vmarsy

Some context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589393

> ...in fact, it's so much a better solution that I can't imagine Amazon hadn't considered it.

I agree that it seem a better solution to the one scenario you're mentioning: delivering packages.

But if you watch the video in the article [1], they describe other scenarios: "maybe let in your dog walker, a friend, or maybe to let in a team of cleaning ninjas"

I don't think it's too far-fetched to see the 'friend' here being actually your airbnb guest. Many airbnb homes already use a rudimentary lockbox with code, if the guest can now instead set up something on their amazon account and know they'll be able to get in (at least the initial check-in, and have a key waiting on the coffee table), it could make the experience smoother for the guests, and the host as well.

[1] https://youtu.be/wn7DBdaUNLA?t=30s

Interesting post! About living nomad, is there any pain points regarding the management of the company from anywhere?

I read the post linked[1] in this blog post which talks about day to day life, even if work-life balance can be tough, it must be awesome for you guys! But what about administrative paperwork or hurdles (IRS, legal mail, and whatnot)? Was there anything different due to the fact that you guys are digital nomads?

[1] https://blog.canny.io/building-startup-digital-nomads/

I specifically installed Firefox 57 so that I could try Inbox there, because as you point out, on Firefox 56 it's very slow (especially the initial load).

On Firefox 57 with that new Quantum CSS, I found Inbox to be amazingly fast (I'd say even faster than Chrome on my yoga pro 2 - except for the right pane of Google Hangouts which takes a while to load still)

> Now to find out what kind of applications are greatly benefited from this.

The common applications are scientific computing usually, here's a quick overview[1] of the kind of algorithms ran on supercomputers: PDEs, ODEs, FFTs, Sparse and Dense linear algebra, etc.

These are usually used for scientific applications like weather forecasting, where you need to know about the result on time (i.e. before the hurricane reaches the coast!)

[1] https://www.nap.edu/read/11148/chapter/7#125

People today still? In Paris, Chambre de bonnes "must have a minimum surface area of 9 m2"[1].

That's 96.87 sqft.

"The rooms usually have a surface area of around 6–12 m2" (65 to 129 sqft)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chambre_de_bonne

In an article[1] about it, it clearly says you can disable it :

>> This isn't going to sit well with everyone, and thankfully Google included a way to disable the feature, it's just a bit hidden.

Settings -> tap on the Wi-Fi -> tap on the menu button in the lower-right hand corner and select "Advanced", Uncheck "Scanning always available"

So sure, it's "a bit hidden" as the article points out, but , at least at the time the article was written, it's possible to disable this.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/how-to/stop-android-4-3-from-always-sca...

It seems to stand for harvard, yale, princeton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(colleges)

> There may be no perfect solution but I am really hoping something better can exist. There isn't as much trouble in some other countries, maybe we can look into what they are doing?

In France for example there's no SSN used by banks, there's no Credit score either. How do people get mortgages? Bank do their research, ask for your paystubs and other documents, it's simply due diligence.

Due diligence can take you pretty far, for instance for mortgages, probably the biggest loan a person needs in life: current mortgage fixed interest rate are around 1.3% - 1.8% for long duration[1]. You get this without the existence of a credit score. In 2008, there wasn't any wave of people loosing their home because their mortgage was approved too easily and they suddenly weren't able to pay back, so something must be done right.

As an other commenter mentions, you might not be able to get your mortgage approved in a minute on a smartphone app ... But who wants this anyways? In a house/car buying process, this isn't the most time consuming task anyways, and certainly not the one you should approach lightly.

It's true that in the US, opening Credit cards is much more common, but even there, I'm not sure why a couple weeks of wait is much of a big deal, the bank already takes one to 2 weeks to send you the credit card by mail.

[1] http://www.meilleurtaux.com/credit-immobilier/barometre-des-...

I don't know if they will keep doing well in terms of stock price If/When Amazon release their ticket master competitor[1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-ticketing/excl...

Not to be alarmist, but how do we know this IR blasting won't be damaging to the eyes, a 3 seconds google search leads to a 2011 study[1] which concludes:

> The protein of eye lens is very sensitive to IR radiation which is hazardous and may lead to cataract.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3116568/

I agree on those 2 points.

regarding your second point, I don't like this unrolling either.

The trick seems to be instead of :

    return $mylist

Add a comma in front:

    return ,$mylist

https://stackoverflow.com/a/16122464

This will make sure [a] never gets changed to a, and [] never gets changed to $null

So basically it seems that houses in France are sold via a slow Dutch auction[1], whereas in the US it's an English auction...

