velavar

It might very well be placebo but it helped me deeply and I can see why women that want to give it their all would try it (and that's why I don't begrudge her counting those jabs). If it helps anyone - my first cycle was without acupuncture and I barely got 4 eggs out of it. I underwent acupuncture for 3 months before my second cycle and that got me 12 eggs.

When each cycle costs about 30k USD, a lot of women with low amh, egg quality or ovarian reserve would try anything to help tweak the odds!

I've previously been recommended "Punished by rewards" by Alfie Kohn

Working in fraud prevention and I would love to know how to detect a botnet system, beyond the usual velocity checks. A decade of working in this space and I haven't found a reliable, fail-safe way to do this. Genuinely interested to know if there's a suggestion.

That's okay, different people can like different things :)

As for myself, I liked reading about some bits of Chinese history that I was not very familiar with, and it also provides a really good foundation for the reason behind the lead character's far-reaching actions. I also do think the best parts of the story do come later in books 2 and 3 - I like the larger-than-life ideas and the imperfect characters.

This was the year I got my attention under enough control to be able to read voraciously again like I used to in my childhood :)

* I'll always bring up The Three-body problem because I re-read it every year

* Piranesi because of it's fantastical story-telling

* The Covenant of Water - because it's a fantastic medical drama and a sweeping story spanning generations

* Victory City - Salamn Rushdie's latest novel which is surprisingly readable

* The Enchanted Forest/Kaikeyi/Palace of Illusions - because they cover the major Indian epics from the lens of the women characters (think Circe with an Indian background)

* Trust - The same story told from different viewpoints with a setting in the early NY financial world, which makes it extra interesting

I notice that I do tend to favour books with an Indian background because of my nostalgia for it as I live in a foreign land. Maybe I'll branch out more next year!

I got Loops on Amazon based on someone's recommendation and they work pretty well for me. They're cheap enough to try once and see if they work for you.

What kmoser said :)

I support your argument about Yubikeys - I myself use them for any financial site that allows it. A lot of companies do use them to check for fraudulent logins. But the friction of it is high enough that companies would much rather take the loss than force their customers to authenticate every time a transaction has to be made. Also, I think until it is normalized in the industry, there is a consumer perception of physical keys being too technically difficult to obtain, set up and manage. Not to mention, all the Yubikeys in the world still don't help if one goes and gets phished/socially engineered :)

That's very true. I think my comment was more in response to other comments talking about "surveillance" and "trust", but you're right that if the data collection itself is illegal, there are no two sides about it :)

I haven't worked with Telesign data but I can attempt a guess. Think of how a fraudster uses a phone versus how a legitimate customer uses a phone:

1. The former is likely using a throwaway phone number, the latter is using an established phone number. You can tell the difference with the number of completed calls over time, call duration etc. Burner phones will have bursts of high intensity activity to several different phone numbers whereas legitimate phones will have lots of successfully completed phone calls over a long period of time to repeating phone numbers.

2. The former will likely place calls all over the country or world as they attempt to raid several bank accounts digitally. The latter will probably have more local calls since they're calling their doctors, schools, etc. This is probably where range activity plays a role.

I'm not defending Telesign or how they collect data - I'm merely saying this data has value in account protection.

Ahh that's a great question - it's a very real risk. In my mind, most of the data these companies have is sourced from other companies so all that these vendors do is increase the surface area for the attack vectors. And the (probably naive) hope is that the attackers can't do much with data such as trust scores and the underlying factors.

So true and something I see everyday on my job! it's no wonder then that financial companies have to resort to using data from companies like Telesign to view these red flags and attempt to detect fraud.

I work in fraud prevention with vendors such as this. Let me be the devil's advocate here: trust and risk scores such as these are often very useful for identifying account takeovers and stolen identities in the financial and telecom worlds. We often see folks on HN complaining about how banks don't protect them from fraud losses - companies like this are how there is any hope left for some modicum of consumer protection.

You may ask: Then why do banks not protect me from losses better? I say: They're already doing something (invisible as it may be). They can definitely do a better job. But without companies such as Telesign, fraud losses would far, far worse.

You may ask: What if my data gathered is used for nefarious purposes? I say: In my experience, data such as this is not allowed to be used for marketing purposes but strictly for consumer protection. I'm not specifically speaking about TeleSign but similar vendors. The worst that should happen is that you get a transaction declined, or get denied for a credit card etc. But no marketing or any other manipulative practice is allowed, in theory.

Happy to answer any questions you may have :)