chairmanwow

Cryptography is a necessary lesson that we need to teach in 2017. Lowest common denominator is a hard threshold to design security for.

But it does make for a great investment asset and or store of value.

Could you imagine something that equalizes the playing field more between men and women? This provides the ability for people to have a child without the woman having to gestate the fetus for 9 months? None of the terrible side effects of pregnancy, none of the pain. Sounds pretty idealistic to me.

While this is unfair of Uber, this is a pretty insane situation. They impound your car for weeks for providing a service consensually? I think that's the real issue here.

You can also "buy" the movie on Chinese marketplaces for ¥10 (~$1.5) and the seller will message you a Baidu Cloud link with the movie.

I do not. I tried to be as up-front as possible about the sources of the information that I'm referencing because it is

a) Not verifiable

b) Not on the record

I am myself very confused by the comments I've been hearing whilst working here because they are at odds with the typical rhetoric that I've heard from both the Western and Chinese press.

The Chinese art of selectively enforcing their laws to the detriment of those that won't play ball with the government really makes it hard to believe Xi's press-tornado of successful anti-corruption measures.

The government has been actively extorting international companies into "joint" ventures. These ventures essentially require "treats" (as an insider told me) every several months. These treats would be manufacturing processes, engineering drawings of proprietary IP, or technical training for their engineering staff. Boards of Directors can't ignore the scale of the Chinese market, but it comes at the cost of essentially giving away your business prospects within the country inside of 15 year window.

China's current long-term strategy seems to be:

1) Spend an egregious amount to woo top talent [1], [2]

2) Learn from them over the next 5-10 year period [2]

3) Transcend the need for foreigners in China

It's a pretty terrifying environment and many Chinese investors are desperate to get their money into foreign investments [3]. Instead of laundering illegally earned money, they are laundering legally earned money that they can't get out of China. At least that is the hearsay that I've heard from several different sources (VC events, friends of friends etc).

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/world/asia/china-soccer-x...

[2] Qi Lu, Baidu's COO YC interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSydk0XzxEE&t=351s

[3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/china-dri...

Francesca Polletta's book "It Was Like a Fever" brings forward some really interesting points of discussion about storytelling as a political device.

Some relevant quotes from the text:

"If the fact that everyone can tell his own story makes it easier for people to challenge the assurances of the powerful that certain policies are to everyone’s advantage, the fact that narrative is seen as less authoritative than other discursive forms may weaken that challenge."

"We are ambivalent about storytelling, not dismissive of it. There is a strong vein of skepticism toward professional expertise in American culture. Against that skepticism, the authenticity of personal storytelling makes the form trustworthy—sometimes more trustworthy than the complex facts and figures offered by certified experts."

"...those wanting to effect social change must debunk beliefs that have the status of common sense, familiar stories are more obstacle than resource."

"when feminists brought sex discrimination suits against employers, they struggled to prove that women were underrepresented in higher-status, traditionally male jobs because they were discriminated against and not because they had no interest in those jobs. Arguing that women wanted the jobs put them at odds with a familiar story in which girls grow up to want women’s work, and men grow up to want men’s work. To judges, feminists seemed to be saying that women were just like men, something that flew in the face of good sense."

I absolutely love Julia Evan's writing. I find her articles / zines to cover interesting and useful technical topics while remaining _extremely_ accessible to me (especially when I was a student)! I really admire her ability to present technical topics in plain language.

> Between 2005 and 2016, the most recent full year of data, the company saw an 83 percent decrease in the number of incidents that resulted in days away, work restrictions or job transfers – to an all-time low of 1.55 incidents per 100 full-time North American employees.

I find it incredibly impressive for a manufacturer to achieve something like this.

Thanks for sharing! This is a viewpoint that I've never encountered before as only having entered the game in the last 3 years.

I 100% agree.

The day that I became a lifelong Amazon customer was when I mistakenly ordered a mattress to the wrong address via Prime. I noticed the mistake some 28 hours after placing the order. I nearly said that I called them to tell them about my mistake, but that isn't true. I typed in my number online AND THEY CALLED ME when an operator was available. The operator quickly calmed me down and told it was "nothing to worry about". She cancelled the shipment of the mattress going to the wrong side of the US and placed an order for a replacement within 2 minutes of learning about the problem. On top of that, without being asked, she upgraded my replacement to 1 day shipping FOR FREE so that my order would still arrive by the original delivery date.

Since I screwed up in such a ridiculous way, that I would have fully expected to have gotten slammed with a return shipping fee, a shipping fee for the replacement, and even some kind of BS replacement fee. But Amazon took the bullet and provided me the the best customer service I ever could have hoped for, which prevented me from having to sleep on the ground for even one extra night.

I would agree with you if this conversation were taking place anywhere other than HN. This community isn't infallible, but I argue that the level of discourse here is far above the mean.

This seems like engineering for engineering's sake. From the author's description, this was a pretty superficial refactoring that may or may not have been for the better.

It seems like a bizarre decision to spend time migrating to a new system / tool that provides no immediate benefits. A thorough refactoring of their codebase seems like it would have been a better use of engineering time.

I have watched so many hours of Dan's videos because he inspires a fervency of the acquisition of knowledge. I absolutely wish that I had his videos whenever I was first starting to program. His attitude is so endearing as it is clear that he simply can't contain his excitement about programming.

