cribbles

> One reason that Europe has very few innovative new companies created in the last 25 years is that everyone is at the coffee shop writing poetry.

This does not dispute the central point of the quoted piece, which is that the quality of life of most Americans is very poor contrast to that of the average person in some subset of European countries. I would wager that most coffee shop employees are more concerned with labor protections, healthcare, social welfare, the ability to afford housing and take vacations than whether their country’s economy is producing “innovative companies” (read: tech startups?). This was certainly true of myself when I worked in food service.

Even so, this point does not stand well on its own. It may be that Europeans are deincentivized from creating enormously overvalued startups because their quality of life is much better (although I question whether this is worth bragging about, from a US standpoint). Nevertheless, I’d consider things like lack of a single market, fragmented languages and cultures, completely different VC environment, and so on to be much more impactful in that regard.

The street litter win cannot be understated. Little black bodega bags are a plague on New York's streets.

Nearly 95 percent of public schools had lockdown drills as of 2015-16.[1] I don't know anyone who's been through one either, but I'm an adult, and our generation just missed the cutoff.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017122.pdf, quoted in https://medium.com/s/youthnow/the-response-to-school-shootin....

The UNC scandal’s beneficiaries were athletes from predominately lower-to-middle class backgrounds. They weren’t competing for the same post-grad jobs and internships as the general applicant pool. They were on an athletic track whose post-grad opportunities were essentially totally different from most of the campus body.

This is annoying if you think universities shouldn’t have high-budget, self-standing athletic programs coupled to their putatively academic mission, or that even if they do, they should play by the rules. But this doesn’t raise the same ire as the observation that wealthy people can simply buy their way into the academic track. At least the athletes had to have athletic merit.

>Transfer this to the "real world", and see how it plays out

This isn't the real world though. This is, tentatively, "pattern match on videos uploaded by non-verified creators with little or no uploaded content, featuring primarily or entirely children, with an unusual level of timestamps in the comments, in an unusual number of playlists that also fit this description."

The main challenge here is more meta: how do you discover these videos before the engagement identifies them as such. I think that's why YouTube went with the overreaching "throw a NN at the problem and just flag anything with kids" solution.

Probably wasn't the best solution from an engineering perspective, as many here have pointed out. But it may have been the smartest thing to do from a PR perspective.

This assumes the higher-paying jobs would have gone to the district's representatives, instead of to out-of-town yuppies. I am open to being contracted on this, but my assumption is that Amazon's HQ2 would not have primarily created jobs for underserved Queens residents.

My own experience in NYC's tech scene is that a plurality of tech workers come from outside the city, and I am skeptical that their presence nevertheless "lifts all boats" via Seamless orders and bar tabs.

The quasi-intensifier "just" is used to similar effect. I wouldn't call it editorializing - more like an attempt to give the quotidian a sense of urgency.

> there is solid evidence of plenty of fraud on the last election

In fact, there isn't. If there is, please provide supporting evidence. Since we're on the subject of the New York Times, here[1] is the closest example I can find, which resorts to vague, unsubstantiated insinuations that voters were "pressured" despite historically low turnout.

As you indicate, the military supports Maduro. There is no reason to believe this will change. The putative interim 'leader' Juan Guaidó was relatively unknown until this coup attempt, has no constitutional mandate to lead, and has no traction with the Venezuelan state. He received an astounding zero percent of the vote in the last election.

Efforts by the US's famously free press to portray otherwise have sunk to desperately lower stabs at 'clickbait' than the linked article. A few hours ago, NPR published the sensationalist headline "High-Ranking General Rejects Maduro, Who Proposes Earlier Parliamentary Elections"[2]. Eight paragraphs later, we get this hilariously sunken lede: "Although hundreds of generals serve in the Venezuelan military, the announcement represents a victory for Guaidó, NPR's Philip Reeves reports."

