staunch

It may help to consider that the most impressive human being ever is extremely shallow and dumb compared to what is possible.

Future humans will have genetic engineering and computer augmentation, at the very least. They will (correctly) view all previous generations of human as comparatively primitive. That won't invalidate what they did.

My thinking is that:

1. Some humans make large contributions to humanity's progress.

2. Almost everyone makes some contribution.

3. A few unlucky people contribute nothing at all.

4. We should count ourselves lucky if we can contribute something.

5. There's no reason to spend a lot of comparing contributions, except insofar as it helps people contribute more in a healthy and productive way.

6. We should all contribute as much we can figure out how to, as one part of living a full and happy life.

If their game time is highly restricted then:

1. Losing is hugely disappointing because there's no time to win the next one

2. They can't get very good, so gaming is more frustrating

3. They can't build coping skills because of how little they've won/lost

It's fun to see the data and it is a cool project.

But running speedtest every 15 minutes sounds like a bad idea. It's going to fully saturate the connection for ~1 minute and is likely to interfere with whatever the connection is being used for. Things like gaming/streaming/video chat are likely going to suffer.

Running the status check only during the night would probably be a better idea, and would probably generate data that was still useful.

  */15 2-6 * * * ~/path/to/starlinkstatus_client.sh -k 'YOURAPIKEY' -s -d >/dev/null 2>&1

I know it's not a new idea but it seems like the time has probably come for there to be a YC Space, YC SaaS, YC Edu, etc.

YC should seriously consider going one level of abstraction up. Instead of YC being an investment firm that creates startups, it should be an investment firm that creates investment firms.

A space-focused YC could probably be a lot better than a generic YC. It would undoubtedly source and fund more than 5 space startups in a 375 company batch, for example.

Yes, it would. Most people should put their internal cloud infrastructure behind a VPN, if at all possible. It's easy to do and dramatically reduces the surface area for an attacker.

It's not a silver bullet but in many cases it will be the difference between getting hacked and not getting hacked.

It is totally possible to design applications that can be safely exposed to the public internet but it requires some real effort.

> What goes wrong?

Usually what goes wrong is parsing or processing the files. It's hard to get programmers to safely validate a 20 byte email address string. It takes a lot more care to safely parse a 4,000,000 byte image file in a complex format.

The real lesson is not to work with blood sucking lawyers. They'll look for any excuse to steal from anyone they can, and they'll use the legal system to do it.

The 90 day stock options exercise window should be made illegal. It should be 10 years or indefinite. Employees, like the author here, earned their stock options. It's wrong that they get stolen back just because its an "industry norm" established by greedy assholes in the 1980s.

The author of this post played an important role in GitLab's early development. They deserve to have their $1 million payday now that it is public, regardless of how they felt in the months after being fired.

They were robbed by GitLab's unethical stock options terms.

Employees also get screwed when they, under time pressure, exercise stock options which then go on to be worthless. And when they simply can't afford to exercise options. It's a huge flaw in the current startup system.

It would be great if YC used its muscle to actually fix this problem. Startup employees are getting screwed by this every day, in many cases by YC companies.

By this logic one should not get excited after buying a house, a car, or even a birthday cake since someone else did the work. Obviously, that's crazy thinking.

But besides that, Bezos did a lot more than just buy a rocket from a supplier. He invested billions of dollars and years of work into Blue Origin. By any reasonable definition, he deserves to celebrate its successes.

Humanity as a whole succeeds when things like this are accomplished. The world has many problems, but advancing our ability to travel into space is not one of them.

Only a sad kind of cynic sees these events as an opportunity to spew hate. They reveal much more about themselves than anyone else.

Besides money, entrepreneurs invest a lot of time and energy.

Buying on one market and selling on another is not much more than gambling/speculation/trading.

Seems like a real stretch to call it entrepreneurship.

They're taking on financial risk but I wouldn't call it entrepreneurial risk. They can list any number of products at time, risking nothing but money. There's nothing innovative or novel being added to the world.

The closest thing to entrepreneurial risk is the "creating demand" claim but that seems unlikely to be very true in most cases. In most cases, they're likely capturing demand on Amazon itself by being among the first to list a product.

It seems pretty clear that they're arbitraging and Amazon is taking advantage of its position to out-arbitrage them. In many cases, it seems reasonable to assume Amazon would've tried selling the product themselves regardless.

These arbitragers probably just have to accept that the reward for finding new products to arbitrage is very time-limited, because if Amazon doesn't start competing with them, someone else will.

