netwanderer3

Went through a similar experience like hers many years ago working for a consulting company. In big corporations, it sometimes feels like there are many little smaller companies within. Often they have very distinctive and rigid cultures which could make one feel like you're just a cog in the system, and because they are so big it's difficult to make any significant individual contributions that could generate real impacts. You either fit in or you don't. Besides, the corporate culture is usually being dictated and passed down from higher level management executives who are not really involved in your office day-to-day so it could feel a little foreign at times.

I used to work at a big oil company where its culture was obsessed with safety and they took it very seriously. It's actually a good thing and I get it if you're one of the workers at an oil extraction site because those jobs could be very dangerous. However, we were just the business operation team working in an office located deep inside the city. We still had to follow the same corporate culture and rituals about safety, so without fail every week we had to conduct meeting where team members would discuss various topics related to safety. Since none of us has actually ever worked down at the oil fields, we slowly ran out of topics over time and people started telling random stories like tripping on electrical wires, spilling hot coffee while they were driving, etc... I think it's such a perfect example of how some passed down cultures could feel a bit foreign at times, depending on which unit or team you belong to. Great company though!

This is an interesting angle. Next generation will pretty much be exposed to pollution by the moment they're born. Technically their kids will inherit a slightly mutated version already even though it might not yet be enough. Does our gene "remember" how much exposure it had accumulated from the previous generation? We often hear from the news how they found some individuals who were immune to certain diseases due to a specific genetic mutation. Your kids don't carry the exact DNA as yours since it's a combination between a father and a mother so it will always be a new mutation.

According to the evolution theory, eventually our DNA will evolve to adapt to its external environment so does this mean given enough daily exposure over many generations, at some time in a distant future our immune system will no longer consider those particles as foreign and thus will not fight to eliminate it? There would be no dementia by then if it was indeed caused by inflammation triggered by the immune system. I know this sounds pretty stupid but human bodies are weird machines still not fully understood by today science. If some people within the same race could be allergic to certain types of food that are completely safe to others without any proper explanations (eggs, peanuts, etc...) then anything is possible. I'm sure there are people out there who live to 90 without getting dementia even in heaviest polluted cities.

There are three facts that are not going to change anytime soon. Number one, integrity is a trait not every human possesses, most don't so the power balance will always be tilted to the other side. Number two, money still rules this world and who has the most of it? Corporations! Number three, society is not going to adapt to each individual, only the other way around.

As a result of these three facts, sometimes life can get pretty tough if you don't join the other side. Integrity was more valued in the past but it simply does not have the same weight in today society as modern competition has ramped up everywhere making everything much more difficult for the average citizen. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself becoming a villain. In other words, we either throw integrity out of the window and survive, or we die with it.

It's pretty great to witness a policy or law that was applied correctly by a government to prevent further public damages, no matter how big the target corporation is.

But that has always been the way how Capitalism works. It's never meant to serve the mass as only the fittest, or the luckiest shall I say to avoid the meritocracy mentality, will reap the majority of benefits. In most industries we look at, there are only very few main players that will completely dominate 80-90% of the market, while the rest are just there to pick up the remaining 10% scraps. Same situation in current society where the 1% elites own the majority of wealth compared to the 99%. This is just how Capitalism works as everything in the system is structured this way to facilitate achieving such an outcome.

People complain about inequalities but then unwilling to modify or upgrade the current capitalism model to a higher more advanced version. Everything has its own lifecycle in life, the current model has achieved many incredible results in the past but it may be approaching a maturity stage and is in need of an upgrade. America is always about pursuing the current capitalism model to the max so if one is navigating under this version and yet expecting something different in contrast, that would be unrealistic. Again under this model and structure if you leave something running for a while, it always ends up with very few luckiest players who will receive the most. It might work well when under small to medium population as the negative effects are negligent, but as the number keeps on growing, the ratio of amount of people between the 1% and 99% will become drastically different and those negative effects will also increase tenfold. Globalization process will only help speeding this up and accelerating it more.