It seems that the English auction goes much faster for the seller, whereas in the french house market, the buyer is the one having a fast process since as soon as they find a good home with a price they like, they can just decide to buy.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction

I think wireless charging slowness can be seen as a feature, not a bug.

Some EE major can correct me, but I think the slower you charge a battery, the better it is for its overall life. (So even for non wireless charging, if possible, it's better to use a 1 amp charger overnight than a 2 amp)

I had a Lumia phone that I charged wirelessly from 2012 to 2017, on its last day, the battery life was around 80% as good as its first day, much better than my friends' phones.

The only use case for me would be to put my phone at night when its battery was less than 20%.

Another thing I read about batteries is that it's better to charge them once a day[1] (so before nighttime) rather than many times during the day. Some people here comment that you always put your phone on the charging plate, I'm not sure this would be good for battery life.

Finally the best 'feature' I noticed is that it's really inconvenient to use your phone while it's charging on its plate, so you're less tempted to use it when going to sleep.

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/battery-charge-l...

Those Spanish wines that are made to look French and fool the consumer with their lavender fields etc as described in the article... Winemakers are blaming the Spanish, but there's also the French grocery stores to blame: why put the French and Spanish wines on the same shelf? Are they trying to confuse consumers because the margins on Spanish wines are much higher ?

Here in the US, nearly all wine stores I've been to sorts wine per type (red, white, etc) for local wines and have a specific foreign section "France", "Australia", etc. Even regular grocery stores tend to do this too.

If groceries chains did this in France, consumers would then rarely buy the Spanish wines unintentionally.

I don't think the winemakers would have a hard time lobbying for at least forcing grocery stores to display foreign wines in a clearly labeled section.

From one of the sources of the article: [1]

>> In Study 1, White and Asian nonnative speakers using the same scripted responses as native speakers were found to be significantly less likely to be recommended for a middle-management position, and this bias was fully mediated by assessments of their political skill.

>> Nonnative speakers were found to have a significantly lower likelihood of receiving new-venture funding

That's an interesting bias, I wonder if/how it varies by accents, as those can be quite different. Are foreign accents from countries where English is still a major language like U.K., Australia, India, ..., perceived differently than foreign accents from non english-speaking countries?

[1] http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-28924-001

There is already such incentives for companies defrauding the government [1] :

"Qui tam" where the whistleblower can receive "between 15% and 25% of any award or settlement amount" on cases like this seems to be a pretty huge incentive.

Look at the "Example" section in [1]:

      - 2009 :  
    [...] was awarded $51.5 million for his role as a whistleblower 
    102 million that was distributed between the six whistleblowers 
    [...] whistleblower was awarded 18% of the $253 million civil settlement
      - 2012 : 
    was entitled to $3.6 million of the settlement

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qui_tam#United_States

I really liked the blog post and was interested to see the end results but...

> I hope to publish another blog post describing [speculative parsing] thoroughly, along with details on the performance improvements this feature would bring.

Isn't there any preliminary results on the perf improvements this would bring?

I understand that the % of time when the speculative parsing succeeds (instead of having to roll back to a sequential parsing) can't be know easily, since it'll be based on the testing of a large number of real-world web pages,

but I'd love to see just 2 simple examples:

* One full of `document.write`, so we can have an idea of the time lost in case of failed speculation

* One 'embarrassingly parallel' dom tree where the speculation should pay off the most.

That would give us a good idea of worst case / best case results.

> A single Boeing building in Everett, north of Seattle, is 4.3 million square feet. About half of Amazon's total.

You're talking about the Boeing Everett Factory[1], 399480 m2, 4.3 million square feet...

Of course it's big, it's a production line for Boeings 747-787, it's the largest building in the world by volume, you can see[2] that it can roughly fit 4 planes per line, with 6 lines, that's 24 planes

But... what does this have to do with office spaces in Seattle?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Everett_Factory

[2] https://roadtrippers.com/stories/boeing-factory

Is there any examples of concrete source code matching exactly?

I'm not familiar with ruby, but what if it's just how ruby projects are set up usually?

The version file content, and the file structure might just be both taken from a tutorial on how to create a basic ruby package?