This is a great example of a ruthlessness, but highly functional, capitalist market. It seems to work out great for consumers, all things considered.

So, 44% of executives are highly motivated by the prestige of their position and the ability to directly exercise power over people.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

> No, it could not. Cryptography can make it as difficult as necessary.

This is just a failure of imagination. The API could be as restrictive as necessary to ensure privacy.

For example, maybe an app is only authorized to upload specific fields of data and a maximum rate.

How does an app only allowed to upload 10 int32 metrics per day going to secretly upload even a single photo?

> Not even going to touch how unacceptable it would be for Apple to require that it be able to inspect all internet traffic from a person's phone.

There are lots of options for how to implement things so that Apple isn't getting copies of private photos or chat messages. Apple is certainly more trustworthy and accountable than a random app developer from a random foreign country.

Personally, I want a smartphone/app ecosystem that is completely free of any centralization. I'm just talking about how Apple could improve their proprietary/centralized system, which actually does make some of these kinds of things simpler.

The entire request can be logged, displayed to advanced users (so they can report it), inspected by Apple's review teams and automated systems. Any app violating the rules, by uploading user data as GET query parameters (for example) could be detected and banned fairly easily.

My goal would be to keep my data on my device and in my control. It's crazy that giving an app access to your Photos or Health data means it can just start randomly uploading to anywhere on the internet without asking you.

People in the future will be amazed we lived like this...

A good system would probably have tiered permissions, something like:

1. No internet apps: store data locally on the device only, no upload or download.

2. Partial internet apps: store data locally, and only download data through an Apple proxy service that hides the user's IP address and any identifying info.

3. Full internet apps: store in the cloud, uploaded/downloaded through an Apple proxy that logs/filters everything. Or even stored in Apple's cloud.

4. Unrestricted internet apps: VPNs and web browsers, and whatever else actually needs arbitrary access to the internet.

There's no reason my bluetooth scale app needs #4 (which it has today) when I would much prefer it have #1.

The problem is that Apple has absolutely no way to enforce the deletion. An app can say "your account is deleted" but not actually delete any data off their servers.

What would really give users the control they deserve is the ability to restrict what data can be sent off the device by an app in the first place.

Apple should make it possible to deny internet access to an app entirely, and they should provide an API that allows apps to upload very specific kinds of data that a user has approved of, but nothing else. Of course, some apps need to be able to request unrestricted internet access.

Permitting apps to collect private data and have unrestricted internet access, by default, was always a terrible decision in terms of user privacy. Apple owes it to their users to fix the problem they created.

And this is why Zuckerberg will never be one of the great titans of Silicon Valley.

He's really nothing but a boring and defensive cloner/acquirer at heart. The world would be no worse off, and probably better off, had he never created Facebook. Unlike Apple, Amazon, Google, Intel, and many of the other SV companies that truly moved the world forward.

Oculus is the only thing he's bought that is actually doing something important in technology, and he seems to have done a pretty mediocre job running it so far.

I would have giggled slightly more if you had "MOST POPULAR" instead of "OUR CHOICE" on the "BUY THE SITE" option.

Working at Tesla, or another car company working on EVs, is one of the most direct ways to immediately have a big positive impact.

But working for "the next Tesla" would be the most potential positive impact, given that Tesla has already achieved its goal of forcing the car industry towards EVs.

You could make a list of the most harmful industries and work at a company trying to force them into change, like Tesla is doing with the auto industry.

Is there a good breakdown of any changes/improvements to PWAs on iOS 15, like can a PWA app do background audio finally, etc?

1. Cook/prepare 90% of the food you eat, meal prep for 5 days on Sunday. Mostly vegetables, some meat/protein, few carbs. Eat more or less the amount of calories you can burn in a day. Drink (almost) nothing but water. Caffeine only in the morning.

2. Don't consume any junk food (soda, beer, pizza, pasta, donuts, bagels, cookies, sweets, fast food, processed foods, etc), except once a month for a cheat day.

3. Only eat 2 meals per day, lunch and dinner, spaced out by 4-5 hours, with zero calories before lunch or after dinner.

4. Exercise moderately (walk/jog, bike, play sports, etc) 4-5 days per week, use audiobooks and podcasts to make it enjoyable. Ramp up to more strenuous sessions very slowly, over time.

