josephorjoe

Well, it is not necessarily right if you have 500 users, but I would call it dictatorial rather than orwellian. And it could certainly be a benevolent dictatorship with the right dictator.

The problem with the 1,000,000 users is it becomes harder and harder to have informed people make reasoned decisions based on good information, so you end up relying on processes and proxies. Data and reports. And then you create rules like "whenever data point X reaches threshold Y action Z will be taken". And it is a good rule. Not a perfect rule, because perfect rules are really really hard. And maybe the rule can be gamed a bit. Griefed a bit. And this makes people unhappy and they start complaining, but there are so many of them and they were the ones breaking the rules anyway, and there really isn't time to look into all these complaints, and its impossible to figure out exactly what happened without reading through terabytes of logs so the rules are the rules and people just need to follow them. And so what if they just got a life ban because of a momentary lapse of reason or because an organized group filed a series of false complaints. Life is too short to coddle whiners and toxic people.

And then you are orwellian.

No. I'm not even sure that is a different class of problem.

I'm generally not a big fan of database driven black lists.

They have all the problems of bad decisions individuals make with much more impact and much less recourse.

It depends how big you are. To be "Orwellian" requires scale.

There is a big difference between individual taxi drivers refusing to take a specific fare at a specific moment in time and a company that controls a large percentage of ground transportation denying someone access to it forever.

It's like the difference between an injury and a chronic disease.

Credit card, payday loans, etc. To a lesser degree car loans.

It often does make sense for many people to take out a loan to buy a car, but car loans tend to be described to people in terms of 'monthly payment' rather than total cost, which makes it easier for people to make bad decisions (e.g., buying that new $30,000 SUV w a 5 year loan instead of the used $15,000 sedan w a 2 year loan).

Indeed. Most of my family falls into both categories.

One the one hand it is infuriating to see them pay more for everything they buy because they are paying interest on everything they buy partly because they buy stuff they don't need or buy it sooner than they need to.

On the other hand there are incredible cultural pressures in america to spend spend spend and get newer/better stuff than you need (cars, houses, phones) and almost no cultural pressure to be prudent and responsible.

Probably doesn't help that there is a whole 'industry' whose only function is to capture 5-35% of the income of the poor and distribute it to the rich.

Completely agree. All the extra fees and hassle around car rentals are why I eventually bought a car, even though I really only need it sporadically -- mostly for vacations.

I think the taxes on rental cars are often a type of "tourist tax". Politicians seem to find it easy to approve taxes on people who can't vote in their reelection campaigns.

I know someone who hasn’t driven since a cyclist ran a red light and crashed right into the middle of the passenger side front door (which had to be replaced for >$500 of which the cyclist paid $0). There was also a kid in the back seat who was pretty upset for a long time.

And the cyclist had a pretty bad day too.

Running a red light is dangerous and can have plenty of collateral damage.

I hear you.

On the one side we have corporate interests looking to exploit everything they are not barred from exploiting and piously declaring that not exploiting things they are not barred from exploiting is failing in their mission.

On the other side we have governments trying with varying degrees of success to add regulations on this stuff that most lawmakers do not understand.

As a parent, you cannot just rely on the government. Some regulations are good. Some don't go far enough. Some are kind of dumb.

No one said being a parent is easy, but taking responsibility for these types of decisions is part of the job.

Seeing the boosters fly back and land themselves reminded me of watching the shuttle boosters detach and fall away from the shuttle.

The shuttle boosters would parachute and land in the ocean where they were retrieved and could be reused.

Back then, the thought of those boosters precisely flying themselves back to the launch site would seem like science fiction -- now it is science fact.

Just watching that video brought back memories of watching the shuttle launches -- as swish_bob says those were a BIG DEAL back then both for the engineering achievement but also culturally. It was something to admire and be proud of even if your only contribution to the project was "being born in a time and place where people do things like this".

If my memory is not playing tricks on me, when the MTV music channel started (which was also a pretty BIG DEAL in my world back then) they used animations of the shuttle (landing on the moon, I think) as part of their branding because it was hard to get any cooler than the shuttle.

Nothing to add here except I'm completely impressed as a software engineer and a human. Congrats to all who made this happen -- you have done important stuff.

Watched the video w my 10 year old kid and tried to explain how impressive this is and relate it to my own experiences watching space shuttle launches.

It will be interesting to see what impact this all has other than raising money, which I hope will actually go to improve public transit.

Driving in manhattan is already such a miserable experience, I'm not sure that $10 adds enough extra misery to significantly reduce weekday traffic, but I could certainly be wrong about that (and hope I am).

I haven't seen any real breakdowns on "who is driving around manhattan on a Thursday" but it seems to me that it is mostly taxis, car services, buses, and commercial vans/trucks -- almost all of whom can absorb or pass on the costs.

He is promoting a business to his followers as a place they should patronize without any actual belief that they should patronize it (other than his belief that businesses that pay him should be patronized).

