thetruthseeker1

How? Apples and Oranges comparison

If you disagree with this view that is not a reason to down vote. If you think the point I am making is irrelevant or insulting or a bunch of other reasons which are not addressing the topic at hand, then that is a reason to down vote. I will continue to argue that it's ok that a tax firm like Intuit can operate with profit being it's main motive

Enterprises like these are free to make whatever decisions they want and I don't think it's fair to evaluate them with morals that seem to imply they are evil. What I mean is : this enterprise is not a monopoly, and there is competition, and it is free to fail ( unlike some banks lets say). If some other tax website provides better value, people are free to move to that.

That is great. However did you guys have a debate about US poverty after every Apollo mission? What about after you buy every F35? The cost of this Indian mission is about the cost of 1 F35. BTW, many decades back Indians also deliberated, and only then established ISRO.

Also, frankly, that's a question for Indians to debate and not a big fan of NY times casually questioning the judgement of that spending without giving it an elaborate treatment. I have seen this multiple times. India launched Mars craft, but there is poverty. India launches 100+ satellites in one mission, but there is poverty. Its irrelevant at that instant and seems only to diminish India's aspirations.

May be some of this journalists can take a look at Indian Budget, study it deeply, and find where the government can spend more wisely. I bet they will find more wasteful spending than the investment in ISRO and that may be helpful for the public to know.

You don't have the whole picture from what you have seen. Have you been to SF? Have you been to LA. Have you seen problems caused by drugs in US? Every country has problems

When US was spending billions on Minuteman and Apollo missions, there were many problems in America, including poverty. Not sure? ask the African Americans in the south from that time. However, very little energy was spent on questioning whether spending in space was right thing to do.

If developing countries spend a miniscule of their budget ( ISRO budget less than 2%), there is cynicism. I think what India is doing is great and is great for improving India's technical abilities and India doesn't need to answer what it chooses to do with its money.

I think Sikhs are great, they are hard-working people. But, how are they transforming the trucking industry though? It seems to me that the ethnicity of labor force in this industry has changed like how it has happened in multiple other industries at least in the USA. Earlier in the west coast, the east Asians did construction, now it's Mexicans. It seems like that is what happened in trucking- Sikhs form the labor force now for many reasons, and that is not a new trend.

The real transformation is coming soon I think and that will be with self driving trucks.

I think this guy wrote a great article. However I don’t know if I agree with his conclusion of him not being a good web developer.

I would bet that most great developers have googled often enough. In their defense googling is a more efficient tool than pouring through manpages all the time that have poor search indexes.

Also, in this developer’s blog, there is no reference to the fact that his code is buggy or less maintainable, or plethora of other reasons that categorically make him a bad developer.

I think it’s ok, to use help from google or stack overflow to do a good job at your task and that doesn’t make you a bad programmer.

While Amazon’s work culture doesn’t surprise me(similar experiences from multiple sources), while I feel sympathetic to the author’s struggles, I do feel the author went a bit too far with his invectives against his previous manager. The reason I say that is, we don’t know the manager’s side of the story and may be it wasn’t exactly like how this guy characterizes it.

While people working on visas don’t have as much freedom as people who don’t need sponsorship, I don’t think this problem is present in every company that has lot of immigrants. Part of the problem is Amazon’s culture and I think this problem is trickled top down.

It seems like people at the top management of amazon work hard and there is probably better than linear returns for their extra efforts. But it seems like they push that even on the lower rungs where it seems like it is not justified.

I think subtle racism is a big problem. It can be felt without being verbally communicated to you, the actions from the perpetrators are frustrating and you feel helpless. The perpetrators would not be corrected because they said nothing wrong. Worst of all is that you don’t get a fair shake, and you might be dismissed at the slightest hint of incoherence and sometimes you feel like the perpetrators are waiting for you to fail.

I don’t think the requirement that the CEO appear in a public deposition is part regulatory compliance( usually good faith). If Facebook is not in regulatory compliance, I am sure they will be fined millions.

May be. However lawmakers don’t roast oil execs. It seems to me like there is a lot of kabuki theater here and if law makers want to do something to improve social media, there are better ways to get Zuckerberg to co-operate than this method

I think the additional value the newer iphone provides i.e face id and better screens doesn’t warrant the increased price tag. Ideally the price should also be falling like it did for PCs in the 90s.

doesn’t work on http

The Algorithm or the concepts behind Asymetric key encryption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography

This makes so much of online trust and verification possible.

While this is sad, if the scientific journals end up paying the authors, it won’t be 35$ anymore, it will be more(which I am happy to pay). The publishers I am sure won’t be taking a pay cut though!

Isn’t this system equivalent to vote your disapprovals only, the person with the least disapprovals wins?

