throw20102010

I think we're looking at Mr. Iacocca with some rose-tinted glasses. He sought government bailouts, fought against requiring seatbelts in cars (because a few dollars worth of nylon would "ruin" his margins), and also fought against environmental standards, particularly requiring catalytic converters (to be fair, catalytic converters probably did ruin his margins).

He is definitely an icon, but do not forget that he was a cutthroat businessman that would do anything to make sure his businessed thrived.

https://nader.org/1979/10/25/iacoccas-gw-commencement-speech...

It’s written in the modern clickbait style- they tell you that you’ll never believe something, then they string you along as long as they can. It’s frustrating to read and usually ends up being mundane info. Usually by the second paragraph you can spot this type of writing and need to be ready for disappointment.

I’m not sure that the whole command/service module separation issue was actually classified, or if it is just a less commonly known part of the story.

This varies on the region. 70cm here in the midwest and mountains is nearly empty, and 2m isn’t completely full. If you combined both you would have an exciting band. The downside is that there won’t be a whole lot of space to expand in the future. I’m sure that on the east coast it’s a different story.

But gaining an exciting and active band is probably not worth losing 2m, and I’m sure that once 2m is gone in Europe it will be on the chopping block in the USA.

Not really. The space over Europe isn’t governed by Europe, they’ll just have to tolerate the transmissions. But lots of ham satellites are repeaters, so they’ll probably get a lot less activity over Europe, and nearby hams will probably get fewer European contacts.

The loss of this band would really hurt ham radio. The cheap Baofeng VHF radios that use this band are probably second only to the RTL-SDR for enticing people into the radio hobby.

It would be pretty easy to move all the current VHF activity up to UHF if you have the equipment, but a lot of tech class (or the European equivalent) hams that only have a cheap handheld are going to need to buy a new radio. That’s going to be a bummer.

You might be right about Zuck being idealistic now, but we have a (much younger) Zuck on record calling his users idiots for trusting him with all their information. He may have matured, but people are justified in being wary. He’s shown some black hat tendencies in the past. I’m a lot more comfortable trusting my money with a bank rather than a company that makes its money selling my information. At least I understand the bank’s incentives.

This is basically the same argument that southern right-wingers use to defend keeping their confederate statues, but oddly enough many internet commenters seem to have no problems with ripping down those pieces of art since they represented something they didn't like.

I'm not accusing you (mc32) of being hypocritical since I haven't seen you make any comments saying that we should rip out old confederate statues because they represent slavery.

However, (let me reiterate that this isn't an attack on you, mc32), I think we as a collective internet need to rethink how we feel about removing artwork if it represents something bad. It is not okay for us to be okay with ripping out some untasteful art but not others, simply because some bad art is "left" and other bad art is "right."

Before you go jumping on me about how slavery is different than communism, remember that communism is responsible for nearly a hundred million deaths, which puts it near the level of slavery in terms of harm it has done to humanity (even if they aren't directly comparable).

I looked through all the comments but still haven't seen an answer to an obvious limitation(that is posed near the end of the article): Where are they getting their library of heartbeats from? I'm sure the CIA is collecting, but being able to positively ID someone with their heartbeat is useless unless you already have a verified record of their heartbeat.

Imagine the case of finding an elusive person (such as Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden), somebody has to go collect a verified sample BEFORE an assassination takes place. But if you are in a position to collect a sample of someone's heartbeat and you KNOW that it's the right person through some other verifiable means (you need to know if you actually got OBL instead of a body double), then what does this really get you? You already had some trustworthy source, and you can probably use this previous source to verify that you assassinated the right person.

So this heartbeat ID tech may be more accurate and robust compared to facial recognition, but it's less useful in actuality. We already have verified pictures of most adults in the world via passports and driver's licenses and such, which makes facial recognition a ton more useful in real life.

The problem that this heartbeat tech "solves," the ability to ID someone with great accuracy, is hamstrung by the fact that the elusive people we have the greatest need for an ID like this won't have their data available. For non-elusive people we can already find them by getting their picture and address out of a database.

