username223

And the "standard" is written entirely by Google, and soon to be released in Chrome. The W3C and IETF are so thoroughly captured as to be little more than two small technical documentation groups at Google. It's the old Microsoft playbook, disguised at the expense of two decreasingly-credible industry standards bodies.

This is the part I don't get. Right now they rely on their employees to buy, maintain, and depreciate their own cars. The natural next step would be to let people lend their cars to Uber/Lyft when not in use.

But they're sinking tons of money into self-driving, which means they would bear the costs of buying and maintaining their fleet. That's a completely different business model, and seems like a tough pivot. And as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, other companies are better-positioned to do this, with better manufacturing, more sensor data, more experience, or all of the above.

> How can you say that Lyft is "stiffing" the drivers when they lose money on every ride?

That's Lyft's problem, not the drivers'. They could always find more money by charging higher fares and maintaining a fleet of identical cars for drivers to rent, but then they'd just be a taxi company, not a "tech platform." If they want to keep offering VC-subsidized rides, that's fine by me. And when they run out, they can decide whether they want to stiff their drivers even more, or raise their fares.

And yes, the American tipping system needs to die.

I think the focus on tooling is more because: (1) developers understand it, since they use it full-time; (2) they're motivated to write it, since it will make their life easier. Understanding business needs takes work, and writing software you will never use is uninspiring.

> Does Silicon Valley not have data caps? I guess they never have bad reception, though.

Pretty much. When the developers only use the latest phones, on a company (or unlimited) plan, connected to 4G LTE with full bars, this is what you get. Google seems determined to hide network latency with its various prefetching efforts, but since I'm paying for bandwidth, I'd rather just wait the extra couple of seconds.

Newegg is okay for computer parts. The various online outdoor equipment stores aren't flooded with knockoffs. And you can always go to the manufacturer.

Amazon is still fine if you're looking for a name-brand item, but as soon as you leave that path, who knows what you'll get? Don't take my word for it, but I even remember reading about their "Fulfilled by Amazon" program substituting items from different sellers with the same SKU. The result was predictable: people scammed the system by mis-labeling cheap knockoffs.

Now that Amazon makes so much money off AWS, maybe they could use a bit of it to put third party sellers in their own "Wild West" tab, and taking a bit of responsibility for what they sell.

It was great for solving integrals in high school calculus many years ago, not only providing the answers, but also showing the steps it took to get to them. Even in the 90s, it did pretty impressive symbolic math and plotting. This was, of course, before Wolfram discovered the web and started broadcasting his monster raving egomania.

I imagine it's still a pretty useful tool.

RIP.

Allen doesn't seem to have been going for the moon (yet), but I wish the billionaires would not spend their hoards on private rocket companies. It's a bit gross that the article you linked calls them "philanthropists" for doing it. Andrew Carnegie was a real bastard, but he funded many wonderful small-town libraries, which remain valuable community centers over 100 years later. Bill Gates took his shot at world domination, but is now using his money to solve real-world problem like malaria.

It's their money, so they can do what they want with it, but rocket companies are pure vanity. Real, cost-effective philanthropy would mean improving the perfectly acceptable planet we live on, not trying to terraform Mars.

"I'm sorry that you felt like you were..." is the worst form of apology, because it admits no guilt or responsibility. "I'm sorry that you were..." or "I'm sorry that we..." would be a legitimate apology.

That said, nuking this data is the first good thing Mozilla has done in this whole fiasco. It's a small but real act of contrition, so kudos for that.

Pretty much. President Trump wants to put a man on the moon before he's out of office (assuming he gets re-elected and makes it to 2024). Mike Pence obsequiously tells NASA to make it so. Amazon wants more sweet federal contracting money, and prepares to bid for that contract.

I wish Bezos, Allen, Musk, etc. weren't burning their piles of cash to see who could be first to shoot other people at the moon, but such is the world we live in.

