Ah, right, I was misremembering how FIFOs work. You can't even write to it until a reader opens it. I was thinking that you could just dump data on it and the operating system would buffer it until someone came along to read it.
3,290 karma · joined March 17, 2013
No, my guess is that this is to lock down the patent so they own it (and as many other even vaguely plausible concepts as possible) and can wield it in patent battles with other automakers. More charitably, you could look at it as clearing as much land as possible so that 10 years down the line their engineers are minimally encumbered by patent concerns and can build whatever they want. Typical corporate R&D, and not particularly deserving of a Car and Driver fluff piece.
The ability to devalue their currency is an essential tool that central banks wield to battle financial crises.
Keynes pointed out that workers don't want to take a pay cut (and employers don't want to offer a pay cut, because they fear causing resentment), so nominal wages are "sticky." When they need to fall to reach price equilibrium, the economy tends to experience mass unemployment instead. It would be very difficult to convince all workers universally to accept a pay cut. The alternative is to devalue the currency so everyone is affected through the currency rather than by trying to propagate policy changes throughout the private sector.
Also, countries can have huge problems when they take on debts in a hard currency which they can't devalue. This is how you get runaway hyperinflation. Their revenues are in the local currency, but their debts are in (usually) USD. If they run low on foreign currency reserves, they can be forced to sell huge amounts of the local currency on the forex market in order to acquire sufficient USD to pay their debts. I can see why France and Germany wouldn't be eager to see yet another USD rise to prominence and leave them disadvantaged in debt financing.
Another talking point which comes up all of the time is the tension introduced when different regions (like Germany and Greece) are forced to use the same currency, even though normally economic forces would cause the weaker region's currency to move against the stronger one's. Devaluation would be fantastic for Greece but it's hobbled by crushingly expensive exports since it's in the Euro monetary union.
Yes generics have proven to be broadly safe. That doesn't mean there aren't still issues that need to be addressed by tweaking or adding regulation. Yes even with carcinogens the contaminated generics are probably better than taking nothing. That doesn't mean that the contamination is acceptable.
1. It's not like it would be difficult to track all of the little chunks of time worked and add them all up. Everything is automated anyway, and nobody is filing time cards.
2. In the end, the wall clock is how workers experience time when they're out doing work for these companies. They get their bike out and go deliver food for a few hours, or get in their car and drive around the city picking up and dropping off passengers. It's not clear to me that the interstitial minutes between gigs should be considered free time for the workers that goes uncompensated. If they drop off a passenger and pick up a new one within five or ten minutes, they've been working continuously. They haven't had a chance to go home and take their socks off and relax. They're working. It seems like a step backwards for everyone's mental well-being to use technology to clock the exact minutes that they produce value for the company, and cut off their pay the instant they stop producing. It's like a widget assembly line monitored by cameras where workers get automatically clocked in only when they're physically touching the widgets, so that if they sit up to stretch, or walk over to the cabinet to grab a different tool, or even if the conveyor belt is sending the next widget over to be worked on, they stop getting paid. I wouldn't want to work like that.
3. The fact that someone can be doing work for multiple companies at the same time doesn't seem like such a big problem to me. If they're on a segment of a route in which they're simultaneously delivering a passenger and someone's lunch, they should get paid for both. And the same contiguous-time rules I mentioned in #2 above can apply - as long as they're continuously picking up lunches and passengers within a certain interval, they're working two jobs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/elixir/comments/bronlx/discover_wha...
I'm not sure where you get that idea. A 2018 poll of political scientists ranked him dead last, and a 2018 poll of presidential scholars ranked him third-to-last:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_preside...
Indoor malls died because consumers who want to shop in person turned out to prefer individual stores and strip malls. If anything you should be pointing out how weird and wasteful those detached stores are. It seems to me that the indoor mall is at least speaking the same language as you, with its "synergy and community" and walkability. The model of having detached stores and restaurants spaced widely apart is the unsustainable aberration. The indoor mall makes sense.
It's an interesting exercise to imagine an elaborate multi-custody arrangement where all data is encrypted with keys that live in hardware security modules and at least three of five senior people are required to join their secrets any time the KEK needs to be handled directly... but I can tell you that that kind of scheme where 100% of customer data is completely opaque would be a major inconvenience in a fast-moving SaaS startup. Not only is implementing an engineer-proof privacy scheme a massive undertaking but it makes debugging production issues much more difficult. If indeed they were going to go all-out on such a scheme I would kind of expect them to brag about it but I don't see claims like that in https://community.box.com/t5/How-to-Guides-for-Account/Data-....
I'm curious if anyone's worked at big-name cloud services providers and can speak to the practical effectiveness of privacy measures in place. My guess is that even at Google, for example, a rogue engineer working on a particular product (or maybe the infrastructure it runs on) could theoretically bypass organizational controls and look at user data.
To be clear, I don't really view this state of affairs as a big problem. I've commented before on why (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513055). Professionalism and integrity (in combination with organizational controls and the principle of least privilege) work fine IME, plus the fact that nobody except you really cares about your personal data. But I do think that your expectations are unrealistic if you think that backend engineers generally don't have the kind of access I'm talking about. Unless a service encrypts on the client with your encryption keys, you should expect that the company's "employees, or a subset, has unfettered access."
This interpretation of his comment is... generous. I agree that there's a legitimate point around wanting your donation to go specifically to browser development and not overhead or other side-projects, but it's pretty clear that he was using the word diversity contemptuously.
There was some discussion about this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20850950