throwawaythekey

Without going into murkier territories like bias

Unfair - debate questions were leaked to Hillary ahead of time.

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/donna-brazile-hillary...

Destabilizing - the Hillary campaign promoted Trump as a candidate.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clin...

I don't think any would argue that python is the fastest language. The more pertinent/practical point for most though is not to needlessly overbuild whether it be in dev time or servers.

Realistically, the author could probably serve 10x-100x more users (your million users) and still stay on the cheapest droplet with python. As you can't go smaller than the smallest, changing language can't be justified on a cost basis.

Finally, the performance differences between a well written python app and a poorly written c# app are probably not that large. The developer probably started with python, because that's what they know, and wouldn't be able to match the code quality in c# without significant effort.

Yes, but a python app can be efficient enough to serve that many users on the smallest size droplet. Any additional speed gains would only be useful for scaling and MAYBE latency.

Youtube mostly uses vp9 these days (I think it might fallback to h264 depending on the device?)

You can confirm this by loading a video, right clicking somewhere in the player and opening 'stats for nerds'

Assange only fits the caricature of the description, but that's for another thread.

In brief though, he can not be a traitor because he is not American and never worked for the American government. The most traitorous party in the Assange case was probably Manning, who had his sentence commuted by Obama which was then lauded.

The podcast makes the suggestion that encryption doesn't have to be universal. If most communication were through unencrypted channels then policing would be easier, and the use of an encrypted channel would still be possible for critical communications (although may draw scrutiny).

I use reduced to mean non universal.

I normally enjoy Sam but found that episode was voiced more by his inner parent than his usual hyper-rational self. Child porn is a scourge that should be destroyed but there was minimal discussion of the following that I would normally expect from Sam:

  - Relative merits of the alternatives to the banning/reduction of e2e encryption, e.g stronger police resources, education and community programs

  - Is there a strong link between the sharing of material and the creation of material?

To demonstrate the seriousness of the issue they cite a study that around 5% of the population have consumed child pornography. My own experience has been that unsavoury images can be posted in public places and none of the viewers intend to see the material. I suspect (and hope!) this is where the 5% comes from. This is not caused or solved by the masses having access to encryption.

I wouldn't be surprised if I was having this reaction just because of my idealogical support of encryption.

Pensions are earned when the work is done. They are paid in the future. It's easy to imagine a pension scheme that overpays to the point where the work becomes uneconomical but because the costs are delayed and/or borne by someone else it exists anyway.

Whether it is representative of the average scheme I have no idea. Anecdotally, my grandfather received a 100% of wage pension from the government after 10 years of service started in his mid 30's (Australia). The expected value of that would far exceed any self contribution scheme, even with tax advantages.

Containers are very lightweight compared to a vm, but each FAAS container is required to run its own instance of v8. This implies some start up time (tens of ms?) and some memory use (10's of mb?).

My understanding of isolates is they are more or less a container, but at the v8 level instead of OS. This makes spinning up a function more akin to opening a new tab vs opening a new browser instance.

If they put moderate resources into it I'm sure they could come up with something fairly predictive. For example this paper [1] finds a significant, but weak correlation between height and violent criminality. Genetic influences on height are well known. However, point taken that all models are subject to abuse.

The morality is still fairly grey though, and I think the reward vs intrusion ratio would have to be pretty high before it gets widespread buy-in. Personally, I prefer the state being disinterested in my genes.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/43/3/835/760664

I am not an expect, but it seems like DNA is responsible for around 50% of the personality variance between individuals. Note that the variance within groups is an order of magnitude bigger than the variance across groups, so there aren't super strong ties to race.

I would imagine personality and/or propensity to mental illness or addiction are decent predictors of likelihood to commit crime.

See this podcast for an actual experts take https://samharris.org/podcasts/211-the-nature-of-human-natur...

> company can get X units of value at a discount by hiring the person with the lower cost of living at a lower salary.

So the hiring process should favour low salaries rather than cost of living?

If that is the case then you can easily replace cost of living adjustments with candidate salary expectation.

I struggle to see the mental leap many are making here.

Are you stating that cost of living impacts your skill level? In some cases that may be true but I think for what most are discussing here the causation would be the other way.

Growing up in a poor area may effect your skill level but moving as an adult from a high COL to low COL area should have minimal impact.

To me it makes more sense that each developer would command the salary that corresponds to their skills, and then adjust their COL in order to be comfortable.

It's an interesting question. To rephrase, I think the market is undersupplied with new construction skewed towards lower quality apartments. This would suggest that high quality apartments would be extra valuable.

I have less experience in the high end of the market, as it's firmly out of my price range. Perhaps that alone is the answer? If while earning ~2x median pay, I don't consider staying somewhere more livable it would suggest prohibitively high prices. I'm unsure if the price is dictated more by the aforementioned undersupply or the higher quality. It probably reveals something about inequality in society.

