spunker540

What about music classes that teach Garageband or more professional recording software like Logic or Ableton? Or art classes that teach Photoshop? Should they even be allowed to use Windows or Mac OS X? How about Google Chrome or Safari? Google search? It seems rather arbitrary to feel so strongly about word processor choice but not anything else.

Yeah I can't tell what the harm is from the metadata and would appreciate someone actually explaining, rather than seeing some metadata and immediately jumping to the conclusion that there's definite harm and "tracking" going on.

Is direct instruction at all similar to college lecture where the professor basically follows a script for 45 minutes while the students furiously try to keep up?

I think a lot of foreign students come to the US wanting to make friends with Americans and more-or-less “assimilate” but then quickly realize their English language skills aren’t as strong as they thought and that the cultural differences are larger than they thought and truthfully, that Americans aren’t as welcoming and tolerant of those differences as they thought. So they fallback to a much more comfortable situation by hanging out with other fellow transplants in what is still a very foreign and challenging situation.

A much smaller scale example of this is when I studied for a semester in France. I thought my French was decent but it turned out to be barely comprehensible by native French-speakers which doesn’t make for easy or fun friendships.

I’ve always known that so-called “smartphones” are instruments of the devil. Anything containing such immoral temptations is a blight on the world and now we have a whole generation of horned satan-spawn as a result.

This is why I only check hacker news on a desktop pc.

“But had his managers asked, they would have learned that Speagle had a history of anxiety and depression“

Should employers really be asking about mental health history during the hiring process?

Yeah if they’re not interested in the only evidence of ability you’re willing to provide, then I think you’re not being considered in the first place.

Is there anything wrong with preferring people who have spent a lot of time practicing leetcode?

Most jobs prefer people with certain kinds of experience vs raw cognitive ability. Raw cognitive ability doesn’t mean much outside of entry level jobs.

I don’t believe the interview process would be any more efficient or effective for software engineering roles if they started preferring pure “cognitive ability” to leetcode effort.

It’s really hard to build consumer-facing products solo these days!

I recently “gave up” on building my own site and just pay for a Shopify site now (only an option if you’re in e-commerce) and I’ve been blown away by how easy and high quality it is, and $30/month is honestly way cheaper than the time it’d take me to create and maintain a similar site. There are plenty of alternatives to Shopify that are competitive too I understand.

Perhaps it is worth your while to explore outsourcing so that your own time is not the limiting factor!

And the first computer ads were showing a dystopian world where the rich can converse on expensive computers about how poor everyone else is who doesn’t have one and can have unlimited access to information while the poor live in isolation.

New things tend to be expensive—it’s pretty rare for any new technology or standard of living to become universally available from day one. This is true of tvs, radios, computers, fridges, air conditioners. I can’t see why helicopters are any more dystopian when they become more available.

The problem is when product managers use language that is understandable to most people but leaves a lot of loopholes and results in lawsuits.

Writing legal documents is a lot like writing code— you are trying to leave no room for ambiguity (or bugs), need to cover all the edge cases, and the code is inevitably at least as complex as the domain in which it operates.

The mainstream media decides what gets published before that content ever even reaches Facebook or Google. In terms of censorship power, the mainstream media is actually further upstream than social media and it can be argued it has more power to decide ultimately what gets published and what doesn’t, especially considering it purely uses human editorial judgment rather than algorithmic.

Couldn’t agree more with the analysis- I just wish some of the politicians running on a “break up big tech” platform could show they’ve thought about these issues half as much as the author has. They seem to mostly be appealing to voters emotionally without ever diving into the significant details like “what is a monopoly”, “are these companies monopolies?”, “what good will come from breaking them up?”

Back when recorded music was still nascent, live amateur music was much more commonplace.

Succeeding at work is often way more nebulous than succeeding in school. School is entirely based on tests and homework with transparent grading systems and syllabi.

Work is so much more relationship-based. It's not just about doing what your told, but also about collaborating and communicating and leveraging a network, mentoring peers, and generally getting things done for which there is no clear path.

I always felt "leadership" was a meaningless buzzword in school (especially since it had no impact on grades), but now that I'm working I can see it's a real valuable skill and essential to motivating others to do good work.

How about we wrap around the alphabet to introduce a new grade ‘Z’ that’s ostensibly as hard to get as A’s used to be?

