago, while watching the downtown being burned.
Started seeing tons of tweets from people who decided my area was next. Tons of people going out about how they were going to burn us down.
Then watching them as they all started heading our way.
Thankfully they found all the exits blocked by police.
I don’t own guns. But my area is big on gun rights. Looters vs gun nuts.
So yea, well. It’s a pretty screwed up situation. Like one step from civiL war screwed up.
I'm very interested to see how Amazon's entry into the Swedish market plays out. I used to shop a lot on Amazon back when I lived in the SF Bay Area and thought I would miss it when I moved to Stockholm but honestly that has not been the case. I get 1-2 day shipping from other online retailers in Sweden anyway (like CDON and Webhallen) and there is quite fierce competition between a few of the bigger names in the game which keeps prices low. The only thing I miss about Amazon was their very generous return policy and same-day shipping on some items, but I think the latter is limited to larger markets.
I always attempt to shop from Amazon Germany because (a) larger variety of items, and (b) I feel I can trust the reviews there. Have you found Swedish e-commerce sites to have enough reliable reviews to buy anything with confidence, or do you tend to buy products that you can find reviews of elsewhere? I joke to my wife, "If 500 Germans say it's good, I'm sold"
There are far fewer fake reviews at amazon.de (well, compared to what I read on HN) and surprisingly many that are high quality. I think it might be partially because the reviews would need to be in German so you have fewer low-cost ways to have them created.
And I’m not sure we have co-mingling here because I never heard of the problems that seem to be common in the US (/ on HN) with it and also never experienced it myself (I spend around 2.200 € on Amazon per year)
I live in the US and out of hundreds (thousands?) of purchases only one or two have made me question if they were counterfeit, and even those worked well enough and I didn't return them. There may be a selection bias in the comments you read because the countless people like me never post their experience and the 0.001% who unluckily were repeatedly sold counterfeit will likely post about it.
I think HN commenters also overstate the problem. I’m in the US, use Amazon a lot, and haven’t noticed counterfeits. Maybe I’m just bad at identifying them.
I think it’s the type of issue where it would be a major problem for the producer of a specific product that got ripped off, and any customers who are fans of that product, but may never affect the average buyer.
No idea. I haven't experienced that either and I use amazon.de a lot.
I've had one item sold by Amazon as new that was clearly a fraud return, though, i.e. the item inside the product package was switched for a different model.
That cluttering and dumping of tons of similar indistinguishable products under different sellers really annoys me. Another annoyance even when I do shop in those redundant product categories is that they don't even upload reallife photos of their products but these lowsy idealized CGI photos that give no sense to the quality or actual appearance of the item.
I feel like to stock co-mingling issue is far less pronounced in Europe compared to what the American crowd here on HN says. I live in Europe, and never got a fake product from Amazon.
I actually use Amazon DE/UK/US for to look at reviews but I more often than not end up purchasing from a Swedish e-tailer. There are some exceptions though, like when the price is just much lower on Amazon DE. I had to buy a label maker last week and the price on Amazon DE for a specific model was almost 40% cheaper than buying it from a local store in Sweden.
Same here (mostly buying books). I look at the reviews on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Goodreads.com (great because it has reviews of Swedish books as well), then order from Adlibris (mostly) and Bokus (occasionally). Often the prices have been about the same. Even if they weren't, I don't mind paying a bit more if it means the warehouse workers are treated fairly.
Yup, that's what I'm using as well, usually in combination with a check on ebay.de and ebay.co.uk for products which fit the bill - i.e. not for heavy, bulky goods like fridges and washing machines but certainly for smaller electronics and tools. For larger computer hardware - servers etc - I tend to look towards Germany and the UK since prices tend to be quite a bit lower than here in Sweden. I have only bought something at Amazon once, using the French version, my reasons being that they tended not to want to ship to Sweden and even if they do the price tended to be matched by other sellers. I do not want to get an Amazon monoculture so I'll continue to do so unless the price difference ends up so big that the offer is "too good to refuse". Swedish prices tend to be on the high side but they have come down, most likely due to competition from abroad. The Swedish postal service does its best to counteract this by putting a fine on parcels from outside the EU - they call it a handling charge but that is just word play, the intention is both for them to pad their budget and for you to stop buying from overseas - so I've been exploring ways to get around this by having goods delivered to the Netherlands (where I'm originally from) to import them myself when I happen to be there.