My view is also that it would be better policy if the california government taxed all homes and generated a certain amount of revenue which they could use to generate certain percentage GW of solar power( A goal they should set for themselves). That way it is fair to all, the problem is also solved at scale which is important as opposed to mandating new home owners only which I am not sure is that efficient

I think the problem is the pricing model. If I watch one Netflix movie a month, it’s not really worth 11$ to me. These subscriptions should have tiers starting from few cents - but it may be less a Netflix problem and more a problem of labels and production companies who may not be willing to see it that way and force higher Subscriptions implicitly.

Fines are usually multiple times more than the value they cheated which seems to be the case here( ~100M$ ) - so it is fair in some sense. Just because they are still profitable doesn’t mean the fine was unfair. There might be other divisions were people worked honestly, let’s not paint everybody with a broad brush or sound despondent.

When I learnt programming, i was confused by x=x+1;

After I understood what it really meant, I wondered why they didn’t use some other symbol to capture this semantic. Say something like x <- x+1 ; Which implies assignment rather than equality - That way this would be unambiguous and I feel is more clear. I now guess the choice of using ‘=‘ was probably an attempt at making a (compromised) choice given the limited symbols that were available back when High level languages were first written?

I like Tessa. I hope they succeed as a company. That said, their claim that the driver had his hands of the steering wheel for 6 seconds implying that they are absolved of any wrong doing seems hard to buy. They may eventually be absolved of wrong doing legally, however I think that statement is bad from PR point of view in addition to casting a bad light on the autopilot tech (It got confused within 6 seconds of him taking his hands off)!

I am sure that I can find flaws in some of the best identity systems in the world - but I am not sure if just finding faults make a good discussion hence I am not going to do that (in addition to not want being labeled a cynic).

Also when you say the costs are not proportional to the benefits... I don’t know if it needs to be proportional, also is there a well researchered study that talks negatively about the overall value provided - I find that hard to believe ?

Usually legislature is free to spend money on programs as long as it is not against the law or constitution and judiciary can’t interfere on such matters. I don’t know what is in the scope of S.C w.r.t Aadhar - I can see some kind of violation of civil liberties within its scope... but I can’t see how cost benefit analysis is within SC’s scope. So I may not comment on it until it plays out.

What is your solution ? It kind of seems like Aadhar should be better managed... rather than reinvent another identity system, sure I am optimistic that Aadhar will improve (Its a very new system compared to SSN or other identity systems)

Regarding ballooning costs, so many successful programs have had costs that exceeded the plan, so far with Aadhar there has been no evidence that the ballooning costs have been debilitating and on the contrary Aadhar seems to be helping.

I disagree with the assessment. It seems like any form in which the government tries to identify you is being compared to the scary Orwellian dystopia. There is no cost benefit analysis. Sure it could be misused, however it can also be used in a super beneficial way. India is a country where some Indians have never obatained birth certificates, there was no equivalent SSN system, often resources are poorly distributed because there are scams where a person claims to be somebody else or there is no clear identification system, all of this significantly affect the GDP and the rate at which people’s std of life is improved. I think if it gets misused , then the solution to that is regulation and better management, not no collection.

Seems like a classic case of standardizing interpreting email moniker. Need an RFC for this

Your comparison is like comparing apples and oranges. You can’t do child labor because there are laws in the US to prevent that. If you lobby to pass a law that prevents AI for defense purposes then that would be similar. Here the US govt is a client, if not google they will go to some-other company for that tech as long as there is no law that prevents that.

Also, if they don’t go to google, sure they may not see as much of a rapid growth in AI tech, but if you think they will never be able to get anywhere significant, you sir are underestimating others IMO

I also think that disengaging is the wrong approach. Google once disengaged with China because they didn’t agree with China on some freedom of expression laws and all the management now think that it was a bad decision. In similar vein, if you are not part of it, somebody else will shape the outcome of this.. It should be rather you if you really care and could play a role in minimizing the negative impact of such tech

Can somebody elaborate why this link from 2016 is gaining steam here? Is it because Cambridge Analytica misused FB data? May be I am missing something, do we know if facebook was wittingly complicit?

Every company has its ups and downs. Some downs or negative things warrant their demise. I don’t think what FB did here is worth calling burn the witch on them or actively trying to kill them, and I do hope FB are able to learn from this and change for the better.

Now, that said, I do think there is an underlying point others ops have alluded to: The disdain for Trump and everything that could have helped him win ( legitimately or illegitimately ) which I am not sure is the best way to react. I think that approach is not a very rational one. What needs to be done there w.r.t Trump is probably worth a separate discussion, but I disagree with knee jerk reaction here from the whatsapp founder.