How do you solve this? If putting a cap on the elites' earnings, arguably it may stop innovations as they may lose the incentives to invest. But everything in life is a trade off, you get one thing by giving up another. Even things that are seemingly good now can become destructive if you leave it running by itself for too long without re-balancing it. Real world example is medicine, it may help your health but if you take too much or too long it may kill you, same with our food if you eat too much you become obese then you die. Excess is good only to a certain point then it will become bad. This is the law of nature that is timeless and never going to change, anyone who goes against this rule they will cease to exist it's that simple.

Our real world is dynamic and ever changing, we could have a model that worked very well from 30-40 years ago but it would have also produced a lot of baggages and side effects along the way, and one day it will reach a point where those side effects will take over what used to be good, the unexpected negativity will gain larger as they will become devastating and lead to self-destructive result of this model, that is if it's not re-adjusted or re-modeled in time to lessen those unwanted consequences. Anyone who believes they can keep running well on the same model to eternity without re-adjusting to avoid self-destruction are in complete disillusion. They are attempting to go against the unchanged universal law stated above and the end result will always be the same.

To solve inequalities, it's important to set a cap NOT at the maximum wealth level, but rather at the wealth difference ratio between the 1% (or arguably 10%) and the remaining 99% (or 90%). This way people at the top can keep growing but they will also need to pull those below them up as well, because let's face it we are all living daily depending on each other, nobody among the 1% would have gotten to the top or can keep remaining there without the 99%. This is very different than tax as it correlates and connects wealth ownerships directly between the two groups of population. Besides, tax is never intended for the goal of wealth distribution anyway or at least it is not being used efficiently for that purpose, most of it goes to funding other also critical but unrelated government projects and even wars.

However, any forms of such re-distribution is against the fundamentals of current capitalism model and some people will start screaming communist before they even attempt to understand the real issues at hand so I'm not sure if it's even possible. Similar to how everyone knows exactly what needs to be done to prevent climate change but that doesn't mean they will do it. Who knows? Maybe I would be biased too if I were among the 1%. Here's the catch 22, people who care don't really have the power to make changes because they're not among the 1%. The 1% don't care about the system because they think they can sustain themselves even in the face of collapse. The history of Rome empire was the definite proof of such an outcome. We cannot go against the law of nature. To prolong ourselves we have to keep changing.

I think what he meant was that Google's methodology prioritizes in anonymizing their data in the pipeline as to not to link it with any specific individuals, as opposed to Facebook's data which is often directly tied to a person. This makes sense because Google is all about Search so it really depends on keywords popularity where Facebook Ads can target very specific individual groups down to their interests.

If we believed in Eric Schmidt's prediction that future internet is going to be split into two halfs where one is controlled by China and the other by the US, and since China is restricting privacy and increase surveillance then the only sensible direction the U.S should adapt is by embracing the opposite values and promoting digital privacy. Those who place importance on these values will naturally follow their path.

So they are saying that even Facebook wouldn't even be able to read your messages. Wait a moment, if I go on Facebook Ads, I can target users based on some very precise and specific criteria like interests, then how would Facebook know these information if they can't read your messages?

I admit those features are pretty awesome as it allows businesses to target the exact groups of customer they wanted. It's the holy grail of advertising. Imagine you can just bypass all those who are not interested in your product and only laser target the ones who have intentions to buy.

Having said that, I understand for businesses to have such effective insights, it's reasonable that consumer privacy must be compromised to some degree. We can't have the cake and eat it too. If one agrees to use Facebook they must give up privacy, it's just that simple and I accepted that when I used it.

For Mark Zuckerberg to come out and say they won't peek at your information, that would be dishonest. How are they going to sell ads if they don't have your information?

For Facebook to continue to grow, they must strive to innovate and provide new services that are deemed so valuable by the public that people are willing to give up some of their privacy in exchange for these new services. That's really the only way.