I don't think your point about the handling fee rings very true. If you followed the news at the time when it was added you would know that it was put in place to counter the huge workload that came with handling all the packages from cheap Chinese online stores (like Wish). Before that PostNord almost never charged for handling packages from outside the EU. The same can not be said about DHL, UPS and Fedex who ALWAYS make sure to charge extra for handling any package from outside the EU, almost without fail.
It makes sense in my mind that the buyer should be the one to pay for the handling of what they buy. I don't want to subsidise your shopping/shipping via my taxes, they're high enough as it is.
Postnord's argument that the handling of parcels from China took too much time was utterly nonsensical, especially given in the light of their usual complaints about the fact that fewer people were mailing stuff so they had to raise prices. If handling parcels from China took too much time they simply had not been very good in negotiating a deal with China Post about parcel rates.
Another factor in the nonsensicality of this tariff is that Sweden is more or less the only country which starts charging sales tax (called moms here, comparable with VAT in the UK, BTW in the Netherlands etc.) from a value of 0kr (i.e. free, but sales tax is paid on the shipping costs). Where other European countries start charging sales tax when the value of imported goods rises above (e.g.) €20, Sweden starts at €0. Many parcels ordered from China fall under that rate which make it a very common thing to be represented with the following:
price of ordered goods including shipping: €4
sales tax: €1
"handling fee": €8
total: €13, of which €9 goes to the Swedish state (directly or through Postnord)
Mind, this is not the shipping fee as that was already paid for in the €4 purchase price. If the same parcel were ordered to the Netherlands the customer would pay €4 and that's it, no import fees and no tariffs.
The so-called "handling fee" is nothing but an excuse to put a tariff on international trade for individuals, a way to make sure the fruits of globalisation stay out of reach of the public.
I use prisjakt regularly as well but mainly for the price comparison feature between retailers. The reviews on the website are decent as well though but there are typically a couple orders of magnitude fewer reviews on products than on Amazon DE/UK/US.
The question here is whether the reviews on prisjakt.nu are fewer because they're true reviews while those on Amazon often are fake. The prevalence of fake reviews - both positive as well as negative - has made it more or less impossible to rely on them as a guide.
As a German, don't trust the reviews, they're heavily manipulated. I guess at some point (e.g. top seller with thousands of reviews) manipulation doesn't move the needle as much, but for plenty of products with < 100 reviews, there's often dozens that are likely fakes (even without counting the paid Vine reviews).
Read 3/4 star reviews, they are usually good indicator of quality.
There are few type of those, and you are looking for someone who knows what they are talking about and talk about shortcomings of a given product. They are usually pro's that have some experience with given category of a product. So they know what they want.
If you find one like that its ease to judge what features you need vs features pros need.
Usually, 1 stars are by entitled complainers (unless product is cheap knockoff) and 5 stars are by people that don't know what they are talking about or brought reviews.
How do you feel you can trust Amazon reviews? In the UK they've become really bad, obvious fakes, loads of low quality products dropshipped from Alibaba/China with tons of 5 stars.
The only reviews you can vaguely trust are the non-5 star ones.
I don’t trust the reviews and the selection is such a grab bag of garbage. Besides some obviously branded stuff (I don’t know, any Apple product for example) it feels like playing Russian roulette, especially if you just want something random like, I don’t know, kitchen utensils.
> My company’s suggested implementation made it to the second round of proposals.
If you don't mind me asking what company do you work for? I am actually studying computer science (security and privacy emphasis) at KTH in Sweden and I have been interested in CBDC for some time now. If your company offers master's theses I would love to connect on LinkedIn or via email.
> the other one is how to live up to the requirement from the government that the currency needs to be liquid also during a crisis (what if electricity or telecom doesn’t work?)
This is the first thing I thought of when reading the article. Since you seem to have some knowledge about the field, what are some proposed solutions to this problem?
