qsymmachus

The end result is Google is getting it wrong, we just have two layers of machine slop at work

Yep, but for ideological reasons they reversed it.

USPS purchased the usps.com domain a long time ago specifically so they could control it and prevent phishing. The decision to replace usps.gov with the .com domain came later, with the tenure of Trump appointee Louis DeJoy.

Right wingers believe that USPS should operate as a business, not a public service, so "rebranding" their website to be .com is definitely a part of that narrative.

I think we're getting ahead of ourselves as an industry if we think the ability to generate a convincing B- history essay from a prompt presages the enslavement of the human race

Oberlin native here. I've been going to Gibson's since I was a kid. You're getting an incomplete picture of this sad drama and the Gibson family does not deserve your sympathy.

I'll preface by saying that no one in this story comes out looking good – certainly not the shoplifters, who expected get out of jail free cards despite being thieves; nor the college, whose greatest fear is offending its fragile student body, with predictable results like this.

What you're not going to read in this article or others like it is that the Gibsons aren't heroes either. There are two important details I'd bring to your attention:

1. Allyn Gibson, the man who tackled the shoplifters, really is a confirmed racist. I know this both first hand (we are peers), and from his many social media posts in which he casually rags on immigrants and black people (expect he identifies them using the n-word). The judge in this case declared that evidence inadmissible, for some reason.

2. The Gibsons are not a put-down, working class family who were nearly bankrupted by this protest. They're one of the wealthiest families in town, and were millionaires before this all happened. Gibson's Bakery is a hobby business; they turn a modest profit selling some baked goods and beer. Their actual livelihood comes from rent – they're the second largest landowners after the college, and own most of the commercial and residential rental property in town. The idea that they were impacted by this protest in any consequential way is frankly laughable to anyone who knows anything about them and their business. Once again, the judge declared evidence of their wealth to be inadmissible in court.

This doesn't absolve the college of blame. But this isn't the black-and-white, "David vs Goliath" story the media is making it out to be. Unfortunately this story just fits too neatly into a national narrative about "woke" politics going too far, so you're not going to see any nuance from the media.

I see that STEM chauvinism is still alive and well on Hacker News.

Believe it or not, there are some skills you can pick up studying the humanities that will set you apart from your CS major peers. Being able to write and communicate clearly, for example, is pretty much a super power in most tech jobs.

No one is arguing that Airbnb is solely responsibly for rent increases. It's one of many contributing factors, including limited supply as you point out.

Contrary to your intuition on this question, Airbnb almost certainly a contributing factor to rent increases. There are studies on this: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3006832

> Insane that this is happening without federal coordination

Not surprising, because the feds are providing zero leadership right now. Just today, Trump told the governors on a conference call that they should "get their own ventilators". We should not expect competent and engaged leadership from this administration any time soon.

Why not 4x8 hours

That's a good point, but I think it would be a shame if wireless charging completely replaced wired, because it's much less efficient.

Something like 20-40% of input energy is wasted when using wireless charging versus a wire. If every existing phone switched to wireless charging, that would cause a non-trivial increase in total power usage.

David Graeber also pointed this out and came up with a rule of thumb: how much a job contributes to society is inversely proportional how much someone is paid to do it.

> Always in ear

What percentage of Airpods owners do you reckon _always_ have them inside their ears?

It doesn't exist because many people don't want it to exist, chiefly due to privacy concerns.

In the mid aughts the Consumers Union successfully lobbied against the creation of a 411 directory for cell numbers: https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2013...

You could think of this as a simple "he said she said", but what possible benefit does the whistleblower stand to gain from making this story up? Whereas the governor has a very obvious incentive to deny the whole thing happened.

They probably care more about bad publicity than fines, especially since they're already under public scrutiny for their treatment of warehouse workers.

It's very easy to write JS in a functional style, since as you point out, it already supports first-class functions, which is the most important building block.

