wyiske

Unfortunately this is no longer true. The quality of the journalism is in serious doubt. One such example: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-myth-of-the-stolen-c...

In addition many articles focus on individuals which offer a skewed perspective. I stopped using the bbc news app after noticing I was only occasionally enjoying the long reads, and even then I don’t want woke politics snuck in

You have a very simplistic view of the history. Many Arabs actually aren’t native to the land either, they moved there for work that the new Jewish immigrants provided. In fact there was significant mutual cooperation and benefit. Land wasn’t stolen either, but bought after the Ottomans empire fell and it became legal for Jews to buy Muslim land (the ottomans had some nasty rules). Regarding the 700k Palestinians leaving in 1948, there was no historical order to evict anyone from outside the future Israeli borders, fact is they fled either from fear or through encouragement to leave by the 5 arab countries which declared war on Israel. Many millions of people have fled war, vastly more numerous than this, but yet that is the most infamous.

The problem is that while al jazeera can be balanced about certain topics, fact is it is entirely government funded by an authoritarian undemocratic state and on this topic in particular it seeks to purposefully take a prejudiced anti Israeli stance. It has also been criticised for biased to the Syrian dictator, and takes various stances according to the foreign ministry. We therefore cannot be certain if the claims are true. Unfortunately as history has repeatedly proven, propaganda works. At the very least maybe source should include Government funded?

You have a very simplistic view of the history. Many Arabs actually aren’t native to the land either, they moved there for work that the new Jewish immigrants provided. In fact there was significant mutual cooperation and benefit. Land wasn’t stolen either, but bought after the Ottomans empire fell and it became legal for Jews to buy Muslim land (the ottomans had some nasty rules). If you’re referring to 700k Palestinians leaving in 1948, there was no historical order to evict anyone from outside the future Israeli borders, fact is they fled either from fear or through encouragement. Many millions of people have fled war, more numerous than this, but yet that is the most infamous.

The trouble with Java exceptions is that the forced error checking is rarely handled at the call site, making the code no longer linear. Calling var a = foo();bar(a); does not necessarily imply bar() will be called. Using a more functional approach, the exception can be even more explicit making it easier to reason about.

Agreed. I was actually hoping the article would talk about how to log (buffer, async, files or output stream, etc). I’ve seen at least 2 cases of excessive logging causing outages: One was using log4j zip rollover which blocked all threads in the app causing timeouts, the other was using json in an older android vm which couldn’t cope with all the garbage, causing OOM due to fragmentation (before compacting garbage collector was introduced)

Not sure if this has been shared, but Yuval Harari, eloquently explains why everyone should care about this, the first invasion of a democratic peaceful country in my memory

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/02/09/yuval-noa...

It’s tantamount to appeasement to let threats like this influence any decisions

PoW guarantees the energy has been spent to find the nonce. If one person had access to a perpetual motor, they could control the market. We assume everyone else would then have to find cheaper sources of energy to compete. If we take this to the extreme and energy were free for everyone then it would essentially become a lottery and the cost of additional mining equipment then becomes the limiting factor.

This energy-cost dilemma is required to required to balance the market. It’s also a highly speculative arms race incentivising mass misinformation campaigns to increase the value for existing Bitcoin owners.

This feels like an assault on truth. I skipped to the blog on “Is Bitcoin mining environmentally unfriendly” and found numerous cases of cognitive biases. Calling it fact checking is disingenuous. More like “alternative” facts.

E.g, consider “Energy consumption comes primarily from mining blocks on the blockchain, not from transactions”. Bitcoin mining incentivises miners to create transaction blocks. The main purpose is to cement the transactions not mint coins. This is plain to see if you consider that the mining process is still necessary once all coins are minted. Therefore transaction energy cost is substantial.

If someone had an unlimited cheap source of green energy, it would actually make Bitcoin less secure as it goes against proof of work - proof of work literally requires an “expensive” operation, exchanging work (energy) for security. This actually makes Bitcoin incompatible with green energy.

I’ll let someone else more eloquently refute all the points in the article.