The article mentioned something that I find particularly interesting:
> Sweden is the least cash-dependent country in the world, making it a litmus test for how central banks can react to people using less of the money they print.
To be honest I had my suspicions that this was the case. Anecdotally, I have lived in Sweden since August of 2018 and I cannot recall a single time where I have carried cash in my wallet or used cash for a transaction in Sweden. If I am not paying with a credit/debit card I usually just use Swish (similar to Venmo or Cash app for US readers, except it's operated by several Swedish banks and I believe the Swedish central bank).
> If you don't mind me asking what company do you work for? I am actually studying computer science (security and privacy emphasis) at KTH in Sweden and I have been interested in CBDC for some time now. If your company offers master's theses I would love to connect on LinkedIn or via email.
I might have the same employer, and the kind of company we and Accenture are don't primarily focus on this tech, but usually have a wide variety and ever changing list of options for a masters thesis.
The poor people have bank accounts, because if you're poor and getting some gov't assistance, that gets transferred to a bank account (I mean, how else? No non-financial institution or gov't agency is going to employ tellers handing over cash directly, they all use banks for that, and checks aren't used); it's general EU policy that basic financial services (bank accounts, bank transfers, electronic bill paying, card payments) should be available to everyone including the very poorest. Even a homeless, unemployed drug addict would be expected to have access to these services.
If you are looking for an alternative I highly recommend Bitwarden (not affiliated with the company). I switched over from Lastpass around a year and a half ago and am very happy with the service. All of the clients and the server are 100% open source plus you can self host if you want to.
Switched from LastPass to BitWarden over the weekend. I have 1,200+ passwords, and the transition was seamless. I even set up BitWarden on one of my web servers so that I can control my data -- even that took less than 30 minutes, thanks to BitWardenRS docker container.
The only thing I have yet to figure out for BitWarden is how to get a little icon to show up next to user/password fields in forms. I just have to right click and go to BitWarden (FireFox) to get there, which it just slightly more work. Still worth it.
Why would I pay $36/year (LastPass) for something that I can control for free?
If you have Bitwarden in Firefox's toolbar the icon will also display a number indicating the number of available credentials, and clicking the icon to open it and then clicking any of the entries autofills.
I seriously considered Bitwarden not so long ago when I was looking for a password manager, and then realized I also need to maintain bookmarks across platforms and devices. Sadly Bitwarden doesn't offer that as a feature.
I'm curious if there is a differentiating feature of Bitwarden over Sync
I'm not the parent comment, but I did consider Lockwise but the inability to store anything else than passwords is a dealbreaker. I have some software license keys and their receipts stored securely, as well as some network accounts that are not web-based.
Is there an exporter available for BitWarden then? I'm guessing your 1,200 password had a seamless transition because of some tooling the project provides? Is that correct? Cheers.
Not the person you're asking but you can export your passwords to CSV from LastPass and BitWarden can import the CSV. The only issue is that the LastPass export can be a bit sketchy and have a few errors you need to manually fix.
I suppose seamless may have been an oversell. I consider it seamless because BitWarden provides the import functionality for a variety of competitors' exports (XMLs, CSVs, etc), so all I had to do was export my LastPass passwords to my desktop and then import it into BitWarden via the web interface.
HTH
I subscribe to Bitwarden but this is a real issue with a lot of things: subscription overload.
It is especially bad with newspapers where everyone seems to be optimizing only for subscribers, not for sale of individual news items or even single day access.
Consequently I don't buy (except one local and one national one.)
The Guardian seems to be the winner in my case. They accept donations and get $10 for each thing I read there it seems :-]
I hear "the cost of electricity" thrown out a lot for self running a small service. A Pi uses ~2W. At $0.11/kWh, running that constantly is ~$1.93 a year. Of course electricity rates vary, but I usually find the cost of electricity to be overblown when it comes to compute. Power can be very cheap.
However, I imagine spending an hour of your time is more than that $10 budget.
Also, I've never run a Pi for more than a few years without the SD card failing. Even when logging to a ram disk, something seems to fail eventually, and it is sometimes not found until the unit is rebooted.