None of this is to defend to current leadership of Venezuela - it is disastrous. Neither would I defend the leadership of Saudi Arabia, which doesn't even _pretend_ to have "democratic order." But these are not problems to be decided by the US, the media class, or the "international community." Don't take it from me - ask an Iraqi.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/20/world/americas/venezuela-...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2019/02/02/690944320/high-ranking-genera...

Instacart delivery workers are classified as independent contractors, which allows the company to flout basic labor laws. This is commonplace in digital age 'gig economy' jobs, but dates back to the early days of food delivery - e.g., most pizza delivery drivers are classified as independent contractors.

That having been said, the concept of defining contractor wages in relation to customer tips is new to me. I could see a legal argument being made in the employer's favor if the worker gave due consent to the transaction.

The idea here would be: Instacart states somewhere on the order prior to pickup 'if you choose to accept this order, you will receive $10, of which $.80 will come from us.' Since the delivery worker isn't running a 'shift' as an 'employee,' but just coincidentally happens to be running Instacart orders for 10 hours straight, this counts as one of many transactions that they've accepted and hence waived the legal right to complain about.

If this legal fiction sounds absurd to you, you're not alone.

You are an extreme outlier. American workers have on average nearly half as many vacation days as are legally mandated in the EU,[1] while EU member states have more public holidays than the United States.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave...

From 2014, still germane: https://www.drop-dropbox.com/

See also Mic,[1] which laid off its entire editorial staff in response to the formation of a union (but prior to a contract being signed).

For counterexamples, see Vice,[2] which negotiated a nearly 30% pay hike in their first union contract, and Slate,[3] whose editorial union recently negotiated a $51,000 starting salary with annual pay increases.

Note that a union is not a guarantee against layoffs. See [4]: the Huffington Post recently lost 15 of its unionized employees to a layoff. On the upside, they were contractually guaranteed severance pay - because they collectively bargained for it.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/mic-layoff-bustle-union-labo...

[2] https://gawker.com/vice-writers-get-a-union-contract-with-a-...

[3] https://wwd.com/business-news/media/slate-media-editorial-st...

[4] https://twitter.com/HuffPostUnion/status/1088524725259628544

This code wouldn't execute properly, since arrow functions are scoped to the surrounding code block and cannot be rebound.

You would need to use `function` for this:

  function getFoo() {
    return this.foo;
  }

Source for this claim?

I get the larger point you’re making, but I’d guess that copyright-protected works make up less than 0.05% of all content posted to this site and that includes repo links. /new is mostly just TechCrunch articles and things like that. I’m aware that bad faith interpretation of imprecise wording can be used to weaponize laws, and that laws are sometimes passed for this very reason, but it would be an incredible stretch (both legally and colloquially) to claim that phrasing applies here.

> "Great fighters have to kind of like getting hit."

This is almost tautologically true. Who starts fighting because they want to avoid getting hit at all costs?

The author wants to examine _why_ Chan drives himself, over and over, to the brink of life-threatening injuries, while we HN commenters - most of us anyway - do not. He fairly persuasively argues that it's a mix of extreme C-PTSD, childhood abandonment, economic destitution, and a near total lack of alternative opportunities.

Can that still be inspiring? To whom? To do what? These are the questions the author wants to ask. We can quibble over the answers. But either way, I find this type of critical perspective more intellectually provocative than taking Chan's plain-faced recollection for granted.

This is directly quoted in the linked article.

The racist cab pickup issue occurred to me too, but it’s not in conflict with his overall argument. Doctorow allows that the ride hailing app experience (not to be mistaken with to the “ride sharing” business model) is, in most respects, a foundational improvement upon the old taxi pickup experience. This is not mutually exclusive with the claim that Uber, et al.’s business practices (i.e. circumvention of any and all possible tax and labor laws) introduce a unique set of problems for riders and drivers alike.

There's a subjective side to this argument, I suppose, but having lived in both cities I'd argue that Berlin's public transportation is _at least_ a couple orders of magnitude better than NYC's.