But you can bet the CIA realizes this limitation and will work diligently over the next few years to get heartprints of Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and other notorious figures at every public appearance so that they can slowly build a library that will be useful down the road.

Hams are continuously fighting to keep their spectrum (and slowly losing it to commercial interests). It is a commonly held belief that unlicensed hackers or hams breaking the law hurts the community’s arguments for keeping their spectrum.

So it’s not viewed in the ham community as tattling, but rather self policing. Because if they don’t do it themselves then papa FCC is just going to take away everyone’s toys. Responsible and lawful use of radios is the name of the game.

Source: I’m a general class licensed ham.

I know lots of people on HN aren’t a fan of patents- either because of patent trolls or because they believe that patents harm FOSS. So knowing that, I expect a few people to disagree with what I say.

This is exactly what patents are supposed to protect you from. If you have a good idea, then file a patent and protect yourself. If it’s worth $500k per year then it’s worth having a patent lawyer help you do it right. Get the core stuff patented, not just the fluff. This way Apple can’t just pull your livelihood from you.

If you tried to patent your idea and it wasn’t patentable, then it’s probably not really your idea, and you can’t feel bad when Apple steals something that isn’t yours.

But you have to do this sooner rather than later. If you wait until your app has become a feature in iOS then it’s too late.

Want proof that patents are necessary? Just look at how many patents that Apple, Samsung, SpaceX, etc. have.

Spotify's recommendation system is dealing mostly with artists that have recording contracts and professional production- their problem shouldn't be compared to YouTube's which has to deal with a mix of professional, semi-pro, and amateur created content. Also there's more of a "freshness" aspect to a lot of YT videos that isn't quite the same as what Spotify has to deal with (pop songs are usually good for a few months, but many vlogs can be stale after a week). Not only that, but many channels have a mix of content, some that goes stale quickly and some that is still relevant after many months- how does a recommendation engine figure that out?

It's better to compare Spotify's recommendations to Netflix's recommendations, which also deals with mostly professional content. Those two systems have comparable performance in my opinion.

There are two distinct types of lying mentioned in the article, and each should be handled differently:

1. The non-issue "lie" that was the subject of the original question. Sometimes I get a little annoyed at people that take a form completely literally and then raise a stink about it. Every form like this has an implied "to the best of my knowledge" inserted in it. You cannot know for 100% certainty that every purchase was completely necessary. Did every piece of paper that was printed from that ream you ordered get used in a necessary function, or did maybe one or two sheets get used for someone to print their baseball tickets out at the office? Could some of those papers have been stored digitally instead of printed? Of course that ream of paper wasn't used for 100% necessary business purposes. But by signing the form you are saying, "it doesn't look like there are any employees in my branch that are stealing tons of office supplies, and that our waste seems reasonable." What you are saying is that "I'm not personally aware of any fraud going on with the supply order, and I've done some due diligence to check." What you are NOT saying is "I personally tracked every piece of paper and staple in the office to make sure nobody was cheating." That is not the expectation with these certifications, and any federal employee fired for that level of expectation can go to arbitration and would certainly win. Luckily federal employees have probably the strongest employment protections of anybody in the USA.

2. The second type of lie, mentioned in the anecdote about the Army officers, is a problem but easily fixed in a way that you don't sacrifice your integrity. This is the case in which adding the implied "to the best of my knowledge" doesn't fix the issue. To fix this, you must line out the "297 days" portion and write in (a different colored ink) the correct number of days that you trained. Then you sign in ink, and return a scanned copy to wherever it needs to go. You probably cannot change the form in Adobe Reader because most government forms are protected against changes, so you must alter the form with pen. If the people that you returned the form to raise a stink (usually they want a digital signature), you simply explain that you cannot comply because to do so would be perjury. If they still won't accept your corrected version of the form you can stall, but let your boss/commander know that you cannot sign the form as-is because to do so would be a violation of federal law- and you can't be fired for not breaking the law. Most of the time, it falls out on your side. If not, you would have your defense counsel salivating to take this one past arbitration to make some real money.