To really go whole hog, try setting one constraint for yourself: only use immutable data. Make all your variables `const`s, and only use immutable data structures (Immutable.js is a useful library for this).

You'll discover that it's basically impossible to write code in the familiar imperative style – everything needs to be a pure function, that just takes an input and returns a consistent output, without mutating state. This really is the "secret sauce" of FP.

Agreed 100%, sometimes the FP community is its own worst enemy. Too many FP enthusiasts seem to think that "real" FP requires mastering category theory, which is cool and all but really just a particular subset of the paradigm, and a particularly Haskell-centric subset at that.

I encourage anyone who wants to learn functional programming to pick up the classic "Little Schemer" by Friedman and Felleisen. It's a charming book, designed for undergraduates, that teaches you all the important and appealing aspects of FP. And you won't be made to feel like an idiot because you don't know what a monoid is.

I was a T-Mobile subscriber twice, first in the mid aughts and then again about 6 years ago. Both times their network had a fatal flaw: I couldn't get a good signal indoors.

Could any current T-Mobile subscribers tell me if this is still a thing?

"People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence."

http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm

Careful! It's easy and fun to make fun of WeWork for calling itself a "tech" company, but we might be throwing rocks in glass houses.

How many of us are currently working at """tech""" companies right now?

You're right, I totally forgot that it's ok to abuse the illegal ones only, cause they're not really people

> We strongly support the rights of immigrants and immigration reform

But also

> Governments at all levels—federal, state, and local—should have access to the best technology

So, we support the rights of immigrants to not be abused, but we'd like to continue making a buck selling tech to agencies directly responsible for that abuse.

Similarly,

> Human-induced climate change is real, serious, and action is needed from the public and private sectors

But but but!

> The energy industry should have access to the same technologies as other industries

Amazon even openly brags about how awesome their tech is for extracting that sweet, sweet oil: https://aws.amazon.com/oil-and-gas/

Its hilarious (and sad) how this position piece outlines what Amazon claims to believe, and simultaneously explains why they're going to keep doing things that directly contradict those stated beliefs. It's an insult to your intelligence as a reader.

What a bunch of baloney

> There must be a level of economic production that falls below the level of emission that can be absorbed without contributing to climate change

You're right, there absolutely is such a level. The important point is that to stay at or below that level, you have to give up on the idea of perpetual, infinite growth. The inputs and outputs must remain constant.

My point was that there's no such thing as "immaterial" growth, so we can't escape this limitation by making a bunch of apps forever.

This is incorrect. Every economic output requires material inputs.

> I can create digital goods and services which people buy

Your digital goods and services require physical machines to run on. These machines are made of physical materials, including some rare earth minerals that are costly to extract. These machines require energy to run, which also requires material inputs.

> I can even give massages all day, and this also doesn't destroy the environment

Human beings like yourself require material inputs to live – food, shelter, energy, to name only a few. Just by being alive on a biosphere, you are impacting the environment in some way. The size of that impact depends on your individual lifestyle.

There is simply no such thing as "immaterial" economic production.

Really, none. It's justified by a grossly inflated sense of the value of their own time. They just don't want to fly with the plebs. And in the case of Adam Neumann in particular, he wanted to hotbox the plane.

In just one cross-country trip, the Gulfstream IV emits nearly double the CO2 that the average American emits in an entire year.

Most "accelerationists" these days are right-accelerationists, because it turns out it only seems like a good idea if you don't actually care about human suffering.

Direct action gets the goods!

No – as much oil and gas must be left in the ground as possible.

Depending on how much of a global temperature increase you're willing to tolerate, there are specific limits (carbon budgets) to how much fossil fuels we can burn. This is discussed at length in the IPCC's report: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-2/

As far as I'm concerned, this move is pure greenwashing until Amazon stops collaborating with oil and gas companies to extract fossil fuels faster.

https://aws.amazon.com/oil-and-gas/

Thanks but I would rather not work for Narcs Inc.