The U-Bahn / S-Bahn / Deutsche Bahn / Autobus / Tram inter-connectivity are at least on par with what NYC has to offer (adjusted for geographic factors and population density), and that's before getting into KPIs like on-time arrival percentages, individual line uptime, and peak hour commuter congestion. And then there's the more intangible differences, which are nevertheless important to humans - like vehicle cleanliness, station upkeep... the list goes on and on.

Compare the Berlin Hauptbahnhof to Penn Station. Or the U1 to the L, or the J/M/Z. Or peak-hour Alexanderplatz to Union Square. Or the M29 to... I don't know... the NYC bus of your choosing. My god. Throw whatever numbers you want out there as a counterargument, but I know which I'd prefer in just about any scenario.

Would such a thing be legal, per FTC guidelines on social media endorsement? (Let's set aside whether Netflix is "really doing this" for a moment.)

The FTC's Sponsorship Identification Rule requires influencers and marketers to "clearly and conspicuously disclose their relationship to brands when promoting or endorsing products through social media."[1] This is the reason you see hashtags like #ad on promoted posts from celebrities. Violations of this rule "can result in penalties far larger than any imposed to date by the FTC."[2]

I'd think that creating phony, low-follower accounts _en masse_ to promote a product would not circumvent the rule, simply because these accounts don't belong to "influencers." But I don't know. Can anyone with a better legal grasp on this chime in?

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/04/ftc-s...

[2] https://www.allaboutadvertisinglaw.com/2018/01/fcc-revives-i...

Me too. I gave up after a couple hundred pages. At times interesting, but too unfocused, not to mention daunting due to the extreme length. Note that none of the commenters here have been able to supply a much more thorough synopsis than “debt has taken lots of different forms in different societies throughout history, including our own today.”

By contrast, I found Graeber’s follow up collection “The Utopia of Rules” startlingly provocative and a super fun read - one of my favorite books. I think Graeber’s divergent writing style and argumentative form work better in the essay format.

It’s so flagrantly non-compliant that I am unsure what they stand to gain by having added it. Might as well divest from Europe entirely at that rate.

Yes! The most noticeable change has been to Tumblr, which I believe presents the Oath GDPR notice on each subdomain. I have almost completely stopped visiting peoples’ Tumblrs for this reason.

One unintended positive effect of GDPR, much like “turn off your adblocker or no content!” modals, has been to deter me from reading pages that, by and large, would have been a needless timesuck anyhow.

A couple of accounts vouching for the comparative simplicity of spoken Chinese:

Language Log (2014): [1] "Chinese is the easiest language I ever learned to speak, but the writing system is by far the hardest I've ever had to grapple with."

Idlewords (2011) [2]: "Don't fall for the bait and switch with Chinese or Japanese! They might tempt you with an exotic writing system, but after a few months you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper."

[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11109

[2] https://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm

A few years ago I would have made the semi-contrarian point that Facebook[1] was here to stay, for the long-foreseeable future.

I say "semi-contrarian" because remember, even 4 or 5 years ago Facebook seemed to be the latest corporate iteration in an ever-flipping lineage from AIM lists to Friendster to MySpace.[2] So the common gospel was: "Facebook" - such as it was understood - could be toppled any day now. Remember MySpace?

The counterargument was that the market capture was incomparable and the network effect was insurmountable. And that's still true, kind of.

But the way we use Facebook has changed. In short, it's gone from being a single service with a bunch of features to being an SSO gateway for a bunch of federated platforms. And that's not just a change in user perception, it's reflective of a completely different product strategy.

That strategy seems to have worked out pretty well for Facebook so far, and I'm not sure what they could have done differently. But I think it leaves them vulnerable to any one of those platforms, or all of them, being usurped by new kids on the block.

Part of the problem is that none of Facebook's platforms are all that great in their own right.[3] But that alone doesn't make them vulnerable. MySpace proved you can have a terrible product and coast off network effect alone, while Google+ proved that without a network, you have nothing.