Pretty much every federal employee that cares about their integrity has already discovered the answers to these situations, and I suspect that this question is more of a straw man so that the author can talk about the pervasive culture of dishonesty that exists in the workplace. He's right in that a culture of dishonesty does exist, but he's missing the mark on where it's a problem. It's not in the resource management office that signs off on the paper/staples/toner orders or the Army officer that signs a training certification form that has the wrong number of days on it (as long as he feels his troops are mission ready). The culture of dishonesty is where a person awards a contract with a particular company so that they can get a cushy job in the private sector, or with people that accept a free trip to Disneyland to overlook an issue. Those are the dishonest incidents that matter, and they do not arise from some imagined "slippery slope" after certifying an office supply order.

You should use Julia over Python because of the JIT compilation makes it faster, as long as you aren’t constantly writing code and running it a single time. Also as long as you are able to keep your REPL open for days at a time. It takes several minutes to load some popular plotting packages in Julia (because of the JIT), so it will take you some time to adjust your workflow to leaving your REPL open all the time.

But the Juno IDE is just as good as Jupyter notebooks or RStudio, and there are probably high quality libraries for whatever you’re doing, unless you work in one of those niche areas.

I think you’re a little confused. Yes, you can fly IFR in class E airspace. The majority of piston airplanes flying IFR do so in class E (the portion below 18,000 ft). Class E is not uncontrolled.

I’m not sure about what you mean with “who flies in class A airspace?” Most airlines and bizjets cruise in class A because their fuel burn is ridiculous at lower altitudes.

The reason that class A becomes to class E above 60,000 ft is because hardly any planes can fly that high. This plane almost certainly won’t go that high, regardless of what the patent application says.

Edit for clarity on why helix’s comment doesn’t make a ton of sense- airspaces go like this:

FL600 (approx 60k ft) and up: Class E

18k ft to FL600: Class A, only IFR flight is allowed, no VFR (even if the weather is good).

below 18k ft to 700 or 1,200 ft above ground: Class E, except around airports, where it can be Class B (big airport), Class C (medium airport), Class D (small airport with control tower), or still Class E (small airport without control tower).

below 700 or 1,200 ft above the ground: Class G, except around airports. Class G is uncontrolled, but you still have to follow the law- no buzzing residential areas and such. You cannot file an IFR flight plan in Class G space, mainly because ATC can’t reliably see you and prevent collisions with other planes.

Class E is controlled airspace but you can fly VFR without filling a flight plan; you are required to fly at altitudes that are xxx,500 ft so you don’t hit planes flying IFR at the xxx,000 altitudes.

You would have to file an IFR flight plan to get to 65k ft because you would transit Class A airspace during your climb and descent.

Not doing something about national security because the US might look hypocritical is not a concern to those making the decision. Countries spy on each other while complaining about the other spies. The US tried to stop North Korea from getting nukes while holding the world’s largest stockpile of nukes. The US has put multiple countries on blast for human rights violations while also being allies with Saudi Arabia.

The fact that Google and affiliates are being used in a similar manner that we’re accusing Huawei probably makes the people in charge laugh even harder.

The real question should be that if Chinese government policy creates a security risk for the US, why are they only going after Huawei? Why not a blanket ban on all sophisticated Chinese electronics? Lenovo has been caught before putting spyware on computers, but somehow the US government still buys Lenovo laptops...

Every American company is at the beck and call of the US government at all times, with their existence in peril if they disobey. The US government has been regulating trade like this since before we were born, and most of the time we don't even notice. This is not the first time that Silicon Valley had to obey US government regulations. Notice that there are hardly any Iranian or North Korean tech companies doing business around the world- any US company that transfers technology to a hostile country gets shut down and people go to jail, and it's not even controversial.

The only thing that's unique with this case is that it's rare for the US government to be so openly hostile toward a major trade partner.

While we don't have any real evidence (from the sources that I read) that Huawei stole 5G tech, it's plausible. They've stolen tech in other areas and then iterated the design so fast that they beat the competition to market.

We know for (nearly) certain that Huawei stole folding screen tech from Samsung (via a supplier), and now that Samsung has reneged on it's Galaxy Fold launch the Huawei folding phone will be first to market.