Everyone knows Google does some surveillance on their users too but their services provide very high values to society, people simply can't ignore and not use it.

This is a perfect example of how everything in life is always a trade off. Do you want a healthier heart to live a few extra years or do you want to sit on your couch and browse HN while enjoying your BigMac? Pick one because only a fool would believe they could have both.

It's disheartening that this med is being used to treat infants and they wouldn't even leave those helpless babies alone. Healthcare is a $3.5 trillion dollar per year industry and is powering 20% of U.S economy, but I think the problem goes a lot deeper and further than just the medical field. This is a systematic issue across all industries where profits are increasingly being prioritized above everything else, even when it involves the most basic and essential human values.

Is the rapid increase of population part of the cause? Overpopulation often means the value of each individual will be decreased since anyone is now easily replaceable and becomes irrelevant. There are no signs this trend is going to stop anytime soon. I fear there has to be a massive catastrophic event to happen in order to trigger any societal changes at this level.

You're right, I used to know a few vegetarians who often supplement their diets with Vitamin B-12 which theoretically could help boosting and balance their cognitive ability vs. meat eaters. I personally did not notice any cognitive problems in those people at least.

Our DNA contains the sequence of folding steps instruction for each protein to fold. So for a protein to misfold itself, could this mean it must have received an incorrect instruction from the source? As we know, damages to DNA are often a result of foreign agents or coming from external environmental factors. Prevention is always better than a cure so it is probably a lot easier to figure out the source and eliminate that rather than trying to change the structure of these molecules which is extremely difficult.

Inflammation is often an immune system response to a foreign agent, and I read somewhere that prions could also be triggered and formed for the same reason so there might actually be a link. I imagine chronic inflammation over a long period of time could do a lot of damage.

Is it possible that these prions were also acquired by human through meat consumption? As in the case with PrP prion from Mad Cow Disease which spread through meat eating as well. Another very similar case is by eating fruit bats containing toxic BMAA, which has a very similar structure to L-Serine amino acid causing it to be picked up instead during the protein synthesis process and resulting in a misfolded version. Studies are being done as BMAA could be a likely cause for many neurological disorders such as Parkinson's.

Has there ever been any researches in determining the rates of Alzheimer disease in meat eaters vs. vegetarians?

That Baidu guy hit the nail right on its head, 996 works when you're in a new booming industry because the lucrative rewards are going to be worth all those long hours put in. But when you're in a maturing sector it just feels like a never-ending grind without getting much in return.

I always shit on Facebook in the past but I have to be honest, their ad campaigns don't require buyers to do keywords research which is often a major pain. In addition, they seem to know a lot more about their end users so it's easier to target the exact customer groups you want. Years of unethical privacy practices have probably given them certain advantages in this area. I was completely horrified when I learned you could upload a CSV list of all your customers email addresses and FB will match and display ads to this exact group.

At least on Facebook I feel like I personally have a little more control over how/when/where my ads will appear as opposed to Google's process where much of it is dictated by their algorithms. Not a fan of Facebook still but I can totally see why their ad products are working well for some businesses.

So I guess Google has been holding off revenue potentials from Google Maps all these years for this moment.

Elon Musk recently said LIDAR system was just too expensive and unnecessary as he's betting on using Tesla's video cameras for their own automated driving. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

You do have a point here. I think it's mostly due to the fact there's very little information about China available on Western media, so people just do not have access to the latest insights. This explains why most of them are still operating based on old beliefs.

Ironically this is probably serving China even better as they were able to keep everything undetected that it often becomes too late by the time people notice what's going on. Huawei is such a perfect example of this.

You're right. I should have clarified myself better. Those best elements were mostly applied to building wealth for China and strengthening their economy only. Other aspects related to political ideologies which will always be very different from the West, and I believe those topics should always be avoided on HN.