But wait a minute. Does any one of these platforms on their own have the network effect that "Facebook" itself once had? I mean, yeah, they've absorbed a greater user share than the 2012 webapp ever had. But that's not what I'm talking about. Is connectivity to "Facebook," and hence its network, a killer feature at this point?

To give one example: I have zero confidence anyone on Groups is a "real person," it doesn't offer any unique features, it's painful to use for anything other than reading a general quasi-chronological survey of recent posts, and it means nothing to me that 17 or 18 "real friends" happen to be a member of the group (how does that help me find a sublet?).

Right now I'm one of millions of people who "just use Facebook for Events and Messenger." Except I don't _just_ message people through Messenger, and I don't _just_ learn about events through Events, and the fact that "my friends" are "on" these platforms seems to mean less and less every day. But I'm still on them... for now... with gradually diminishing frequency... basically out of ambivalence.

Is this product direction sustainable?

[1] Any references I make to Facebook in this post refer to the core service - the website, the app, whatever you want to call it. Not the company, which I'm aware owns WhatsApp, Instagram, etc, and could potentially continue to coast off acquisitions alone.

[2] This is a myopically North American view: in Brazil it would have started with Orkut, in Southeast Aria Friendster held steady market share for quite a while, etc. The point is that we used to consider portal-like predecessors as a litmus of comparison for Facebook’s health, and now that doesn’t seem as salient.

[3] I mean, Groups _barely_ serves its job of being the sort of Craigslist-with-authentication into which it's evolved, in part _because_ it evolved into that role over time. The Events interface is totally cluttered and incoherent, and despite its ubiquity, it seems to get the lowest social engagement of any of Facebook's core products. Messenger is... fine I guess, but I have no strong preference for it over WhatsApp or iMessage, and having hypothetical connection to hundreds of "friends" I haven't spoken to in years isn't exactly a value-add.

Indoor smoking is quite common here, but only in bars and clubs.

I guess you could get a slightly larger apartment in Sunset Park or Jackson Heights or somewhere but you would still be paying a preposterous $2000 (realistically $2500+ in 2018) for that, and now you've added NYC's cramped, unpleasant, "state of emergency" transportation infrastructure to your daily grind. For all that you get housing that is _still_ laughably austere in comparison to what you'd get nearly anywhere else in the country.

For what it's worth, I lived 7 or 8 places in about two years when I lived in NYC, in pretty much every Brooklyn neighborhood within a 20-40 minute radius from where I worked. Saved lots of money too - never lived alone, did social stuff in my neighborhood, took full advantage of the City to the best of my ability. After all that, I came to the following verdict: NYC is stupidly overpriced and has a substantial quality of life problem.

I am admittedly a non-native, so perhaps some of the finer charms of the City will always be lost on me. But I don't know - I'm living in Berlin right now, which isn't _too_ drastically different, and can't say I find myself missing NYC at all.

I spent a lot of time writing TI-BASIC and PHP/MySQL when I was about 11-13. Stopped programming in any serious capacity for about a decade.

When I picked up coding again as an adult, I found that although I had forgotten language-specific details (function names and arity, syntax, semantics, and so on), the flow and rhythm of programming had never really left me.

Since then, I've occasionally offered advice or informal tutelage to friends who are picking up programming and have asked for help. My observation is that programming seems to "click" with those who have, at one point or another, built a trivial project or script without following along a tutorial too closely. It doesn't matter how long it's been since they last wrote a line of code, the actual practice of coding sticks with them, and it greatly eases the challenge of further learning. Rote activities like codecademy don't seem to act the same way, since the user never gets into a flow state.

The article linked in the OP doesn't mention natural language learning, but I wonder where that sits in the proposed declarative/procedural binary. There's no getting around the brute memorization involved, but it does seem like certain language acquisition skills can be applied abstractly to grammar comprehension, semantic pattern recognition and the like, and can consequently make one's third or fourth language easier to learn than one's second.

Atom's vim bindings are great. They lack just one command that trips me up from time to time: :u.

Yeah, I can get by with cmd+z, but it would be nice not to be forced to context switch when I'm thinking in ex-mode.