rayvy

This looks amazing (as everyone else said). Hope this remains somewhat stable so I/we can build on top of it. 5 stars.

> The main concerns are not the ads themselves

^ This.

> but the uncontrolled amounts of information that are being collected to tailor those ads

^ Especially this. (side note: funny thing how so much of this information is gathered, yet targeting is still so bad)

> the emerging tendency to try to get users addicted to content so they can see more ads

Also very important. These platforms don't build features with "how to make things better for users" in mind, they do so with "how do we increase user engagement for ad spend" (see Snapchat as a prime example)

> Am I applying to the wrong jobs?

I believe you're applying to the right jobs, it's probably just that the interviewers are trying to do what they think is the "popular" way of going about technical interviews.

Best way to handle this IMO - ask yourself: Are you ok with putting up with this in order to get the job? If so, study study study. Buy the recommended books (there are tons of HN threads on this topic) and study! However, if you decide that you're not going to be the monkey boy for anyone, only go so far as displaying that you know the fundamentals of sound programming (e.g., binary search, linked lists, all basic data structures, etc). None of the crazy/wacky/never-used stuff.

A lot of modern interviewing isn't about finding talented programmers, it's about finding those who know how to follow their (albeit implicit) rules. You study, we give you the job, you don't, we won't.

Edit: change "the" to "your" in last sentence

- React JS/Native on the front - Python for general/glue code - Redis for cache - Some relation tier-2 storage (MySQL) - Rust for the computationally/machine intensive stuff - Airflow for scheduling

Thanks so much for this

> So it is possible to resist, but we are not all Jimmy Wales. The pressure to submit is overwhelming. On the level of the employee, there is the specter of unemployment. To willfully reject the logic of the market is to be rightfully terminated. But the pressure to conform to its demands exists at every level. The executive, though better paid, is essentially in the same position as the janitor. To resist is to go. Even the founder, the inventor, the owner, the celebrity is precariously positioned. While they might be spared termination at the hands of management, in the long run, they too end up in the same place. In 1938, Bill Paley, the chief executive of CBS, presciently stated that “too often the machine runs away with itself” (Friendly 168). To obstruct the machine is to be crushed by it. To refuse to go along is to be replaced. Everyone and everything is fungible.

> When it comes meaning in media, we are confronted with an unpalatable choice. Either stable meaning imposed through deliberative control by the few (as tyranny) or the autonomous, impersonal and invisible hand of the attention market, which, in the end, results in the “liquidation of meaning” (Baudrillard 84). Any point in between is an unstable equilibrium. And one can at least negotiate with a tyrant.

A slightly depressing ending to arrive at but an amazing read

> While privacy is an ever growing concern, it isn’t a strong enough feature for most people.

At the end of the day, this is the end-all-be-all argument to the Facebook and Google duopoly. People just don't give a goddamn (excuse the language) about their data - they simply do.not.care.

I believe my generation (Y), and possibly a few after us (X, etc), will be known as the generation(s) who didn't think privacy/data was that big of a deal - until one day it was.

We are the guinea pig.

Have also been reading about this [3-6]. With some believing the economy is slowing[1] (i.e., lower corp profits), and with the Fed believed to be pausing rate hikes[2] (i.e., no interest payment increases), I'm curious to see if this turns into a sizeable problem (i.e., quasi '08 bad)

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/10/goldman-sachs-warns-of-a-sha...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-global-forex/dollar-falte...

[3] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-30/corporate-debt-bub...

[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-19/corporate...

[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessecolombo/2018/08/29/the-u-s...

[6] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4225847-corporate-bond-mark...

Interesting story but someone I work with was actually severely rear-ended by an Uber driver heading to the airport, and she said the driver's insurance wouldn't cover the driver because the driver was acting as an Uber driver at the time of the accident. Don't know the insurance co., but I definitely remember being shocked by the fact that they wouldn't cover the driver for that reason

No. That would truly ruin HN for me personally (as seems to be the case with just about everyone else)

Ahhh. They aren't keeping the logs, they're merely forwarding the logs to another "non-associated entity" (giving them legal cover), and storing the logs there. Makes sense. They can advertise "we don't keep logs" (we meaning the corporate entity itself) so they have legal cover, and they make the three letter agencies happy (and thus are allowed to continue to operate)

> "For starters, Airbnb says it was profitable on an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) basis for the second year in a row in 2018."