We have to understand that China has never been able to enjoy such economic power at this level throughout their history, so they have been waiting for this position for such a long time. Their current position may potentially reshape future history of human civilization. When you have the entire country concentrating all their effort on one and only one objective, the rest will have to take a backseat. For example, China didn't have to spend trillion of dollars going to war which was also another reason why they were able to laser focus on just one single goal.

This definitely doesn't mean it would make China the most balanced country overall as everything in life is always a trade off. One may gain in one area but would always lose in another. I'm not saying people should be afraid of China, I'm only saying they should not lock themselves up in the old world, and instead be ready and willing to learn from others because obviously China must have been doing many things right to get here.

I spent first half of my life in Asia, and second half in the West so I am very much under influenced by cultures on both sides. I've always tried my best to view these issues as objectively as possible and without any biases.

China of the past has always accepted that they were inferior, but they were always willing to learn which was why most people accused them of copying from others. However, human knowledge and innovations have always been about replicating what others have already done, and then adding your own tweaks to it. Nobody could go from 50 to 100 without climbing up through every step, and China was willing to climb those steps at all costs. They have studied Western society extremely well over the years. China were able to extract all the best elements from the West, removed the not-so-good ingredients, and then applied those filtered results back to the country.

On the opposite side, it's understandable why most people are criticizing China because psychologically it's very difficult to accept an inferior opponent who was only considered as "copier" not long ago could now in fact be as good, or possibly even better in the future. It's not easy considering they have been leading by a wide margin for such a long time.

The danger here is while China has quietly concentrated all their effort to adapt the best formulas from the West, people on the other side continue to ignore an inevitable reality. Instead of investigating China to see why they have done so well and to obtain some of their knowledge in return, many are still refusing these facts and trying their best to hold onto old ideas that just badly need updates. If not careful, we have seen this scenario played out time and time again in business (Kodak, Myspace, Blackberry, etc...).

Despite what others may want us to believe, majority of today world are still operating based on zero-sum game. Italy has seen its real GDP in decline and is the first G7 country to endorse China's "Belt and Road" initiative. In their own view, China of today no longer believes they're an inferior opponent.

It's about time people should forget about the past and start looking more into the future. Our world is changing very fast and failing to do that may quickly leave people behind before they even realize it.

They could be invasive, by monitoring even when there's nothing going on, but there are well-defined rules and strict protocols in place, and I have never heard any cases where they have used the data to attack anyone personally or are there?

I would respect Apple a lot more if they would just accept the defeat and publicly declare that their butterfly keyboard was a mistake and a complete failure. It was a bold experiment, and they don't always work out but that's okay! How could they not realize their stubbornness was precisely the reason why many customers have turned their back on these new MBPs? I can't expect them to be perfect or correct all the time, but it's more important to be able to accept when you're this wrong.

Ultra-low-latency is absolutely vital in sports betting industry where the odds are constantly changing based on what actions are taking place in real time.

Results in sports can switch from one side to the other end within split second, so whoever has the lowest latency will gain massive advantages. It's very similar to stock trading.

This reminds me of a story I read before.

A man approached the salesman upon seeing various colors of different fishing lures being on display. He asked whether those different colors actually work in attracting and catching fishes. The salesman promptly replied "Mister, I'm not selling these to fishes."

If these people are targeting VC money, they don't care if their products actually help solving problems for end consumers (aka the fishes), they just need to know what triggers the VC to invest. Even Masayoshi Son, the head of SoftBank, has lost $130 million in Bitcoin after listening to pitches from those crypto startup CEOs. This is how most businesses fail but hey at least it keeps the money flowing.

Those VC operate based on the principle in which if you throw enough spaghetti onto a wall, even though most will fall off but a few are always bound to stick.

Believe me, nobody knows anything in advance and everything is purely a game of chance, but once somebody gets lucky they can immediately declare themselves as the expert. They start selling books and everyone else would rush out to buy and follow exactly the same steps only to find out most of it just don't work. This same cycle just keeps repeating itself over and over again. Why? The market is not static, it constantly moves and changes around so you are already way behind by the time you apply those same strategies. Plus your personal life and connections are completely different than the other person's so you can't realistically expect the same results.