I can't be certain the motivations of the developers choosing to build smaller apartments, the reasons I alluded to in the parent comment were an attempt at an educated guess. There is however an obvious ground truth that apartment sizes are shrinking (47m2 2014/44m2 2015 for 1 bedroom -10% in one year!) [1]

- [1] https://www.afr.com/property/melbourne-new-apartment-sizes-s...

From my observational experience, and limited study on the issue, markets don't seem to be solving this optimally, at least in Melbourne, Australia.

Overall, the market for apartments seems to be supply constrained. The main factors:

1. Government approval is required to build large apartment buildings. In general, this seems to lag behind demand.

2. Large buildings take a long time to build

3. There have been a number of years of high immigration, especially in and around the CBD.

All of these factors combine to cause high prices. In a high price environment, many residents are stretched for cash. They essentially have to pick the lowest price apartment available. It's not uncommon to have multiple people sharing a room in order to decrease costs. This creates a high price floor. Mid range apartments don't tend to be much more expensive, simply because many residents are already super stretched financially and unable to afford the extra marginal cost.

As a property developer in a high floor, low marginal payoff environment your financial incentive is now to build as many low cost apartments as possible.

>> The majority of Victoria’s newest apartments are so small they would be considered unliveable in Sydney…More than three-quarters of new one-bedroom apartments built across the state are 50 square metres or less, which means they probably would have been illegal in Sydney, London and Adelaide. [1]

Making these apartments meet a reasonable minimum standard could only be less than 5% of the total cost [1]. To achieve this governments have tried to intervene by increasing minimum standards [2].

What concerns me the most is the longer term impacts. When demand drops off (as covid is pointing to), you have a massive supply of low quality apartments. Is the end result of this many vacancies and people living in shoe boxes when they could've been somewhere nicer?

There are a few long bows there, but as someone who lives in a relatively sunny but not quite sunny enough apartment that is my take.

[1] - https://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2015/05/18/apartment... (great blog for planning issues)

[2] - https://architectureau.com/articles/victorias-draft-apartmen...

What's interesting is, many of the same people who criticize the leaks for hurting Hillary's chances would also applaud the leaks for demonstrating DNC bias against Bernie.

Sinemia. From the start of 2018 until the start of 2019 IIRC.

Major cinema chains in Australia went one step further and would actively block your payment from going through if they detected you were using a moviepass like product.

After becoming frustrated with my payments being rejected I reached out to one of the cinemas. I explained to the likely overworked support worker that they were essentially both turning down free money and being hostile to me personally as a customer by refusing my payment method. As I should've known the support was powerless to do anything but repeat "we are not associated with product x".

Suffice to say I no longer offer unsolicited advice to theatre chains.

Could you provide some resources?

I've only ever experienced visualization once on a drunken night and thought my drink had been spiked.

Is it being used a slur? It's a fundamental characteristic of those types of people.

I think he's talking about the difference between correlation and causation.

You're right though in that from a law enforcement POV the two look roughly the same.

The worst thing about other people's SUVs is they obstruct your vision. I suspect there's an arms race going on with more and more people picking up SUVs to see around other cars.

In the mining example I gave it's probably more clear cut than the SV case.

A whole heap of people are working high wage jobs in essentially the middle of nowhere. The local towns don't have the capacity to replace many lost jobs and aren't the ideal place for all of the now unemployed workers to end up. You don't want a whole heap of empty houses in an area with no jobs.

Diversifying the economy is definitely a step in the right direction and is likely more feasible in an area like SV. On the flipside you've got to be careful that the other industries are valuable in their own right and don't exist solely due to the rivers of money in the area.

You are forgoing the tax revenue that would've been earned by the workers as well as any benefits that they claim.

In Australia it was estimated that each auto job produces 6 other jobs through network effects [1]. All up that number would be fairly substantial and likely enough to justify some subsidies/bailouts.

[1] - https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Sen...

To be more clear;

The lack of diversification in employment makes the residents as a whole more vulnerable to the next sector based bust (see dotcom crash).

If there is a larger supply of housing then more properties will be put on the market in such an event. This could exacerbate any fall in prices or result in a large number of abandoned properties which can be pretty damaging to a neighborhood.

We get a sort of similar effect here in Australia. A mine opens in the outback somewhere and prices rise rapidly in the nearest town(s). Then a whole heap of new housing gets built to meet the demand and make some profit. One day resource prices fall, the mines cut back on operations, and suddenly there is a housing oversupply and the whole local market falls pretty harshly.

If you were a local resident who lived there the entire time you would probably be feeling pretty shortchanged by the end.

The correct answer is probably to build some new housing supply but definitely not as much as the peak demands.

Are the policies bone headed?

I'm not American so may not have this perfectly right but the Detroit of the past seems to be a good analogue to SV. Lots of well paid jobs in a single industry. When the eventual downturn occurs you don't want to be left with a ghost town.

How about the ones that show the HC camp intended to actively support trump because they thought he would be the easiest candidate to beat?

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clin...

Why is he a bad actor? Why should he be treated differently from other whistleblowers. AFAIK his leaks have had many good outcomes. I think there was a case or two where sensitive information could've been vetted better but to me he definitely looks like a net positive.