5. Sleep consistently at the same hours every day of the week, for ~8.5 hours.

6. Get a bluetooth scale and monitor yourself on your phone.

7. Do bodyweight exercises like push ups, lunges, etc as much as you feel like you can throughout the week.

> ...i don't want to kill somebody regardless of their intentions...

This is where each person's specific ethics are really important. I would really hate to ever kill anyone. Full stop. But I would definitely prefer to kill a criminal that was attempting to murder me or someone else.

If you would rather be murdered by a criminal rather than kill them, that is a respectable position to hold. Although I do tend to doubt the conviction of most people who claim this position.

> Furthermore, i find US fascination with their theoretical ability to fight their government with small arms adorable and misguided.

I find the historical and military ignorance of people who imply this even more adorable. Especially given the timing of the recent example, where the Taliban defeated a massive military force that was equipped with modern U.S. weaponry including tanks, helicopters, and armored vehicles.

Not to mention the countless other examples of uprisings using small arms successfully against superior military forces. Add in the fact that the U.S. citizenry is made up of tens of millions of military veterans and is more well armed than any civilian population in the history of the planet. It would not take long for a revolutionary force to take control of many military bases and armories within the U.S.

The idea that 50 or 100 million armed U.S. citizens couldn't defeat a few hundred thousand armed U.S. soldiers (most of whom would defect) is adorable in its child-like ignorance.

A kind of similar funny example is in Xenophon's Anabasis, where he mentions "millet-eating Thracians", which always cracks me up. Lots of people ate millet, including Greeks, but this group got referred to as millet-eaters. Seems hilarious to me.

"When all of them had been prevailed upon, they continued the march with Seuthes, and, keeping the Pontus upon the right through the country of the millet-eating Thracians, as they are called, arrived at Salmydessus."

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...

Wow. Norm Macdonald is my favorite comedian of all time and stand up comedy is one of my favorite things about humanity. I was just watching some clips of his on the "I'm not Norm" YouTube channel while eating lunch right before I read this. I had no idea he had cancer, although in retrospect I can see the signs...

Damn, what a massive shock. He was an absolute legend and will never be forgotten. RIP.

His appearance on Letterman's last show is one of the greatest stand up sets of all time and now I'll consider it his farewell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFjEvl43zYY

A more recent appearance where he was great, just talking, was on David Spade's show. His quick comeback on the Paul Newman line is a great example of why he was so amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbanVqLk1lQ

> The open-office concept was designed by executives who have their own private offices.

Or they technically also use open office desks but spend little of their time at them, and the majority of their time commandeering conference rooms, using executive-only meeting rooms, staying at expensive hotels, resorts for "offsites", working from home, and the like.

The few days they spend per year doing non-focused work in an open office environment is probably enjoyable enough, and helps them rationalize torturing everyone else.

One thing I've found trying to find HEPA filters is that many reviews complain of the filters themselves having some kind of stinky off-gassing. I don't know what the reason for this is, or if it's a problem, but it is worrying.

Reviews on most air purifiers seem to have examples of exploding fans and melting components almost burning houses down.

It really seems like there's room in the air purification market for a company that is really trustworthy, effective, and affordable. Apple could do it, for example.

Anyone who has has worked on such massive projects as Bezos is going to have some failures along the way. It doesn't matter how good a person they are, there will be some accidental collateral damage along the way, at the very least.

The average person has had much less negative impact in their life than Bezos, but they have also had almost infinitely less positive impact as well.

In other words, it doesn't really make sense to zoom in on the failures Bezos has had without putting them into the context of his successes.

And I've never really seen a clear-headed examination of Bezos' positive and negative impact. My guess is that he's doing extremely good overall, even if his negative impact is a bit higher than would be ideal.

This is similar to how many people claim that technology, or even social media, is an evil force in the world while completely ignoring the massive good it has done for people (grandparents living richer and more connected lives with their grandchildren, communities of people supporting each other, political organization, etc).

A good friend of Bezos' (like his brother maybe) needs to pull him aside and tell him how pathetic and sad this tactic is making him look. He's ruining his reputation among people he needs to recruit, like engineers, who might not otherwise fall for the false Bezos-is-mustache-twirling-capitalist narrative.

Bezos actually seems to be a fairly good person with good motivations in general. But he's also extremely competitive and willing to hit below the belt like Bill Gates was famous for doing.

Elon Musk is doing the Steve Jobs thing, where he out-competes his rivals by creating better products. Bezos should switch over to this approach ASAP, for the good of himself and everyone else.