This happens for other languages, a lot of CMakeLists.txt files looks very similar for instance, including the exact location of version files and whatnot if people follow tutorials like [1]

[1] https://cmake.org/cmake-tutorial/

> The customers don't have any recourse to say "no, that's a shitty settlement, we want 100% of what we're owed not 10% of it"

They definitely do, they can decide to opt-out, and retain the right to sue the company on that issue. But those who opt-out would have to go start their own lawsuit. For small matters where you were wronged by $120, and you only get $30 back, this is definitely not worth it to start your own lawsuit, the best action here is to take the money and boycott that company if possible. For bigger amounts, like lemon-law cars, it might be worth it, especially if the payouts look too small. For instance, $300 refund if you had to do multiple transmissions repair on your car doesn't seem that great, given that a transmission repair can cost from $500 to thousands of $ each. In that case it can make sense to opt-out.

> or "hey, 50% is too much for the lawyers, I'd rather take $0 than the shitty deal we were offered".

The article says they usually get $2 for $10, which can still look high I agree, but definitely not 50%.

Agreed, but you can't anticipate what another dev could write :)

Or if you pass down that `isConnected` down to a library where for some reason they assumed `null` should default to `true`

Of course it's very unlikely, but my point is you can't know all use cases of `this.state.isConnected` in advance on a large project so as you say it doesn't hurt to sanitize the input.

What if `weAreConnected` is `null` or `undefined`?

WalterSear's solution solves the issue since both `null` and `undefined` would become `false`:

    this.setState({
        isConnected: Boolean(weAreConnected)
    })

but in your case you could set `isConnected` to `null` or `undefined`

so if later in code someone makes the mistake of writing:

    if (this.state.isConnected === false) { /* do stuff */ }

they could have a bad surprise.

I think this is an important point. I found the Intercept's article[1] about the ACLU defending Charlottesville protesters' free speech right pretty interesting in that regard: Some people insult and blame the ACLU for defending free speech rights of even the most infamous people, but as the article points out, people fail to understand that if a precedent is set on them, it's diminishing everyone's rights.

The ACLU understands this, which is why they defend such people.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2017/08/13/the-misguided-attacks-on...

Same for Seattle, $10518 of housing implies a rent of $876.5 per month

But the average rent[1] in Seattle is $2210 per month for a 1Br, $2803 for a 2BR , so even sharing a 2BR it's still way above the $876.5/mo

[1] https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-seattle-rent-tren...

> Some 58 percent of all offers on Airbnb in Germany are entire apartments or even apartment blocks - meaning professional landlords are effectively the core of Airbnb's business.

Someone working a full time job, who owns a primary residence as well as a secondary one for vacation. Does renting that secondary location means they are "a professional landlord" ? If someone who owns an apartment but is going abroad for a bit for vacation/work and have a family member take care of renting the place on AirBnB, are they "professional landlords" ?

I would assume professional landlord = landlord whose full time job is to take care of the rentals, I don't understand the jump from "this listing is an entire apartment" => "This is a professional landlord"

This reminds me of Solar updraft tower prototypes [1], which concentrates heat at the bottom of the chimney instead of expecting cold air at the top of the chimney.

There's still a delta of temperature between the top and the bottom, but instead of

    T_bottom_chimney  = T_hot_ambient_air_bottom
    T_top_chimney     = T_cold_ambient_air_top

it is :

    T_bottom_chimney  = T_much_hotter_than_ambient_air_top
    T_top_chimney     = T_ambient_air_top

Everytime I start reading things like this, I wish I had a home with similar 'magic', like Solar chimneys[2] and other techniques[3],

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_chimney

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-coupled_heat_exchanger

3) is true with all hue lights, so that you can easily override using the good old physical switches.

However, are you sure about 4?

I had power outages sometimes, when the power comes back, all the hue lights gets on (Not cool when it's 4 am by the way), but then I'd just press "Off" on my hue light app and they'd all turn off.

If I remember the Hue API, you can send a new state to the lights not matter what the previous state was, so I'm not surprised this works correctly, which is why I'm confused about your step 4).

Are you trying to turn them off via a Echo command specifically?

To add to the list of how many of those problems are already solved in the EU :

> Allowing merchants to save 2% in credit card fees (which doubles their profit margin if it was 2% to begin with).

In the EU those fees are capped at 0.2% for debit cards, 0.3% for credit cards [1]. It'll be helpful if the crypto currency fees gets even lower than those, but 0.2% starts to get pretty low.

[1] http://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2015/...

Low humidity compared to where?

Average yearly relative humidity[1] :

 	Houston:
 	75% daily 
	90% morning 
	55% afternoon

In the summer, the heat is much more unbearable in Texas than let's say Arizona due to the high humidity rates. Every year, 97 days in Houston with Apparent temperature above 95°F due to humidity (vs. only 16 days per year where Actual temperature is above 95°F)[2]

[1] https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Texas/humidity-annual...

[2] https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Texas/hot-humid-days-...