Not sure if this is financial engineering or if they're actually profitable, but I'm so curious to see how Wall St responds to this "profitability", especially since growth plays (e.g., FAANG) just cratered in Q4'18.

Not to get too involved in the dichotomy but I'm interested to see if AirBnB plays like a Snapchat (i.e., tons of hype then gets killed in the public markets), or more like a Dropbox (i.e., takes a bit of a haircut but share price remains fairly stable).

About 10 feet of walkway ;)

I definitely agree that most VPN services are a cash grab, and can be nefarious to the unsuspecting user. Would definitely encourage the OP (and others) to do diligent research before signing up for one. And TOR would definitely fall under #6 in my answer, gonna go back and add it now

I'll take an actual stab at this, as this is something I've been working on for the better part of a year

Prerequisites (non-optional): 1. A good VPN 2. A non-Google browser (Mozilla Nightly/Privacy browser) 3. Extensions - AdBlock, UMatrix 4. Browser settings - purge all trackers, don't save history, etc. 5. Private, secure services (e.g., Protonmail for email, something similar to a Dropbox for filesharing, etc) 6. there are other things to mention here, but for brevity, I'll skip them (e.g., TOR)

Now that you have all the necessary tools, this is where things get a bit tricky.

See the fact of the matter is, you have to settle for some part of your life being public online - this is simply non-negotiable.

But this isn't inherently a bad thing right?

I'm sure there are people who know that your name is $NAME, and you work at $JOB, and you have $N siblings, etc - basically, parts of your life are already very public and that's OK. The same goes with online. It's totally OK for some parts of your digital life to be public. Example: you visit github.com regularly, you check your Gmail account, you watch youtube videos, etc. For these public aspects of your digital life, DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT use a VPN, or a privacy browser, or any privacy tools. You want to come off as being a regular person, doing regular people things (this is sort of the bait).

This way, you can build an online profile that says "Hey, John Doe's online behavior looks like $XYZ, so if we see something that looks like $ZYX, it probably has a low probability of being John Doe".

However, this strategy requires you to almost live a double online life (a sad necessity), where you're John Doe by day (i.e., watching youtube, checking gmail, looking at funny cat memes, not using privacy tools), but Doe John by night (i.e., using all of your privacy tools to do what you actually want to do online - look at conspiracy videos, read up on politics, etc).

It can be a bit cumbersome and tiring to switch back and forth in that way, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes much more natural. You learn not to mix your "John Doe" digital life, with your "Doe John" digital life. Because if you log into say LinkedIn via your VPN and they record your VPN IP, that can easily be cross-referenced across other platforms/sites for that same IP (it's not an exact match, but it can leave a trail of cookie crumbs).

So can you protect your real digital privacy when needed? Yes. Is it hard? To start, yes. Even when you get comfortable with switching back and forth, it can still be cumbersome. But until the world catches up and realizes that digital privacy is important (maybe in 50 years we'll be there), I wouldn't sit around waiting for things to change. Take action into your own hands.

Cheers

> Yes, there is herdlike behaviour. But why?

> People, and computers which learn what worked for people in the recent past, have gone from a rich market conversation about many things to one about just QE.

So are you saying that in the past N years since QE and 0 rates, the parameters that define which assets/resources to buy/trade have gone from wide-ranging (e.g., "We'd think about different countries, their bonds, their IR rates, swaptions, etc"), to singular (e.g., "...has become a conversation only containing rates.") ?

How does this tie back into the "herd-like behavior" comment? Are you saying that every algo trader is only focusing on rates because that (more so than anything else), is determining where to allocate capital?

Wow these look great! It just looks so...different from what I'm used to? Personally the wood is a bit old school, but with maybe some more modern/sleeker materials, I could definitely see myself putting up a large on of these in my place. Kudos!

