bdrool

Maybe they can't, but that won't stop the people who benefit from high rents[1] from trying!

[1] (And the people they have somehow brainwashed into being on backing them up, despite it being against their best interests.)

I've stopped using Amazon for:

  - Anything eaten
  - Anything that consumes or stores power (too much fire risk)
  - Anything worn on the body (even socks)

And now, based on this article, it appears I'll have to stop using them for books, as how can I be sure it's word-for-word the same?

What's left?

I wonder how the quality compares with MozJPEG?

For reference:

- Snapchat is now worth nearly 10x Facebook's acquisition offer from 2013

- Snapchat is also worth ~1/14th of Facebook's worth

- Snapchat is also worth somewhere in the range of 2-3x Twitter

> says in its prospectus that it has no plans to make money and maybe never will

Assuming you are talking about this sentence from the "risk factors" section of their S-1:

> We have incurred operating losses in the past, expect to incur operating losses in the future, and may never achieve or maintain profitability.

That's relatively boilerplate and doesn't really mean much. The "risk factors" section is always very gloom-and-doom to avoid the appearance of over-promising returns. For example, Workday said "we have a history of cumulative losses and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future" in their risk factors. Shake Shack included "our inability to open profitable Shacks" as a risk factor in their S-1. Google listed pages and pages of "risks" that basically boiled down to "advertisers might stop using us". It's really not that unusual to say something like that.

You might be right and Snap could be headed for a big fall, but that statement alone isn't much of an indicator.

For reference:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0531381/bio

This is the end of innovation on the internet, and the beginning of a few large, highly-entrenched incumbents with high barriers to entry. Unless your application is unusually low-bandwidth, you won't be able to compete, and that's the way the big players will want it. In less than 30 years, we'll have gone from a completely wild-west open internet to a totally locked-up playing field. It was fun while it lasted, I suppose...

Aside from a throwaway line about a possible "macroeconomic meltdown", there seems to be little attention paid to big signs of an overall negative trend in tech jobs:

* "Bay Area: Tech job growth has rapidly decelerated" (from here: http://www.siliconvalley.com/2017/02/10/tech-job-growth-slow...)

* "Tech Jobs Took a Big Hit Last Year" (from here: http://fortune.com/2017/02/16/tech-jobs-layoffs-microsoft-in...)

The first of those two articles has been submitted twice to HN with zero comments both times. The second has not been submitted at all as far as I can see.

Is it possible there is a bit of a collective head-in-the-sand phenomenon going on?

> "It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards."

Damn.

Slight correction: it was called the "nanokernel".

Too bad Dart has fallen so far out of fashion.

The US is so polarized now that no one looks at an action's merits any more, just whether or not the red team or the blue team did it, and then they either express maximum outrage (always maximum, never anything less), or do mental backflips to justify it, depending on whether it's "their" team doing it or not. Political discussions are reduced to spewing hate at anyone or anything perceived as being attributable to the "other" team. Nuanced thought is not tolerated.

Things have been heading this way since the end of the Cold War. Once the Berlin wall came down, there was no longer an external "enemy" to rally against, so a new one had to be invented. Unfortunately, that ended up being an "other" internal to the same country. It feels like this internal schism finally reached a boiling point in the most recent election. People I normally think of as reasonable are angry and unwilling to listen to rational thought. There is nowhere left to turn for cooler heads. I am afraid of where it all is going from here.

Yes, but since everyone is super-polarized these days and only listens to "news" outlets pushing narratives they already agree with, that means no one hears it who needs to. It's very hard to get a story to get widespread attention.

I have never seen a claim from anyone who wants to block new housing that actually stood up to the slightest scrutiny. There is only ever one reason why people take this position: homeowners in California are hopelessly hooked on the Free Money™ from ever-increasing home prices. It's like a drug. Get your hands on a house and you're all set. With Prop 13, any risk is almost totally externalized. We see the result in action when cities allow additional office space to be built but not additional housing to go with it. The message is crystal clear: keep those home prices going up; keep the money flowing in. Screw anybody who hasn't bought yet.

When anyone proposes additional housing, all manner of excuses (and ugly accusations) come up: history, neighborhood character, the environment, claims that there are no more places to build, racism, classism, you name it. It's always a smoke screen. They are always lying. Always. None of the people blocking housing care at all about any of those things. It has always been about one and only one thing: the Free Money™. Anyone who says differently is lying.

I am sorry to hear you experienced that.

For those who doubt it: yes "benevolent" sexism (or racism) is real, unfortunately. There are many ways it can manifest itself, but what it always boils down to is someone with the proverbial "good intentions" who decides to treat someone differently, even in a way they think of as positive, for no other reason than because of their sex (or race). It can be particularly poisonous because once you call someone out for being different, even if it is in a way that you believe to be beneficial, it highlights to everyone around them that they are different, which can make them a target.

