mustacheemperor

Every HN thread including any discussion of demographics eventually reaches a man insisting women are biologically programmed for certain roles. When specified those roles are invariably service based ones and never engineering innovative products, leading teams, or conducting research.

Relative to the breadth of human history with little to no gender equality, there is no country with a long history of gender equality. And throughout the history of gradually increasing gender equality in human society, there are numerous examples of men structuring the rules of engagement to restrict access for the women attempting to break in. When the Royal Society commissioned a bust of mathematician Mary Somerville, they still refused to admit her.[0]

If women are biologically ill suited to compete with men in these fields, it seems it would be unnecessary to prevent them from trying, like med schools rigging their exams.[1]

[0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2010.004...

[1]https://apnews.com/general-news-1c2a635e9faa44daa1225a804288...

Aside, I think this is it for me, I’m changing my HN password to something I can’t guess or remember. This is one part of tech culture I am just sick of responding to. There is more than enough of it in real life and I will always feel obliged to respond. Especially on HN where so many voices are leaders in the real world, the disappointment of seeing it over and over again is just crushing.

Please…if you won’t alter this attitude, don’t bring it to work. For the sake of the women in this field.

Total federal civil asset forfeiture passed losses from burglary in 2014.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...

Yes, this user grotesquely underrepresented the scale of chattel slavery in America at the peak of the American slave economy. The original commenter is still completely wrong if you look at the 1860 census.

The first user made a wild, incorrect guess, and the rest of this subthread shows just how badly that can spoil discussion quality on a forum like this. Fortunately, someone linked an earlier discussion up at the top.

They are also wrong by absolute numbers.

That figure of 7m is not the total incarcerated population. It's the total correctional population, which includes parole and probation.

The 1860 census counted just over 4 million enslaved African Americans in the South, out of a population of about 31.4 million.[0][1]

There are about 1.9 million people incarcerated in jail or prison in the United States today.[2]

The scale of incarceration in the US today is mind-boggling, but is itself under half the number of people enslaved at the height of the Southern slave economy.

[0]https://usafacts.org/articles/the-1860-census-counted-4-mill... [1]https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1864/dec/1860a.h... [2]https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html

But a dumpster is a complete and functional item. I think that's a key distinction. This is an incomplete high rise blighting the landscape until it's taken down.

What if you like your job, your area, and a developer shows up one day and installs 2/3rds of a dumpster in the parking lot. There is a partially completed trash enclosure there, clearly unfinished, blighting the view from your office.

If someone drives past, they're not going to get a positive impression whether it's painted or not.

If someone paints the wreckage of the incomplete dumpster, how do you feel about it? It seems to me the disrespect here is really from the people who built a pile of garbage in your parking lot.

I actually essentially do that, I have a reusable bag that folds up into itself with a zipper into a package about the size of a wallet. Fits well in a purse or jacket pocket and is more pleasant to carry when full than a plastic bag anyhow.

So really, there’s not even a small sacrifice involved for me, just a little bit of planning, to avoid making that waste.

And isn’t this kind of ingenious gadget based solution much more in the hacker spirit than throwing up our hands and saying, give me back the old traditional way regardless of the flaws?

In particular because Appin Training Centers was only incorporated several months after being named the plaintiff in the lawsuit, and appears to exist in order to facilitate these suits.

One of my favorite aspects of pinball is finding and playing those odd machines tucked away here and there, thanks to some enthusiast at a local business, or because it’s always been there. Fond memories of an old laundromat in CNY that had a machine of similar vintage..and an equally old coke vending machine.

Worth noting the performance characterizations of an individual machine can depend on how it’s maintained and how the operator chooses to set it up - so this may not be a completely level playing field.

On the other hand, if you’ve figured out which Medieval Madness in your city you play best at, you can leverage that information to your advantage :)

I believe it was right here on HN that I read last week the pithy aphorism,

>to err is human. to screw up a million times a second, you need a computer.

