freyir

“Quite a few activists and researchers were fired for asking Google to be a bit more ethical”

In the examples the author cited, those activists and researchers were fired for reasons going beyond “asking Google to be a bit more ethical. And frankly it doesn’t seem ethical for activists, researchers, and the author to deliberately misconstrue facts whenever they believe they’re on the right side of an ethical (and sometimes just political) issue.

Anti-vaxxers tend to be Republicans too. Finally putting their money where there mouth when it comes to smaller government.

It’s not nice to trash the art and entertainment that other people enjoy, but man, I hated that book.

Seems a bit far-fetched that the guy creating Bitcoin was also building up a global criminal empire. I’m sure Paul is a very talented guy, but there are only so many hours in a day. The article’s author even admits it’s a stretch by the end of the article.

It falls to the bottom because it lies about the facts (vaccines were never declared 100% safe and effective) and reaches an incorrect conclusion (if one vaccine is determined to be safer than another, it doesn’t follow that vaccines are objectively unsafe, or that being unvaccinated is safer than being vaccinated).

It’s a silly comment to make, and potentially harmful. The majority of people in this case don’t, on average, “follow what they’re told.” They’re very capable of evaluating facts and data and responding accordingly. That’s what’s happening here.

It’s a poor comparison. Stripe Press can effectively show a dozen books like this. Amazon can’t show 30 million books like this.

Not a substantive critique by a working physicist, a rant by a blogger who thrives on controversy.

My phone has a setting to not ring or vibrate unless it’s a recognized number. That alone has largely solved the issue for me. Fortunately I don’t need to answer calls from unrecognized numbers my job.

It may be an outcome, but it certainly wasn’t ”designed to boost disinformation.” If you watch a pro-vaccine videos, it will suggest more videos portraying the vaccine positively.

My take on things as time has gone on? It’s depressing but the problem is people. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching a pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine video, the comments are filled with hundreds or thousands of anti-vaccine comments. People are the common denominator of what’s wrong with the Internet today.

Yeah, it’s just a bunch of cheap (and some not-so-cheap) knockoffs.

Tech companies dumping their self-driving R&D divisions seems like a stronger admission that full self-driving is unlikely to materialize in the near future.

Just because you weren’t tested for the flu at your local doctor’s office, that doesn’t mean that the flu isn’t systematically monitored or that infection rates haven’t plummeted.

The headline is hyperbolic (the article says it’s dropped to “minuscule levels”) but it’s entirely possible to determine that by sampling a small portion of the population.

Yes, and then they too moved to the US to study or work.

Look at any top US university’s STEM faculty? What percentage are native born? It is shockingly low.

Your “cut” is having a place to store, view, and share your cat photos online.

The web only has two business models: users pay for a service or advertisers pay for a service.

I’m all in favor of paying for services, but it turns out most people prefer ads to breaking out their wallet.

Is this really a case of “tooting one’s own national horn”?

Or is the interviewee just discussing historical global factors that gave US universities an edge over the past centuries?

These knee jerk reactions whenever anything vaguely positive is said about the US have gotten a bit tired.

Leetcode interviews are exactly how I, as someone from a non-traditional background, got a job at a tech company.

I didn’t need to know 4+ years of CS curriculum, which I never would have learned on my own. I just needed to spend some time learning algorithms and data structures, and practice using free resources on the Internet.

A pretty good deal for non-people who didn’t study CS in college.

In fact, someone who studied CS in college might be slightly miffed that they offered a job to an outsider like me just because I practiced data structures problems in my free time.

Yikes, that sucks.

I’m fine with the walled garden of my iPhone and Apple’s App Store. But I had hoped there was an alternative for those so inclined.

> The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

Here he understates his own point. The rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. The people getting poorer the fastest are the middle class.

What prevents the Epic store (or any alternative store) from gaining more traction? Is it just that users prefer the default store that ships with the phone? Or are there other barriers?

It’s a simple policy: a percentage of revenue from games hosted on the platform goes to the host.

When that revenue is labeled “donations”, it doesn’t make it not revenue.

> “you are not permitted to ask for donations to support your free art project”

The host is not in the business of differentiating art projects from non-art projects or donation-based payments from non-donation-based payments, which could easily be abused by developers offering in-app rewards for “donations.” That is a slippery slope that would be ripe for abuse and satisfy no one.

When we have a complicated system, like the US tax laws, people abuse it and everyone complains. When we have a simple system applied fairly across the board, people think exceptions should be made for them and complain. The lesson seems to be that someone will always be complaining.

It’s not the gambler’s fallacy since they’re treating each flight as an independent event:

Probability of dying on one flight: 1/10,000,000

Probability of surviving one flight: 1-1/10,000,000 = 9,999,999/10,000,000

Probability of surviving 100 flights: (9,999,999/10,000,000)^100

Probability of not surviving 100 flights: 1-(9,999,999/10,000,000)^100 ~ 1/100,000.

I don’t know if the initial assumption of 1/10,000,000 survival rate is accurate, but the math is correct.

And when you have a probability that’s very small, you can skip all that and approximate by multiplying the probability by the number of events: 1/10,000,000 * 100 = 1/100,000. That’s thanks to the binomial approximation.

$700k is the median. The average is even higher, and especially so in “outlier markets” (where outlier here means the cities and surrounding suburbs where most people live).

Also, more Americans live in California than any other state. So if it’s an outlier, it’s an especially impactful one.

You might be mixing up Annie’s with Amy’s? I don’t believe Annie’s has frozen foods.

It also describes the most populous US state. The median housing price is now over $700k in California, while the median household income is around $80k.

You study, you learn the algorithms, and in return you get a high-paying job and excellent benefits. It’s a good deal for many.

You complain about studying unpaid, but who gets paid to study? Many pay tens or hundreds of thousands to study law, medicine, business, etc., and it takes years. Spending a couple months studying algorithms may not be easy, the process certainly isn’t perfect, but calling it abusive is really a stretch.

San Francisco also applies rent control only to older buildings. The effect is that developers only build top-of-market “luxury” housing (often cheaply constructed it rented at luxury rates). This helps them recover their development costs, which they couldn’t recoup on affordable housing.

For the last decade or so, since I first became acquainted with databases, the HN crowd has said “Use PostgreSQL.” And every few weeks there’s a company blog post mentioning that they use MySQL. Why is this?

Dumb question: Do browsers actually notify websites when the user is in incognito mode?

Or is it just presenting the user as a blank state with no cookies or other local season data?

I’ve always assumed the latter. So I’ve never assumed any implicit agreement that websites would turn off logging when I showed up in incognito mode.

Nobody talks about how difficult it actually is to commit mentally ill people in many places.

Case in point, San Francisco, where severely mentally ill homeless people abound, many of whom who cannot look after themselves, and are left to suffer and die in the street out of respect for their civil liberties. Or those who terrorize neighborhoods for years on end, and everyone looks the other way out of respect for their civil liberties.

Civil liberties are important, but prioritizing civil liberties to an extreme, above all else, is often harmful for the individuals they’re supposedly serving.

Not enough.