It's still necessary to learn what has worked because new levels are always built on top of the old ones. But this demonstrates why mathematics, or the rule of randomness, is a universal language that governs everything in our life.

The index itself is already separate in a sense that nobody is being stopped to do the indexing task themselves.

Google is a private for-profit company so we cannot realistically expect them to provide something for free to the public without generating profits in return.

The web index is not a locked up proprietary resource by anyone, so people can do the indexing themselves but the real question is how do you fund a service that will keep increasing its workload exponentially and indefinitely? What institution will have the required resources to bare such costs?

The demonstrating video was hilarious.

You cannot stop the camera to be there or aiming at you, so realistically the best option is to rely on a timeless principle: modifying input information will lead to changes of its output result, since the second element will always depend on the first.

I can see this is going to be another cat and mouse game in the near future. People are going to constantly come up with new creative ideas to circumvent around machine learning since it can only accurately identify data which it has already seen.

I wonder in what situation exactly would a company legitimately have a need to interview a candidate for a total of 5 rounds? Wouldn't they run out of questions to ask? Are you applying for a CEO position?

All it does is displaying for everyone to see their indecisiveness and wasting other people's time. They obviously couldn't make up their mind even after the first four rounds and that's just bad in any businesses.

If I ever had to go through a five-rounds interview and they ended up turning me down, I will not care if it burns bridges as I will track down their boss and he/she will receive some nice hand-written letters from me to let them know how their company performed. A working relationship always goes both way and they obviously have not valued much of your time.

I really wanted to believe Apple but they need to try harder.

This is not on iPhone but on a MBP so it's still quite relevant to Apple. I had disabled the "apsd" process, which serves as Apple's push notifications service, completely blocked it off using Little Snitch, and yet the process still found its own way to reactivate itself and keeping a persistent connection back to Apple servers in the background. I personally don't use FaceTime or Notifications on MBP, why couldn't Apple just let me disable this, and instead the process even circumvented around my firewall protection to make sure it could communicate back to their data center? This practice is a little shady and does not promote trust or transparency. If I have blocked a process permanently then I expect it to remain always blocked.

Their EmbeddedOS on the Touch Bar also keeps a couple always-on connections that utilize its own bridged network interface which users are completely blocked off and do not have access to. They were supposedly for TouchID, but I was viewing bandwidth usage the other day and these connections used up to almost 10MB of data. Why would something like TouchID need to send 10MB of data back to Apple? Again, this makes no sense and does not promote trust.

People tend to upvote a lot more than downvote. I believe it's because one's ego doesn't want to associate themselves with being negative, instead we always try to attach ourselves to more positive traits.

These metrics should only be used for categorizing purpose only. We need to be very careful in using it as a driver for more of the same articles, because in the long run this will only create a feedback loop that will keep feeding us the same content and narrowing our views, making us blind to more critical issues at hand.

Slack only works for companies where the nature of their employees' work actually requires team communication that will benefit the organizations.

Like everything in life, it's always a trade off. You may gain scores for team work but will sacrifice individual creativity. Deep creative tasks always require a full strength of focus and that state is only attainable once we allow our mind some time to completely "dial in". You simply cannot switch from 0 to 100 and be in the zone within the span of just a few minutes.

When you are using Slack or any social media communication platforms, your brain must allocate cognitive resource to manage your ego because you do care about what other people think of your opinions. Since the pool of our cognitive resource is limited, we will have less remaining that can be dedicated to other real creative tasks.

On top of that, you now have a distraction source where you constantly have to switch attention to. This may condition your brain over time and cause it to lose the ability to "dial in".

Some companies were eager to force employees into using these tools while it didn't really provide any real tangible benefits, and may in fact even be destructive. Within a company only some departments should use it but some definitely shouldn't. It's the same reason why open office concept may work for certain organizations but not for all.