This takes me back to my own first experiences 'hacking' and tinkering with the guts of a computer system, which put me on the path to a career in IT and engineering:

- Breaking the family computer with a trojan pirating Halo PC, which I then had to figure out how to fix before my dad got home

- Circumventing the NetNanny, etc parental controls my parents randomly decided to install on our personal computers several years after us kids had already been using the internet (edit: okay, there may have been a letter from Comcast re: the above sloppy piracy). Restoring my netbook to useful functionality without leaving a trace of modification introduced me to Linux Live CDs, and Linux!

Good to know tomorrow's hackers are still getting that education today!

Yeah, I'm sure some of the experience quality is because the only other riders are people Waymo selected for the beta, and nobody wants to get kicked out for misbehavior. We've joked a few times "don't forget that water bottle, I don't wanna get banned!"

On the other hand though, I have seen misplaced items in Waymos a couple times and when I reported them in the app they pulled the car for cleaning ASAP. I actually did leave a water bottle once - a disposable, single use one - and they emailed me asking me if I wanted them to return it! That kind of vehicle management feels more like a benefit inherent to centralized taxi fleets than a benefit inherent to AVs, but it's something Waymo can take advantage of. I would guess the in-car cameras would be capable of detecting vomit-related events etc too.

Wow, that is really cool. Thank you - I frankly feel a lot of relief knowing the collection is still being maintained, even if I can't visit it. Maybe they need volunteers.

The jarringly bad nature of my recent experiences with Lyft/Uber compared to Waymo has likely inspired some hyberpole, but - I have been an Uber and Lyft rider for almost 10 years myself. Back then I was at town meetings in Syracuse, NY advocating for Uber to come to town. I know the experience can be good, but it seems like over the last couple years the experience has gotten considerably worse on average.

Experiencing Waymo has also altered my standards. Now I really notice how often the car is dirty and unkempt, stinks of pot or cigarette smoke, or the tire light is on, or the driver is handling the car poorly. Waymo is usually the same price, and none of that ever happens. If they pull this off I don't see the business model for human based rideshare surviving unless the cost of AV rides skyrockets once they need to be independently commercially viable.

I also live right off the highway, so I think I am more prone to getting people who pick up my ride on the way to or from somewhere else and then get upset about where they have to go. Pretty much the only place I need an Uber to these days is over the bridge to the East Bay when BART is not realistic, which is usually because I'm in a rush. One of my recent trips I wound up late anyway, because the first driver who pulled into my complex explained to me "because the uber app gives me these bad rides" I should cancel the ride for him, and pay a fee, because it was so unreasonable for me to expect him to deliver me to the destination I had called the ride for.

Edit: on another bridge trip, my driver was excited to show me his 'tiktok famous' friend on his dash mounted iPad while we went over the bridge. Diamond driver, perfect rating, surfing social media with one hand and steering with the other. Maybe Waymo has just made me picky and most rideshare users now expect to share use of an iPad with the driver in traffic

I really hope Waymo succeeds, or at the very least survives in its current markets. It is so much more comfortable, convenient, and safe than traditional ride share.

I switched to more or less only using Waymo for ride-share in SF after I got into the beta last year, and almost without exception every Uber or Lyft ride I have had to take since then for timing, availability, or route reasons has been some kind of debacle. Ranging from just an unclean and odd-smelling car to a ride my partner and I had to end early with the "pull over now" button when the clearly intoxicated driver missed multiple exits and slid on and off the highway median figuring out what to do.

By the way, that driver was a "Platinum" tier driver per the Uber app. I reported what happened in detail in a message to support, specifically using the safety issue area of the app, and got back an automated message explaining to me that my credit card charge differed from the amount shown onscreen because the ride ended early. I have previously ranted at length on HN about the nasty dark patterns Lyft uses to attempt to trick you into using their "priority pickup", which is always slower than promised and condescends to you with fake "just a few more seconds" messages while it waits for a driver. Recently, my Uber app has begun auto-selecting Black cars for no conceivable reason, except that it does this after 10pm on the weekends when it's more likely I'm in a rush and/or sleepy and/or intoxicated.