Now that they have a reputation for stealing it is hard to view their other advancements as purely the result of honest work.

Unemployment is very low right now. However, the most accurate statement is always, "shortage of people that have the qualifications we want that are willing to work for the payment we're offering."

Just because it's publicly available doesn't mean the US government won't try to embargo it. The government does silly things all the time.

The book "No Easy Day" became a New York Times best seller as soon as it was published (it's written by the SEAL that allegedly shot Osama bin Laden). The Department of Defense threatened to revoke the security clearances of military members that read the book because it contained classified details. It took a few weeks before they walked back their threats, because somehow nobody at the top realized how stupid it was to revoke security clearances over reading a bestselling public book.

Lots of lower middle class families have been deep in debt at some point. They know how tough it can be trying to pay off debt, especially with an entry level job right out of college. Since they know how tough that is, they want to sacrifice for their children to give them the best possible chance at living a good life. That's why some people struggle to put their kids through college even though there's "free money" available. It's not hard to understand, because "free" loans aren't free, even if the college graduate does have a decent chance at being able to pay them off over the next decade.

I'm not saying that parents that let their kids take the loans are bad parents, but it shouldn't be hard to see why some parents don't want their kid to be saddled with debt upon graduation.

I think GP has a point that needs to be addressed if we ever want to do a debt forgiveness on a large scale without alienating a bunch of hard working people. It's not about keeping people from getting goodies, it's about rewarding responsible behavior.

Imagine two students, Andy and Brady. Andy decided that it would be best to get good grades, so he took out more loans and worked less. Andy had more time to study so he got mostly A grades. Brady decided it would be best to get graduate debt free, so he worked long hours instead of taking more loans. Brady had less time to study so he got more B grades. At the typical US university, you might be able to call their outcomes balanced- Andy can maybe get a better job because he got better grades, but has to pay off more debt. Brady won't get quite as good of a job because of his B grades, but gets to start saving for retirement faster because he is debt free.

But then some billionaire (call him Robert Smith, if we're trying to come up with the most generic name ever) comes and pays off Andy's debt. Now instead of a balanced outcome Andy is debt free and has a better job. Which is great for Andy, so I'm not saying the billionaire should't pay off his debt. But you have to think that Brady is probably kicking himself right now for not making a different set of choices. He's now behind in the race, and being behind sticks with you for a long time when it comes to careers.

If we could find a solution that kept Brady from feeling bad, but still gave Andy his goodies, then I'm sure that most people would agree that is a good outcome. An easy one that comes to mind is instead of saying, "I'm paying off all your student loan debt," Smith could say, "I'm giving you each $100k." That way Andy and Brady both get goodies, and Andy doesn't have crippling debt any more. Brady also doesn't kick himself for working hard during college because he now has a nice sum of money to do something responsible with (invest, save for retirement, down payment on a house, etc.).

Android has cryptography in it for app signing and secure logins and such. Crypto is a real sensitive subject for export, even fairly standard implementations like what Android has. I'll bet that once the question is raised with government officials they will say that Google licensing crypto to (or just trusting certs from) Huawei is a hard no.

It would be real hard to make the Play store useful if you take away its main feature of getting trusted versions of apps. Ditto for most of Google's other products in Android.

Edit: For those of you who disagree with me, check out what happens now that Huawei is on the entity list (https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/lists-of-p...). Most notable is that they are now subject to "license requirements are independent of, and in addition to, license requirements imposed elsewhere in the EAR." Even if Android is deemed no license required (NLR) to every other person in the world, the US government can still prohibit Google from licensing Android to Huawei. If you don't think that the government would use a petty excuse such as [easily available] crypto to deny the license, then you obviously haven't dealt with the government enough. The US government was treating crypto the same as nuclear technology up until the year 2000, and they would still prefer if US companies didn't give out source code on the internet. This isn't a bunch of forward thinking Silicon Valley types making the judgement call, it's a bunch of bureaucrats in suits that don't understand how the internet works.