If you have some time, the linked presentation is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk

That's actually kind of genius. Domain squatting is highly automated, so in most cases it's not hard to figure out when a domain is squatted rather than simply inactive. Taxing squatters 10% of their sale offer every year would make them think twice.

It could even be done through the registrars: for every year you hold onto a domain, the registrar withholds another 10% if/when you sell it. Legitimate companies and people wouldn't suffer, since they would want to keep their domains more or less forever. Those looking to flip domains would have to consider their diminishing returns.

And this is why you buy the .com domain for your company, instead of some weird one like .info, .io, or .pizza: most people assume that's where they'll find your company. If someone's squatting it, you can buy it from them, or just come up with a new nonsense word for your company.

Maybe developers are getting used to the `getQwerpy.io` convention, but I don't see it catching on more broadly.

> I don’t blame Mark for his quest for domination. He has demonstrated nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented entrepreneur.

What a strange juxtaposition. It would be a shame if "entrepreneur" now only refers to the VC dream of either domination or flaming death. There are many trajectories in between.

Zuckerberg's focus on "domination" in the company's early days, added to his famous "dumb f*s" comment, makes me even more certain that Facebook was rotten from the beginning.

I prefer the Southern convention of appending "... bless his heart." "Mark is just a sociopath hell-bent on world domination, bless his heart."

I had this argument 10-15 years ago, and agree about the potential for lock-in. But even at the time, I realized that I would rather not build Konqueror, Kate, or the Gimp from source, and would never make a significant change. They had become so complex that learning and keeping up with them enough to contribute would be a part-time job.

The current toss-it-over-the-wall-ware model is good enough. Android and Chromium technically "work" without Google, and their code is online. There are multiple Firefox forks. I don't know about OSS programs for Excel spreadsheets and Word docs, but I'm happy to sacrifice some freedom in order to never have to go down that rabbit-hole.

Let's put it in simple CRUD terms. Users want to:

C - control when you collect it.

R - read what you have on them, and know how you read it and/or share it with others.

U - update it, e.g. when it is wrong.

D - delete it.

Most users just want non-hostile defaults, but all users should have CRUD-control.

This reminds me of a classic blog post:

    http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.html

All of those old Unix programs aren't fast by being simple and clean on the inside. Old age and treachery...

> push notifications from Android for my credit card payment with my exact balance due

Or "you have been served with a summons to appear at... See transportation options" (beta soon?). When a company has so completely lost sight of what its customers see as creepy that it advertises creepiness as a feature, it has lost its way.

> I realised in the next months that the perceived "freedom to tinker" on Android is something hugely overrated.

I've never really wanted to tinker much with my smartphone. I want it to do a handful of simple tasks (calls, texts, maps, music, light web browsing), and otherwise get out of the way.

Similarly, I switched to Mac OS X awhile back after years on Linux and BSD, because I realized that I would never want to tinker with (the source code of) my web browser or word processor, and there was a whole tinker-friendly Unix system sitting right next door. Pace, Stallman, but I don't need the freedom to tinker everywhere.

Agreed, it's a terrible idea. I've been subscribed to the NY Times' "morning briefing" email for a long time. I'm using an IMAP client, and I never bother to load the images for this, because all I want is a text summary of the day's news.

They recently sent me an email saying something like "we noticed that you're not reading our email, so we're unsubscribing you." Apparently I hadn't been loading their tracking pixel/script/CSS, so they thought I wasn't "engaging" enough. This was despite the fact that I clicked on links to full articles, which had all sorts of tracking info embedded in a redirect.

A responsible email publisher offers a clearly-visible "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the email, which will unsubscribe you with a single click. No nags, no checklists of email categories, maybe an "are you sure?" page at most, with equal-sized "yes" and "no" buttons. One or two clicks, and I don't hear from you again.

A dodgy email provider is more likely to "use lack of opens to reduce volume." If I don't trust some company to actually unsubscribe me when I ask, I'll just filter their domain directly to the trash. Clicking on spammers' "unsubscribe" links is usually a bad idea.

