alphakappa

> It’s easy to forget how quickly we can overextend technology, which is so good at solving some of our problems, into a good way of solving all of our problems. But eventually the self-driving wheel turns and we realize we don’t have as much command to reduce the whole complex world to a set of yes or no answers, let alone predictions, and our grossest capitalistic dreams are thwarted yet again, but not without a cost.

If the argument is that when viewed through the lens of today's technology these are seemingly insurmountable problems, then it is a weak argument for the case that the self driving car will not arrive.

It's easy to forget that what these cars can do today is leaps and bounds ahead of what self-driving technology could do a decade back. When these problems will be solved, it will be through other breakthroughs that we are not aware of today, so this is a premature obituary for self-driving AI.

I may be mistaken, but sounds like you are referring to browser compatibility not being a good reason to adopt jQuery anymore.

But like the parent said above, there's more to jQuery than just getting browser compatibility - it's an abstraction for UI concepts that would require writing a ton of low level JS otherwise.

Congratulations on the launch - I love this idea. One thing that stands out to me is your beautiful packaging. Could you shed some light into how you went about figuring out packaging and all the logistics involved?

Speaking of styling things for novelty, there's also this

https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock/text-styles

I think the parent's point is that markdown is simple, but markdeep is not.

Yes. The newer ones enable control over WiFi. Joule requires you to connect to WiFi to get firmware updates.

This happens all the time. Recently I bought a sous-vide machine, and realized that it would phone home with details of my cooking, along with the WiFi AP. Essentially someone at the company would have an idea of my location, along with whether someone was at that location, and maybe my food preferences.

The idea that this kind of analytics is not opt-in, and that you are essentially forced to provide this on a product that you paid full price for is ridiculous. It may feel like an overreaction to worry about someone knowing what you are cooking, but how do you guarantee that this information will not be combined with other pieces of data by a third party to create a more complete picture of the user?

That may be technically correct, but that is unfortunately not the common usage. Regardless of how long you intend to stay in a country, people from the non white countries are almost always called immigrants. I've almost never heard an H1B worker called an expat instead of an immigrant.

For all the (well deserved) Apple Maps hate, using Google Maps in South Africa on a recent trip was just as bad. Good at finding POIs, but navigated to dead ends and through wrong roads quite often. South Africans, what do you use?

Trends only shows data for the past few years, but searching usage in print can be instructive. Frida seems to have become hugely popular beginning in the 90's. Strangely enough, there doesn't seem to be a rise in usage after the early 2000's Hollywood movie.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Frida+Kahlo&ye...

I don't know if reimbursement happens, but kids will bring home a note with the contact details of their playmate, and their parents will schedule it. The whole calendar scheduling, driving, chaperoning etc are things that definitely happens. It's not the age of 'go play with the kids down the street', at least in the urban California I'm familiar with.

Thank you for posting this. All of this should be apparent to users when they visit the website though - right now all that I see is an offer to signup, but you should be dazzling me with all the coolness and advantages (and maybe even demos) before you ask me to signup.

As I was typing this, I visited your site again and realized that there's more to the website when I scroll down, but all the was lost below the fold. Clearly, a lot of work has gone into making Stadia and it deserves to succeed. May I suggest that you take another look at how users interact with your site?

That would be true if grand projects only came out of military funding. There are plenty of examples of wonderful projects that are the result of civilian enterprises without a primary military motive.

The Internet and GPS are more visible examples, but semiconductors, medicine, algorithms (like machine learning) etc are no less grand and marvelous in terms of taking humanity forward!

I think it's clear from nearly a decade's worth of Facebook's trysts with privacy issues that it is a company that doesn't have a fundamental stance that's in favor of user privacy. Over and over again it has either intentionally built features that disregard privacy, or put in wrong defaults, or simply brushed off criticisms when others have misused Facebook. At this point we should be asking ourselves why we expect Facebook to change on its own.

There isn't a good alternative to Facebook (given the network effect and the legitimate features that Facebook provides), but it's probably important that there be public oversight of Facebook (and any other social media company that becomes large and powerful as Facebook).

We should also be asking ourselves whether an organization that has the power to be so influential in the destinies of nations should be run by executives who see every issue as a PR issue to be dealt with, rather than ones that should teach them fundamental lessons. If the leadership is so reluctant to tackle these issues head-on, maybe they need to be replaced with a humbler set of leaders.

While T-Mobile has 2G coverage for no additional charge outside of US/Mexico, in practice it's not very usable due to the extremely slow speeds. After trying to painfully use maps with that data plan, I had to switch to a regular 3G data plan so I could get on with being a tourist.

Thank you for these examples. I visited the links but I am not entirely sure what I’m looking at (sorry, this may also have to do with being a non-French speaker). Would you be so kind as to provide your thoughts on what’s the interesting bit about these places?

No, and you didn't suggest that he used it in any extraordinarily careful manner either.

His point is that what you have is a nice anecdote, and survivor bias means that you only hear about the products that ended up lasting, but not all the Mercedeses that bit the dust along the way.

How does viewing the code give you confidence that the app is running the code you saw?

I understand what you are getting at, but it's really a problem with Instapaper. We shouldn't really expect NYTimes to not exploit the full power of web technologies simply because read-it-later services may not present them in the same way. The readers have to adapt to the content, and not the other way around.

A deterrent to future pranksters maybe. But I would imagine that the real danger is from malicious actors (say, foreign governments) who would not be deterred by the threat of punishment. So what does punishing this kid get us, other than satisfaction?

For an architecture that has been around for so long, if the attack was only discovered recently, then is it fair to call it 'simple'? In retrospect, anything can be obvious.

A thicker phone (presumably due to a larger battery) doesn't necessarily solve the problem of fragile front and back materials (glass).

One of those stepwells was used to great effect in Tarsem’s movie The Fall (which is a glorious visual feast where clever cinematography did things that you would expect to be CGI)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/

That would have to be a remarkably prescient customer relations fellow to know that such-and-such would be born 1750 years later.

This is the same country that the US funnels weapons into, and uses for leverage in the region. Does it make the US complicit in the actions that Saudi Arabia does? Now does it make sense to ask for Saudi Arabia to be sanctioned when it comes to business investments?

Now they are perfect for AirPods.

That's a naive belief to have in practice. If you are part of a group that has been systematically oppressed by a different group because of your skin color, there is a valid correlation between trust and skin color. To think otherwise is... well... naive.

Gets some funding from the federal government != funded by the federal government.

There isn't much of a point. Later in the story it says

> Amazon is a hugely successful business but makes slim margins on the products its sells – the company recently warned it may report a loss in the third quarter – and with low profits comes a low tax bill.

Essentially, the title is clickbait. There is a good discussion in there about tax avoidance, but tying it to revenue doesn't illuminate the topic.

Fascinating to see where these folks ended up nearly two decades later.

Nirav Tolia: Co-Founder, NextDoor

Naval Ravikant: Founder, AngelList

Ramanathan Guha: VP, Google