The user experience of Uber and Lyft has gotten so poor it feels like outright hostility from these apps towards the users. I've certainly had multiple drivers who behaved outright hostile to their customers. By comparison, the Waymo experience is perfect.

If you're a renter, recovering $500 a month in funds probably looks like cutting back on entertainment, switching to cheaper brands at the grocery, declining to visit those friends in the East Bay to save on gas, tolls, and/or Uber.

If you're a landlord, you can just force a $500/m increase on your tenants. Done.

Since everyone has felt the squeeze after the pandemic, those of us who represent a potential X% increase in monthly revenue to the person we depend on for the roof over heads are going to get squeezed on their behalf.

I dunno about that other commenter's theorized 'mass migration' overseas, but sheesh, a personal migration to Stockton is starting to feel pretty reasonable.

> The only running CDC 6000 series machine has been restored by Living Computers: Museum + Labs.

Wonder what's become of it, now that the Paul Allen foundation deemed the LCM a needless expense and who knows what happened to all the donations.

Seriously, who knows what happened to all the donations? A lot of folks in tech reached in their proverbial closets for pieces of history, worked on these restorations, etc, presumably with the expectation that work would be preserved for more than a few years via this institution endowed by a vast fortune.

I always wanted to visit the LCM and it's like feeling the knife twist again every time I see a line about "this extremely cool thing from the history of computers was restored and you can see it yourself at - oh, that's the one in Seattle isn't it."

There's a running CDC6000 somewhere in the USA, or at least there was. Is it still in Seattle? Is it still in the museum building? Does it still run? Is anyone responsible for it? Has anyone turned it on and felt the hum since 2020?

For me, it's just constant cable news cycle clutter on my home page. At least with cable TV I could change the channel to Food Network and all I would see was Food Network stuff. With Youtube, even though 90% of what I watch is cooking content and travel shows, every time I launch that app on my TV there's a high chance the recommended carousel on the first screen I see will be full of violence overseas, suffering refugees, crime, etc. Even when my recommended carousel is only full of stuff I actually watch, YouTube will simply insert another row of videos titled [Outrageous News Topic of the Day].

And just like you, I'm sitting down to eat dinner. It makes me, sad? Hard to say what the emotion is. But I feel something when I sit down at the end of a day to watch content I like on a device I own, the only content I ever watch on a platform I subscribe to, and I am forced to see violent, emotionally outrageous, troublesome thumbnails instead because some metric says that for someone statistically "good number go up get performance bonus" if everyone gets that shoved in their face. Oh, you want to relax and watch SortedFood? No - you will feel rage, you will feel sorrow, you will feel stress, YouTube demands it of you. This specific word is hyperbole, but I feel abused by big tech these days.

>All those things plus some fancy instagram marketing is tricking people to spend $700+ on an air filter.

I think there is also the middle ground of spending about $150 on an air filter, because the ones from Ikea and Bluair look and sound much nicer in my home than a box fan with a HEPA filter duct-taped to the front.

I don't mind the repeated breathless excitement over it. It feels very on-brand for hackers to get excited about discovering a cheap and ugly DIY version of a commercial product and apparently miss that not everyone wants one in their kitchen.

There is also an opening for someone to market this exact product exactly the same, but just undertake the testing to prove it actually works as advertised to comply with California law.

As a state where air quality is a major public health concern, it seems very reasonable for the regulations to protect consumers from being sold scam products that do not actually filter the air. I understand this concept is well tested and proven, but I think we're all familiar with the general counterfeit product issues on Amazon and I would be 0% surprised to get a fake of even such a simple design.

Before this entire debacle unfolded, I really liked having Beeper on my iPhone to send and receive texts from my Windows computer and mix my chat platforms together like the old days of IM. I was on the waitlist early and I even got the Beepy Mini and have had a lot of fun messing with it. The visual design of their app/logo is distinct and charming. I told people to try it out. I would make detailed bug reports for issues I hit and the team would reply, and fix them.