I'm loving it, too. It's a cheeky strategy, and I hope to see it used at other companies that make workers sign binding arbitration agreements, then screw them over. But then I read this:

> Lawyers who claim to represent more than 12,000 drivers who have filed arbitration demands have sued Uber, arguing the company has refused to pay obligatory filing fees to get the process started.

So apparently Uber can just say "we're not gonna" if they decide that arbitration is no longer working in their favor. Does that open them up to a class action suit on behalf of all the drivers who were denied arbitration? I have no idea, IANAL.

I also think mail clients should do that, or at least offer it as an option. Most mail readers have an option to disable loading remote content, and this would be another little way to make HTML email less dangerous.

I think (or at least hope) that most people are in the habit of hovering over links in email before clicking them. And I really hope that mail readers never start implementing Javascript. As for web apps, that's the Wild West, and a small fix like this isn't going to tame it.

I agree, but think it's even worse. The various exchanges are immature, fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants tech companies sitting on mounds of other people's cash. That makes them tempting targets.

Worse, they are trying to protect that cash from everyone on the internet. If you want to steal actual cash from a bank, you need to walk into it and threaten a teller, and you're probably going to jail. If someone hacks into BofA and drains a bunch of accounts, the losses will be covered by the bank or the FDIC.

If a bunch of people put cash in one place, then trust an immature company with no insurance to keep it safe, this will happen again and again. It's like a data breach, except easier money.

My pronunciations:

* FAQ is "fack", though I hear "eff-aye-que" often enough. * .edu is "dot ee dee you" not "dot ed-you", though I pronounce all of the other old-school domains as words. * .dev is definitely "dot dev", since "dev" is a word.

It may be apocryphal, but I remember reading somewhere that Tim Berners-Lee chose the name "World Wide Web" because the acronym was harder to say than the word itself.

See the variable "org-clock-idle-time". This is Emacs, so of course there is an option.

I'm not sure if I would use org-clock unless I were already programming in Emacs, but since that's mostly what I'm doing, it works great to keep track of contracting time.

> I don't get it. Of all the tech products I've had over the years, the Google ones have been the best, the most secure, the most useful. They collect more data, but as far as I've seen, they also protect it the most.

They're way less sketchy than Facebook and data brokers, and better at not letting people's data leak out ("sorry"), but the sheer volume they collect is frightening. For the average Android user, they collect every search query, complete browsing history, complete location history, and more, all "anonymized" but easily correlated to a real person, and store it more or less forever.

They've avoided Yahoo- or Equifax-scale breaches, as far as we know, but it's just a matter of time until someone hacks the world's biggest store of personal data. Even if that happens years from now, I wonder how they will monetize all of that data when merely slinging ads no longer satisfies investors.

I was a bit hesitant to write it, but that was just my friend's experience on the MTB circuit over the last 15-20 years. US Postal and Armstrong were awful and shameless, but I think they were an outlier among American pro teams. Also, there's less money in mountain biking, and it's not really a team sport, so the kind of organized team doping Armstrong created is much less likely to happen.

Anyways, I don't follow cycling as closely as I used to, in part because the pervasive doping was just so discouraging. Hopefully some combination of out-of-competition testing and biological passport will finally make the sport relatively clean.

Controversial? Yes.

Wrong? I can't speak for all sports, but I know an ex-professional cyclist. Doping is less prevalent in the States than in Europe, but even in the States you see amateurs doing it occasionally. Plenty of Euros dope, but more ride the fine line of "therapeutic use" exemptions for drugs that just happen to improve their performance by a percent or two.

They're not all doping, but at least in endurance sports, many are.

Cyclists have been using drugs for a long time -- Tom Simpson was doped to the gills when he died on Mont Ventoux in 1967. EPO, HGH, blood doping, etc. may only be worth a few percent, but at the elite level a few percent matter. For cycling, you can look at the power output on Tour de France climbs before and after they developed an effective test for EPO.

Elite level anything is unhealthy, because you're pushing the limits of what humans can accomplish, at the expense of everything else.