I feel like there are clearly ways in which facial recognition can improve a lot of systems -- ticketing (think airports, sporting events, concerts etc); automated stores (like the amazon cashierless stores); payment (imagine not needing a wallet because the combination of your face, gait, and voice is enough to verify you); security (home/building/car entry, detecting suspicious individuals, known terrorists, past offenders, restraining orders)

There are also the many valid awful ways it which it can be used, particularly by the government. Why not just ask for laws preventing the bad uses? I don't get why it has to be all or nothing. If it's strictly government use that is concerning, or police use, then pass laws banning government collection of facial recognition models. There's no need to pass laws banning all forms of racial recognition simply because there are certain dangerous use cases.

It'd be like if back in the 20's or 30's someone said we need to ban cars because they could someday be driven by terrorists into large groups of people. It's a tragically valid concern, but we all agree it's not reason enough to ban cars altogether. An even more realistic example is folks back in the day complaining about how dangerous cars were, and rather than banning all cars deciding on speed limits and safety belts and airbags and anti-lock brakes and so on. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.

Annual revenue for newspapers is down something like 70% since 2006. I always hear that Facebook and Google are largely to blame but isn’t it more just the internet at large?

One thing to consider though is that all the big companies like Google and Facebook and many others have dedicated employees on their payroll whose primary responsibility is contributing to open source projects and the more critical a piece of open source software is, the more likely it is that there are contributors being paid by very large corporations to push the project in the right direction for them.

Is there any reason why you couldn’t create a group to accomplish the same goals?

One of the interesting aspects of the gig economy (speaking mostly about ride-sharing) is sure the pay may be bad and the hours may be bad for certain regions/areas/drivers. But Uber and Lyft don't impose any sort of requirements. You can work exactly when and how much you want to work. That in and of itself is a huge win for workers. Part of the problem is Uber and Lyft also don't limit how many drivers drive at any given time, which results in some inefficiencies (which are mostly just felt by the drivers). If there are too many drivers on the road, fares go down which is good for everyone but the drivers: Uber will keep taking it's cut; riders get cheap fares quickly.

I think the fact that people can drive 15 hrs a week if that fits their childcare schedule or drive 60 hrs of week to pay for a vacation is incredibly valuable.

Do you feel defense contractors should go out of business and that the work they do is immoral? Or is it just not for you?

I don’t know what country you’re from but would you prefer you had no military or weapons or defense? Like it or not there will always be other countries with weapons and they may not always be friendly towards you or your interests.

I wouldn’t want my work to have anything to do with killing people either, but I also think the defense industry (while unfortunate) is probably here to stay, for good reasons too.

I don’t mind paying the 3 or 4 dollars to rent a movie off google play to watch a movie when I don’t find it on Netflix. But I guess I don’t watch too many movies so it’s not too bad. Anyone remember how much it used to cost to rent a movie at blockbuster?

I think all it means is everyone with a smart speaker should have a sign on their front door informing all who enter that “conversations may be monitored”.

Realistically though don’t a lot of stores have cameras and mics lawfully recording for security purposes? Are they all legally obligated to post warnings?

No company in any domain rolls out products globally all at once. McDonalds introduces new menu items in test markets, tv shows start as pilots, software is deployed gradually and as it’s deployed it’s usually measured and rolled back if it’s not working as expected. AB tests are hardly any different. Smart companies experiment.

Why do users need to be explicitly informed of AB tests but not about other new gradual feature roll outs?

Frankly I think when you use a web site you are giving consent for your behavior on that site to be analyzed. I wouldn’t act indignant at traditional retailers attempting to learn from my shopping behavior in their stores so that they can improve their shopping experience. That’s just how businesses work.

This doesn’t tell you about any data sharing that happens serverside.

Something I read recently on some other HN comment was that if you work in AWS you are customer-obsessed for AWS customers, when you work in 3rd party seller tools you're customer-obsessed for 3rd party sellers, when you work in ads you're customer-obsessed with the advertisers as your customers etc.

It makes a lot of sense for any company to operate this way (most I've seen already do) and explains how they can be genuinely customer-obsessed while still seeming like at times they don't have the average consumer's best interest at heart.

I’m not at all confident these economics are true, but I imagine the argument is this: products like music, news, tv, Facebook, google search, YouTube (any ad-supported media) will now have to cost money. Their prices clearly have to go up without ads.

Next are all the businesses that will have a harder time attracting as many customers as they used to with ads- with fewer customers one can imagine they will have to raise prices as well to sustain their business.

Last, without advertising it will be much harder to start a new business. If you don’t have a highly visible store front it will be tough to gain traction no matter what sort of business you’re in. This leads to lower competition overall which also means higher prices.

I hear most people only attend book clubs for social reasons too — are book clubs also as bad as tobacco companies?

Going by the latest lawsuit against songwriters (suit filed by google, Spotify, amazon and pandora), it’s probably Apple.

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/03/11/spotify-amazon-g...