atotic

Wow. I had my own bad AirBnB experience, and privately decided never to never use them again. I wrongly assumed it was just me.

This is sad, I thought AirBnB were one of the good guys, and had a good experience 4 years ago.

Is there something about doing things at scale that makes things go bad? It seems like so many companies are great at start, but go downhill when their assumption that "fraud is a rare exception" does not hold.

Extreme freemium model! Free for everyone, except for that one billionaire :-)

"why is American infrastructure so bad?" has been a topic I am curious about. The above article does not answer the question.

I'd prefer not to care about American infrastructure costs. Unfortunately, I occasionally have to leave my house, and the consequences of bad infrastructure stare me in the face: people living in their cars, traffic jams.

The best attempt to actually answer the question I've seen has been "Pedestrian Observations" blog. Their take on the same GAO report is:

[New Report on Construction Costs Misses the Mark](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...)

"The GAO report is out now, and unfortunately it is a total miss, for essentially the same reason the RPA’s report was a miss: it did not go outside the American (and to some extent rest-of-Anglosphere) comfort zone"

The simplest consumer-friendly solution would be:= to make consumers whole: if I receive a counterfeit item, Amazon should send me a genuine replacement immediately free of charge, and pay me $5 for my time if they want the counterfeit item back.

I think it would pay off for Amazon in the long run. Right now, I avoid Amazon for any significant purchases, because I do not trust them.

Andreessen was loved by the entire core Mosaic technical team. Management did not like him, because he was a leader they could not control: opinionated, outspoken. The core Mosaic tech team all left Mosaic project on the same day to join Marc at Netscape, and pursue the pure vision of what browser should be. Mosaic project never recovered. Source: I was Mr. MacMosaic.

Not on HN, looking at your comments/submission stream.

All Blender needs to do is to publish a few videos that offend everyone, and get demonetized. Problem solved!

I've worked with another Forth disciple in the late 80s.

He was on a PC, and thought that my Mac GUI was neat. So he wrote a portable GUI framework from scratch in Forth that had dialogs, buttons, pull down menus, text inputs, graphics, mini Mac clone. It was magic. I think it was way under 100K.

After that, I really wanted to become a Forth wizard. I tried, but it never clicked, my code was very clumsy, write only. I admired my coworker as an almost alien intelligence.

I think it really works well for coders spiritually close to hardware.

Amazon used to have "what people in your city are buying?" charts when it was still a bookstore. I loved it, so much more useful than generic bestseller list. I think privacy concerns killed it....

My feeling is that we have two opposing modes of work developing:

Scalable work, where tools multiply worker effectiveness exponentially (tech, finance, manufacturing),

Non-scalable work, where tools multiply worker effectiveness linerarly/constant (everything else).

It is a little bit of a Taleb's world where exponentials live side by side normal distribution.

Scalable work is much more profitable than linear work. Where I work, being scaleable is a requirement. If it is not scaleable, we are not doing it.

This creates incentive to make everything scaleable. Which is a big problem for those whose work is inherently linear: teachers, doctors, waiters. They get put in optimization straightjackets for marginal improvement. And it sucks the soul of what they do. It makes world a less happy place, filled with 15min doctor appointments, restaurants where tables must be turned every 2 hours for profitability, etc.

The compound problem for doctors has been that they have to perform highly creative, high impact tasks while inside the optimization straighjacket. That's got to hurt.

Wow. That's my first memory too. I was almost 3.

fairvote.org is a national organization dedicated to voting reforms such as this. They were a big supporter of Maine initiative, and often have satellite state offices.

I might enjoy using this. But, PRIVACY! Sending back every visited URL has never been ok for any reason, first time I saw this idea shot down was in '93.

But there might be a way out:

I'd be willing to give up privacy of URL hashes. This is how I'd do it:

- you already track a set of URLs that have discussions (I assume). If not, you need to figure out how to seed these. Volunteers, APIs....

- hash these URLs on server, and use a not-too-unique hash function. You want to end up with a high collision rate, but not too high.

- now, the client can query for conversations without revealing the URL it has visited: - ask server whether there are any conversations for a particular hash. - if server finds any, it returns { pageUrl: '', conversationsUrls[]} - now client can decide whether the url really matches, or it was just a random hash collision.

- I know this is not perfect. A privacy-busting determined enemy could generate hashes of large number of public sites and use statistics to infer what sites you've visited just from your hashes. But it'd be good enough for me.

Bonus money-making idea: - offer your plugin as a paid service to different web communities. Increases their "community engagement".

I seriously contemplated starting an "annotations" startup in the 90s. Someone else did, and they folded after a few years.

I was scanned the comments looking for suspects. My best guess are: osipov, usaphp, and ibi7.

I've read this comment thread a few days ago, and was disappointed that the discussion has focused on Brendan's contribution to prop 8. Just want to get this off my chest:

I've known Brendan, I've code-reviewed some super scary changes he was checking in. I've watched him do cartwheels.

He is a very smart guy, one of the few I've met who is clearly superior to me (Hi Guha!). He is also part of a tribe foreign to me, deeply religious computer geeks.

I believe (have no 1st hand knowledge), that Brendan contributed to prop 8 as part of a church drive. His contribution has offended many, but it not part of his core beliefs.

I also believe that he gets Internet's potential more than just about anyone. My passion is open Web, and Brendan leading Mozilla is great news. He knows what really matters, he is passionate, and he will fight for it.

Both of your points are valid objections to MOOCs.

Not sure whether you are correct. If you are, I believe that MOOC model can be modified to fix them. (ex: local meetups for teaching how to learn, google hangouts for in-person discussions).

What is interesting is that your single paragraph contains more valid objections to MOOCs than the original 4500 word essay. It was a collection of anecdotes, emotional appeals. Which is really lame, considering that MOOCs are just getting off the ground, early alpha, there are tons of real serious flaws.

I heart the idea of MOOCs. I enjoyed my grad school. I've recently taken two online classes. Loved Ng's Machine Intelligence, dropped out of Startup Owner Manual (but got a few good pointers). When MOOCs take off, they will change education as much as self-driving car will change the car industry.

I believe the restriction is "only single keep-alive connection". This makes sense to me, no need for multiple overhead if one connection will saturate your bandwidth. It will open multiple if the server does not support keep-alive.

Workaround is easy: make sure your long-polling connection is not keep-alive connection.