Have you looked into alternatives? I'm about to swap out a Pi 3 for something a bit faster and without an SD card, but I'm not sure what. I was thinking NUC but they probably aren't nearly as efficient. Efficiency at idle, more than compute efficiency, is really what I'm seeking.
Running a Pi with a SSD over USB seems to be the best option at the moment. There are other SBCs with m.2 storage options which look neat as well but are obviously not nearly as well supported as the Pi line.
Any time they spent is time they could have spent earning money instead. They may not have wanted to earn money with their free time, but did they want to set up a password manager with their free time either? It's not exactly a leisure activity for most users
I'm 3 years into Bitwarden and have never looked back. I backed the kickstarter that failed some while back, but it seems he/they ended up managing without it. I should probably subscribe even if I don't need the extra features.
I second Bitwarden. I have >130 120-character auto generated passwords stored and can rotate / regenerate my passwords with little hassle. Also love having the self hosting option available.
After reviewing what you actually get from a family plan, I'm not needing to be sharing enough credentials to make it worth the cost. I opted for a premium plan instead so that I can make use of yubikeys.
There is. If you plan on sharing some credentials with only one more person, you can make an "organization" for free and put some credentials in there. My Netflix account is in there for my wife, so if I decide to rotate the password she'll have access to it.
There's also some other stuff like our Wifi password, etc so that she doesn't have to write it down.
Both the teams and enterprise options also allow you to share any credentials within an organization/team, though the default for any new credential is no sharing. I assume that's exactly how the family plan works as well?
I really like the idea of Bitwarden but haven't used it yet. I think it will probably eventually be my go-to recommendation in this space, having fought with some of the other non-foss offerings.
Doesn't it worry you that Bitwarden is essentially maintained by one person [0]?
What if that person gets run over tomorrow and nobody knows the password for the AWS account. Imagine how long it'll take for somebody get around the huge code base on their own.
I keep an offline, encrypted backup of my Bitwarden data in a safe place. If something happens I can quickly spin up a bitwarden-rs instance, or go back to KeePass.
It's also much cheaper than LastPass. I was going to convert over to BitWarden the last time I was up to renew LastPass but that means I also have to retrain my family on how to use it. I'm gunning for sometime in the next year though.
As a child in Sweden in the late 90s and early 2000s I recall that my dad had a hardware token to access his bank account. Though nowadays people in Sweden use BankID for the most part which is 2FA in the form of a mobile app. BankID is also used to login to most government websites in Sweden which is nice.
Meanwhile, banking security in the US is stuck in the Stone Age. Last I checked Wells Fargo, one of the largest US banks, still does not allow passwords greater than 14 characters in length and passwords are not case sensitive.
+1. I migrated to Bitwarden from LastPass last year and haven't looked back. The desktop apps and browser extensions are fantastic and the UX is wonderful.
I have experienced the same behavior when trying to complete Captchas in Tor Browser. However the vast majority of the time it just says "Your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now." so I cannot even attempt to complete the Captcha.
You can do this on their mobile web app as well which is why I use that over the mobile application. The mobile web app experience is actually quite nice.
Thinkpads have already been mentioned but I also highly recommend the Dell Latitude, especially the 7490. They have fantastic keyboards, great battery life, and absolutely amazing displays (among the best 1920x1080 displays I have seen on a laptop). Plus they run many Linux distributions out of the box with minimal configuration.
If you live in the US or Europe I'd recommend the US/UK Dell Outlet. You can get a Dell Latitude in great condition (often like-new condition) for a nice deal, especially when they have their laptop promotions. I've had a good experience with their onsite service as well.
I looked a those, but found the 5400 series more practical (I use a 5480). US keyboard, 3 button mouse, and it has the same screen resolution, but a slightly more readable dot pitch.
For me the choice was based on the 3 button mouse, and the screen pitch.
What annoys me is that the only way to get the USA keyboard (for a UK purchase) was that the machine was procured in the USA.
This is one thing Apple get right - offering the USA keyboard layout in the UK market. That said, I don't like the feel of the current Macbook keyboards.
My point is that is that it’s possible to filter out a lot of the political garbage on those sites if one wishes, but it does appear to be getting more difficult since political stuff is appearing more and more often in places that I personally wouldn’t expect.