His Youtube channel used to be called "Coding Rainbow", but he was unfortunately forced to change it. He really does a great job at capturing the sense of wonder that "Reading Rainbow" inspired in me as a kid.

How so?

What a fascinating premise. Kudos to the author for doing such a thoughtful analysis. His technique for arriving at the cross-sectional shape is especially interesting. I would have never considered that the optimal cross-sectional shape to have been anything other than a circle.

I wonder if it would be possible to orbit the ring in the axial plane, around a single arm of the torus? Or even in a lemniscate, intersecting the inner Lagrange point?

I'm so glad that The Expanse has brought great space opera to the masses. Scifi books are several orders of magnitude better than the majority of "Scifi" Hollywood movies.

The struggle of a fledgling technological species against the plight of interstellar space is a majestic backdrop for many of the best novels I've ever read. Especially with Clark, Niven, Pournelle etc. that have done some excellent mathematical investigation into the feasibility of the concepts discussed.

> Amazon could certainly be coerced into unlocking the door

This is an extremely worrisome statement. Is there any precedent for this type of coercion from the FBI to businesses who have access to a home? My justice-sense is tingling to think that the FBI could get into my home by coercing any party that I give access (hypothetical maids, pool guy, cat sitter, etc)

As a sidebar, I really wish that Blendle would exit Beta so that I could buy these extremely interesting articles as a one-off micropayment. I don't intend to get a subscription with every top news organization (NY Times, New Yorker, The Atlantic, WSJ, Economist etc), but I would be more than happy to pay $0.25-0.75 for an article like this.

I want to pay for their content, but getting locked into a subscription when I don't want to read the majority of the content in any one of these publications is foolhardy. And unlike streaming platforms like Spotify, Netflix, HBO etc these news platforms don't provide nearly the same return on investment. I listen to Spotify 15-20hrs per week, I watch Netflix for at least 6hrs / week. High quality journalism is very valuable, but certainly these publications are aware that they aren't in the same weight-class as Netflix and Spotify in terms of value to customers individually. As an aggregate, I would easily spend $10 / month consuming "high quality technology and research news and opinion" pieces.

Please, for the love of god, provide me with a sensical way to pay for your content.

I think I might start suggesting this to my coworkers + friends.

I'm actually pretty ok with these types of articles. They are generally well-researched and well-written—giving technical introductions to important concepts.

As always, it is important to be wary of the reasons that an author writes an article. If there is an advertisement at the end, then the author motivations (at least in part) are clear. But I often find that promoters of new systems and tools are able to present excellent critiques of established tools and practices. New things are USUALLY made to address the shortcomings of existing things. You as a reader have to parse whether their arguments are sound and maybe do some more research before you can make a sound judgement on the matter.

I'm currently living in China, and I see things disappear from social media ALL THE TIME. It's not pleasant or proper, it's just scary to have someone else decide what you can or cannot see.

Say whatever you want, I'll make my own decisions about whether I'll believe you, hopefully without the aid of censorship, thank you very much.

    Which design decisions are you thinking of?

Mostly that updates can only happen on explicit changes to the state. Also a React application doesn't acknowledge the possibility of a component existing which is not a React component. I most recently ran into this issue when trying to add an OpenLayer map to an application. In a vanilla JS application it's trivial, but React was difficult to coerce into breaking it's own rules to accommodate it.

Elm solves this particular issue well with Ports [1]. It respects the possibility that there may be things going on that haven't been explicitly planned for.

    actions are insanely laborious to construct

On a second read through, this is edging on hyperbole. Maybe a more honest presentation of the facts is that Redux actions grow tedious to write. You start with an action type declaration:

    export const SOME_ACTION = "SOME_ACTION";

Then you create an action creator:

    export function performSomeAction(data) {
       return {
          type: SOME_ACTION,
          data
       }
    }

And then of course you need to write a case statement in a reducer to deal with the data and somehow effect the state.

It's tedious because it's trying to recreate the pattern matching functionality of passing union types around in functional languages. In SML, Haskell, Elm etc. you can elegantly decompose and consume types with case statements and pattern matching, which are built into the languages [2, 3].

[1] https://guide.elm-lang.org/interop/javascript.html [2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/14604042 [3] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs312/2004fa/lectures/lect...

Redux is unusable without an insane amount of boilerplate. HOWEVER, I think Redux still is an improvement over raw JS, although underpowered compared to Elm.

It seems like it is essentially trying to bring functional union type case switching to a language without that feature. As such, actions are insanely laborious to construct. Furthermore React / Redux is far to pedantic in reinforcing it's design decisions without offering a backdoor to work interact with the outside world.

I would imagine it is mostly just oversight, given the loading period in the beginning.

I'm not sure that I buy the logic of "Winner take all" in the TNC space. The service is intrinsically localized. There were competitors in NYC that I had never heard of before after living in SF, and SF companies that New Yorkers had never heard of. Furthermore, their is little efficiency to operating such a business at scale. The marginal cost of each ride is the same. I can see some strong network effects from travelers, but that doesn't prevent a service from cropping up in a local market that can compete with Uber.

All of the scenarios that I see where Uber can grind out competitors is by continually operating at a loss? I would imagine that eventually investors would tire of such a position.

Lyft is US only

There is no such tab for me.

> gas stations start disappearing

Already happened in Japan.