But the shine really wore off over the last couple months, and I finally uninstalled it yesterday. It’s just become less and less reliable throughout, with messages arriving out of order, etc. There was plenty of room left to polish and improve the experience as an iPhone messaging client too, but instead of doing that they picked this fight with Apple and it feels like any other roadmap items and general stability fell by the wayside.

I wonder what the master plan for Beeper was here. Because I feel like as a user of their original offering I was pretty much left aside so they could fight this battle that unfolded exactly as futilely as skeptical HN commenters predicted it would on day 1. Were there just not enough of us using the original offering, they had to throw this Hail Mary?

The updates channel used to be full of incoming features and enhancements, once it became a constant drumbeat of the next flailing attempt to circumvent Apple with the Android client I figured we weren’t ever getting Stickers support. iMessage sending and receiving performance in my iPhone and computers has generally degraded over the last couple months too, and I have to assume it’s related.

>Schools nationwide have invested millions of dollars in the monitoring technology, including federal COVID-19 emergency relief money meant to help schools through the pandemic and aid students’ academic recovery. Marketing materials have noted the sensors, at a cost of over $1,000 each, could help fight the virus by checking air quality.

>Students found vaping also can receive a misdemeanor citation and be fined up to $100. Students found with vapes containing THC, the chemical that makes marijuana users feel high, can be arrested on felony charges. At least 90 students in Tyler have faced misdemeanor or felony charges.

Imagine getting a felony as a high school senior for getting caught vaping weed by a sensor bought for a thousand bucks in COVID-19 emergency relief funds.

>Understanding traffic police, sign turners, "follow me" trucks, etc.

I can confirm that in my experience, Waymo handles these kinds of situations fine. Better than many humans in SF seem to, ha! Compared to my past experiences with Cruise, where the car would become instantly paralyzed at the sight of flashing yellow lights, so it could phone home for human intervention.

Icy conditions seem like a big open question to me. As a human driver, there's a big difference between driving on a road slick with rain and a road slick with snow and ice..but maybe there is not much of a difference to a self driving car? Certainly, other humans on the road behave differently in snowy/icy conditions than in rainy conditions, and the self driving vehicle needs to share the road with them.

In my opinion the "Latest in the Area" screen using 30% of real estate by default when you launch the app is an ad, regardless of whether the businesses featured there actually pay Google or just show up there randomly.

Is "all weather conditions" a global benchmark, or is it "all weather conditions occurring in the cities of operation?"

At least in SF, I haven't seen a day where Waymo refused availability for the weather. Rode it all over town in the rainstorms this weekend, and found it a little jarring to see the windshield covered in rainwater cause the computer doesn't GAF.

If it doesn't need to handle snow to win this bet, it seems it could handle Seattle-tier rain already.

It feels like you have to choose between Google Maps, with up to date information but an ad-riddled, not-useful interface, or Apple Maps, with a simpler map interface but worthlessly unreliable information.

Looking for a place to eat in downtown SF always requires sifting through multiple listings for "permanently closed" restaurants that have indeed been closed, for a decade. Why do those still need to appear on the default view?

On the other hand, a new record store just opened up in North Beach recently - already on Google Maps but, of course, still missing on Apple Maps this weekend.

Unfortunately no, and I should mention a cursory search turns up known driverless startups active in Mountain View - so I think unless any other HNster has better evidence, treat me as hearsay.

I also shouldn't oversell them, the ones I've seen look 'slick' in that they are similar to other well-polished LIDAR test vehicles that aren't just a bunch of sensors bolted to a roof rack, and they're 'mysterious' in that they're unmarked.

I don't think he would be shocked to see this comment, though, since it is materially identical to the complaints I remember reading circa 2010 and is as willfully ignorant of the Vision Pro as those complaints were of the iPad, and later the Apple Watch and the AirPods (when 'the FBI will destroy Apple's privacy edge' was the government conflict du jour).

I don't mean to come across as standoffish here, it's just, this complaint reads to me like the "HN is becoming reddit" complaints. People have been saying it forever, so, without any new evidence, it just reads like the same old prediction that hasn't come true yet.