The best solution is to always strive to treat everyone equally. People are not perfect, so there will be mistakes, but that should nevertheless always be the goal.

I'm in tech because I'm an idealist and believe very seriously that, done right, technology can change people's lives for the better. For the record, I don't think I could be convinced work at Uber.

What service do you use to rent it out?

> Heck, why have driveways?

My point is that millions of them already exist, with a distributed network of roads leading to them, as well as storage (garages). It would be costly to suddenly rip all those up.

> Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff.

Or, if everyone has a self-driving car of their own (or one that can be converted to self-driving), people will rent out their cars AirBnB-style when they aren't using them. I mean, why not? You've already got a garage, a driveway, etc. Might as well make a few extra bucks with your vehicle...

I've been on Metafilter for a long time (since the early 2000s -- edit: longer than that, as I just recalled discussing the 2000 US presidential election on there, so it's been quite a while it seems). It was and still is miles ahead of many places on the internet in terms of civility, intelligence, and general knowledge, however it has one very big downside these days: it has gone more or less off the deep end into identity politics. As someone who believes in equality, individuality, and enlightenment values, it's difficult to stomach at times. I basically don't talk on there any more, as I know my viewpoints would not be welcome. I just read, as I still find it informative and valuable. However if you are looking for anything even approaching balanced discussion on certain topics, it's not really a go-to place.

Well said. As far as I could see the whole thing was a huge scandal and black eye on the scientific community. The way Robert Park of the American Physical Society acted was particularly bad (he outright accused scientists of fraud without any evidence to back it up). Much of it probably came from competition for funding, as quite a few people got their feathers ruffled once the Dept. of Energy announced it would put funding into Cold Fusion research, thus diverting it from their own projects. Without absolving them of any responsibility for overstating their claims (which they absolutely should shoulder), it is truly a shame Pons & Fleischmann's findings could not be processed more rationally than they were at the time.

> Click the Like button on a Page that challenges your beliefs, interact with that information and you'll see more of it.

Yeah ... not gonna happen. I already use private browsing windows to read anything even remotely controversial. Not going to start building a publicly visible history of 'liking' things that could be seen negatively. Call me paranoid, but I can see that happening some day in a job interview or something similar. I love my freedom, and that includes being able to read whatever I want without being accused of wrongthink at some point in the future. Facebook isn't getting any data from me on that front.

> As in research projects, which this project expressly states that it is?

This is from comma.ai, who famously tested on public roads with a reporter in the car and very little prior testing ("the first time it worked was this morning").[1]

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv...

> The truth is, if as a continent we are to point at individual world leaders who did the most for African nations, Fidel Castro is very high up that list, if not at the top.

Many don't know this, but George W. Bush had quite an impact:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President's_Emergency_Plan_for...

Can people please be honest and say "trendy" instead of "modern" if that's what they actually mean?

Or he'll do the opposite, as in he'll shoot his mouth off so often people will give up trying to hold him accountable, making him an unpredictable wild card that can pretty much do anything he wants. (In fact I'd say he crossed that point a long time ago.)

This event and Brexit are proof that you cannot shame people into voting how you want. Calling them bigots over and over just galvanizes them if anything.

This, obviously:

https://youtu.be/E7Or2M7XUb4

https://github.com/avatsaev/touchbar_nyancat

People have been playing a lot of political football with this story. I saw a Facebook post making the rounds saying that this cancellation proves once again that women tolerate pain better than men. And these women sharing the story and having a laugh were medical professionals. Yes, really! It's pretty absurd that our society still can't have honest, open, and adult discussions regarding reproduction and sex, even among the supposedly educated.

He sounds really immature and irresponsible. If you look at his code on GitHub, it's full of sloppy stuff, commented-out code, and worrisome little loose ends with comments like "should I check this value?"[1] Even his commit messages are full of sloppy stuff.[2][3] That's fine for hacking on game systems, emulators, or various consumer electronics (and he's clearly quite good at it, given his accomplishments), but would anyone really want to trust their life to code like this? How much testing has he actually done on this thing? By his own accounts, it didn't even work until less than a year ago.[4] The NHTSA is right to question him about safety if he's planning to put this on the market for anyone & everyone to use on public roads a matter of months from now. Choosing to shut down and go work in another country after receiving just one inquiry about safety is a sign that there could be serious problems. A car is not a toy.

(Oh, and in case anyone responds with "well let's see your code!", please note that I'm not the one making asking people to trust their lives to my code, making wild claims about what I've built, nor issuing challenges to the likes of Tesla.[5])

[1] https://github.com/geohot/kvm-kext/blob/master/main.cpp#L642

[2] https://github.com/geohot/kvm-kext/commit/082b7ca99cba4c3b9c...

[3] https://github.com/geohot/kvm-kext/commit/96441be079562b0dd0...

[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv...

[5] https://electrek.co/2016/04/06/tesla-autopilot-comma-ai-geoh...