Awesome, thanks so much

IPFS is indeed more similar. Tor is more of a compliment to a DFS such as Freenet (though Tor can very much works as a DFS itself)

I enjoyed this nugget of info. But a few questions (if you can answer them)

> They log connections with peers Of course (I'm assuming via just IPs)

> and track chunks of illegal files meaning what exactly? How could they track a 5KB chunk being sharded across say 10 different nodes? (further, flexible nets like freenet adjust the location of data over time based on the use of said data)

> they can see if it requests any of those illegal chunks My understanding is that yea you can see who's talking to who (via IPs), but I guess traffic analysis is the way to see the chunks (i.e., Peer A sent Peer B 100 bytes at 5:65 PM PST)? Even then, the payloads are encrypted, so I'm not seeing how you could infer that the content is "illegal"

Again. I enjoyed that little nugget of insight you shared. Hoping you can share more :)

Which part of web development? I know it sucks that I'm answering your question with a question, but learning the stack is crucial in any field on dev work. Example: web dev can be frontend (what you see a lot with React : UIs, UX), or backend (what you see with Python or Go : APIs, middleware, databases).

But to answer simply yes waits for rock to be thrown, web-dev is something you can get started with right this second. Just download react js (frontend). Get started with either Python/Go (maybe Python will be faster to learn), and then just start throwing things together.

> The problem with duckduckgo is that you are searching for something specific or something you saw months ago and don't remember well then google's index and tracking can be useful.

At this point I don't treat search engines as some sort of dichotomy (Google or DDG or Edge, etc). Rather, I try to use them as a nice blend : Google for when I'm throwing darts at the dartboard and have no idea what I'm looking for, DDG for when I know exactly what I'm looking for (to the point where I can type in the url), so on and so forth.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with using multiple search platforms. Obviously Google is great for when you don't really quite know what you're looking for, but if I want to read Deadspin, typing "deadspin.com" into Google will be the exact same experience on DDG.

Seeing as how most people visit the same websites over and over again, it doesn't make since to just have 1 single search engine (e.g., a Google).

You should probably start cranking out code, either via personal projects, or work-related projects.

> How can I start transitioning away from school so that I can start working full time as a developer as soon as possible?

These people either 1) get internships with a decent salary while in school, and just dropout or 2) build their own side project into something with cashflow, then dropout

> I'm okay with not being a ninja rockstar 10x programmer, I just want to be "average"

Frankly, you'll have to change this mindset if you want either #1 or #2 (which I mentioned above). The folks who either dropout due to amazing internships, or because their side gig has taken off are usually pretty good programmers. Not "balls-to-the-all amazing", but definitely better than average

My suggestion: Stay in school. Learn the fundamentals (e.g., C), but learn how to sling code around at the same time (e.g., React, Python, etc). You'll get your shot in due time.

Yea sometimes I believe the word "enterprise blockchain" makes about as much since as a "dry rain". Basically saying that the problems that blockchain solves are usually not problems that enterprises run into often, or can't solve using some readily available alternative (e.g., SQL). Blockchain clearly satisfies a need. It's just that the great majority of enterprises clearly don't have that need.

I myself have read this particular paper a few times, and plan to put a fresh printed copy in a cover protector. Something about keeping this thing for years strikes a chord with me

If you want a really fast webserver. Tokio's[1] zero-cost abstractions are amazing. Further, the examples provided make futures/async/low-level socket work quite understandable.

[1] https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio

> The biggest problem with such a tax is that all countries would have to implement it. When the US is accounting for about 15% of global carbon emissions

Hypothetically provinces/countries could be taxed relative to their emissions (albeit this would take some fantasy-like widely agreed upon criteria).

> "how do I make this into a program?".

This! It looks unbelievably promising, but still very much a work in progress, with no deploy-able examples. Can't wait to see what it turns into though

> The worst part is that Yahoo innovated a lot

^ This!

Yahoo innovated a ton! Everything from the software infrastructure level (a few submissions to the Apache Big Data suite), to the hardware infrastructure level (data centers) to acquisitions (had they just made a mobile app of Flickr they would've had Instagram years before Instagram).

But yes, their biggest problem to me, seemed to be by far and large lack of leadership (e.g., the CEO turnover)

Disclosure: previously worked at Yahoo

I actually emailed one of the contributors from crust and unfortunately the impression I got is that it's still very much a work in progress (but good if you want to actively contribute to the project I guess)