He is behaving honestly with the restaurants but not with his followers. Unless he is actually posting things like:

"Hey, I've never been to Moe's Tavern but they said I could have a free burger if I posted this picture, so here it is. Go check it out! You should totally spend money there. Moe's is awesome!! (at least, they were awesome enough to offer me a burger to type this!!11!!!)"

This is what bothers me the second-most about the whole Influencer system.

What bothers me the most is how many people see no problem with that, which feels to me like a much bigger problem we have as a society (essentially: the growing disconnect between motive and perceived motive in information distribution and the fact that everyone is OK w that).

I didn't learn programming until I was in my 40s. I taught myself and went through one of the coding bootcamps. It took a while but I did eventually get a job.

Probably the three biggest takeaways I have from my own experience:

If the company is big enough to have an HR department, it is going to be hard to get hired as a non-standard applicant. Too many people would have to agree to take the risk, and HR is NOT about risk taking.

Some type of personal connection is extremely important. Meeting someone at a job fair/meetup/hackathon/whatever is going to get much better results than emailing a resume.

Recruiters are probably not going to be of much help. Companies do not want to pay recruiters commissions for jr devs.

You can use the `--user-data-dir` arg to specify a profile location when opening chrome. So, on a mac, something like:

  open -Fna /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app \
  --args --user-data-dir=/my_temp_profile_dir/my_tmp_profile

If you copy an existing profile to `my_tmp_profile` chrome will use that, otherwise it behaves like a new setup.

Disable their client side validations and find out if they bothered with server side validations...

cobblestone

Whatever may or may not have happened, NYC's general economy is way too big for 25k jobs to significantly alter it (let alone "destroy" it).

Amazon would not even have been one of the top 20 employers in the city and finance would still be the most important economic sector by far.

It would have been a big deal for LIC, but not for NYC.

I avoid them as much as possible -- if someone wants me to train their machine learning algorithm, they can pay me.

newegg lost some of my business recently after thinking it was a good idea to make me fill in a captcha before taking my money.

How does the state not get involved in forcing medical treatment on an adult?

Even if a relative is designated as a guardian, if the person refuses treatment what happens?

Forcing an unwilling adult to regularly take medication is not a simple thing to do and in many cases will require physical restraint or violence (or the threats thereof).

Even getting a young child to take medication can be challenging (try getting a 5 year old to go through a 2 week antibiotic treatment w a liquid antibiotic that tastes bad...).

No recourse perma ban within 3 hours?

Sounds like a recipe for griefing.

I just got a new pc and decided I wanted Office for it. I did not want to rent Office with an online subscription as I flat out do not trust that the pricing and offerings will be stable, and after jumping through many hoops (err, web searches) manage to buy "Office Classic".

But I still ended up needing a Microsoft account for the download. I was surprised to find I already had one (for the email I was using) , but I did and I was able to use it to download/install/validate the software.

Only later did I realize it was an account I created for my son to play Minecraft... hopefully he doesn't manage to get me banned from the Microsoft ecosystem.

I use to be like that (the snickers bar had the best calories/price ratio in the office vending machine), but I'm not any more (the popcorn has the lowest calories in the office vending machine).

Something very unfortunate happened to my metabolism in my 30s... do enjoy it while you can :)

Fair enough, although there are plenty of realtors happy to help landlords vet and negotiate w tenants for 12 month leases (and then charge the tenant a fee for their services).

I still see more risk/work in the AirBnb model, but I can see where some landlords (esp. local ones w small numbers of apartments) could find it worth it.

Is there really much evidence that the majority of Airbnb properties would otherwise be traditional "12 month lease" rental apartments if it were not for Airbnb.

I mean, I'm sure there are a few, but if I'm a landlord, why would I give up having a stable tenant paying market rate rent for 12 months at a time for essentially managing a hotel room?

Sure, the 'rent per day' is going to be a lot better with the hotel room model, but it seems like an entirely different business to manage say 30-100 property rentals per year rather than 1.

People have always subletted their apartments when they are out of town -- I'm guessing a lot of the Airbnb rentals are just those traditional sublets showing up in an easy to quantify form.

I'm open minded to the possibility I'm wrong -- I don't have the data on the history of the properties showing up on Airbnb -- but it seems like the profile for the landlord/apartment that ends up on Airbnb is a bit different from the ones that show up on StreetEasy with 12 month leases.

At least in nyc, it seems to be a mix -- small non-profits/start ups who need a professional looking space but can't or don't want to deal with office management as well as some big companies who need a lot of extra space and will just rent whole floors for fairly lengthy timeframes.

Exactly.

And on top of all that, you're lucky if the teachers even look at the homework they assigned.

My kid's teacher doesn't bother -- she emails photos of the answer sheets to the parents because I guess we are supposed to review the homework too?

Maybe this isn't obvious... but if I wanted to homeschool my kid, I would homeschool my kid.

Lol that is awesome. Thanks for the link.

I feel for the poor introverted guinea pigs of Switzerland though. No chance for a peaceful quiet life free from the squeaking of another pig.