Most Chinese versions of Android are completely de-Googled[1]- no Play store, no Maps, no GMail, etc. They have their own app store, web browser, and everything else. They are still based on Android, but it's not a stretch to think that most Chinese phone manufacturers could fork the open source project tomorrow.

As soon as Google goes too far against the Chinese government, the manufacturers will receive a notice that Android is no longer welcome as an operating system and they will flip the switch. Most Chinese citizens wouldn't care or even notice.

Other Asian companies are working on alternative OSes in case Google ever "pulls a Google" and kills off Android. Samsung has Tizen, which sucks, but could be better with some work.

[1] I bought a Xiaomi phone with a Chinese ROM and it took three days to get unlock permissions from Xiaomi to put the Global ROM on it that had Google apps. In that time I didn't feel like I was missing anything huge- except for being able to get directions since the maps app didn't have US street maps.

Deep fake videos already exist, and will fool most people for short videos. You might start to suspect something if you deep faked a feature length movie though. Combine a deep fake with Faux Rogan and we can expect 2020 to have a video of Joe Rogan taunting and then fighting a chimpanzee.

Not likely helping with the training- unless I'm underestimating the scale of people visiting the site. Also unlikely because they had to have a well trained model to launch the site and make the YouTube video that everyone has seen. It's possible that they will do fine tuning in certain areas depending on if some generated clips get consistently answered the same way.

More likely is that you're helping them write the results section of their research paper, with a sentence like this, "In a blind trial of 5,000 internet users, over 93% of people were unable to tell the difference between generated audio and real audio at a statistically significant level (P<=0.035)."

Note: if we assume a binomial distribution, you need to get 7 or 8 correct to reach the magical P<=.05 barrier. If you assume that there are a fixed 4 generated clips and 4 real clips, then you need to get them all right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_exact_test). I think it's fair to use the binomial distribution because the website does not tell you the number of real and generated clips before you take the test.

You're not eating meat even if you eat McNuggets /s.

At least a public deposition would allow people to come to their own conclusion. If Chelsea felt that public questioning was one sided and a smear campaign then she could release a statement afterwards filling in the context and pointing out the other side of the story.

With a grand jury it is illegal to discuss anything, so a one sided smear campaign during a grand jury can lead to an indictment and Chelsea would have no opportunity to offer her side of the story without risking more jail time.

Snarky, but poignant. However, note that there are many government funded programs to help people quit smoking if they want. The government doesn't ban smoking, but it does tax it to encourage healthier behavior. There is no such funding to help people get rid of social media, and there are no such taxes to push people towards other options.

Also yep. Facebook is valued at $158 per user. There is absolutely no way that the average user will click on $158 worth of ads in their entire time on the platform, nor will their children, nor will their grandchildren. At some point, a sane person has to realize that Wall Street is pricing in something other than the net present value of all the ad revenue that Facebook generates. Their buildings and servers are worth peanuts to their $227 billion market cap. What the market is pricing in addition to the advertising is how Facebook sells your data to companies for uses that most people have never even considered.

https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth/

While we can't point to any direct causation right now, it also took a long time for us to have proof that smoking was harmful.

In the following hypothetical scenario, think about how much blame you would be willing to assign Facebook. It may be none, but they may not be blameless: Facebook's poor privacy practices allow a malicious actor to influence the outcome of an election- they may have only swung a few thousand votes, but they focused on swing states and contributed to the outcome that occurred. This elected official acts in a particular manner, installs a war-monger as national security advisor, who encourages us into a conflict with Iran. Now hundreds or thousands of soldiers end up dying on each side because some malicious actor wanted to make a profit by electing a business-favorable person.

Did Facebook cause a war? No. Did they contribute to a war in some way and cause lives to be shortened? That depends on your interpretation. But I think there should be some regulation, and not the kind of buddy-buddy regulation we're seeing with the telecoms and the FCC right now.

If it were just people trying to sell me things, then the privacy issues and poor control of their data wouldn't be an issue. I've got people trying to sell me things on TV all the time. The risk is the other things that an untrustworthy person can do with this data, that's what I want the regulation and protection for.