The story “To the Driver Who Hit Me and Ran” makes me never want to get on a bike again

I worked at a startup about 10 years ago, and it was probably the most bureaucratic place I’ve ever worked. I was the 3rd employee, but my stock was negligible - incidentally the company wasn’t very transparent about this; When the offer was made they said, we’ll give you 5000 shares which sounded like a decent amount. I asked how many shares were issued and the guy replied just 7 million, but the important thing is how much each share will be worth (still 0). This is in London where this is probably quite common.

The sad thing was it was one of the most interesting places and domains I’ve worked, and if the company launched while I was there, it probably would have been acquired (like all our competitors). The founder was quite innovative but think was scared to launch and had a new idea/approach to market every few months. Eventually I lost faith, and being expected to work late every evening knowing my options were tiny killed all motivation.

As the author said, I calculated the expected value, decided it’s no longer worth it and left. The moment that changed my outlook was when they decided not to approve my leave (I had already booked and didn’t expect any issues since I had mentioned it in conversation a few months before). If I had stayed, I would haven’t enjoyed all the travelling and experiences I’ve had, earning more and working less.

The company is still going, and probably a long way off from having any exit. A few months after I left, some incompetent recruiter tried to hire me for my previous role at a £30k increase in salary.

Having said that, I would definitely join an early stage startup again, if the work was interesting, but would expect at least 1% and decent salary next time.

This article gets many things wrong. Starting with Bitcoin, he misunderstands what the mining process is. It’s main process isn’t just to mint new coins, which is what I think he assumes. Minting coins is an incentive to incorporate transactions into the blockchain, requiring a compute intensive lottery. Yes verifying transactions is quick, but the “per-transaction energy cost” is not misleading as the energy required to create the transaction in the first place is significant. The mining process will still be necessary after all coins have been minted.

Secondly why does he assume clean energy produced in one region can’t be exported elsewhere? China is the world’s largest coal dependent nation. Electricity does not require batteries to store and transmit large distances.

While I like, and am influenced by the economist, I find their formula frustrating. After stating the opposing side they often jump to their conclusions with barely enough arguments or stats. The articles don’t leave much in the way of follow up and hardly ever cite references to interesting facts or figures mentioned.

I built an app to scan receipts for bill splitting, although your use case is certainly interesting.

Google‘s MLKit is very accurate for on device recognition. You can even feed frames straight from the camera with almost real time results. Your bigger problem will be parsing the results, and handling very inconsistent receipts.

The South African variant is almost certainly not spreading faster because of the variant but because there were super spreader events like recently 1000 people tested positive after going to a night club [1]. Indoor weddings, funerals, and other big events have contributed too. While people wear masks (badly) outdoors and in shops, I think the root cause is bars, clubs, shebeens, etc. The government is also reluctant to introduce a new lockdown for fear of the damage to the economy.

I’ve just come from the UK, and while rules were less strict for a while, and people weren’t wearing masks as much, I’m less certain if people were social distancing. We certainly were in preparation for travel, but I imagine schools, college holidays, etc contributed just as much as any variant.

[1] https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2020-12-08-130...

I’m not sure this is true. People are much more willing to buy a coffee/pastry rather than spend £2 on an app. It seems to me, that people definitely compartalize their spending, with most consumer software and apps expected to me free.

I used to be afraid of debt, but understood this principle ever since an accounting friend told me about a luxury cruise liner he worked for. It was started buy an immigrant, and quite successful (pre Covid). I was confused how anyone could launch a cruise company when the cost to buy (or even lease a cruise liner) must be 100s of millions. When I asked my friend about their debt, he said “don’t worry, they’re doing just fine”. It was at that point I realised it’s not the debt that matters, but the rate (time wise) at which you can repay it, i.e., debt itself is fine so long as you have sufficient cash flow, and debt can be cheap.

Unfortunately I’m just a software engineer, who has never been able to put this in practice.

A similar thing happened to me a few years back. I seriously considered changing careers, and decided not to renew my contract.

I decided to try work on an idea some one suggested a while before. I ended up eventually launching an iPhone app, and really enjoyed the experience (I work as a backend engineer usually). About a month later, someone called about an interesting project, and I’ve been fine since then (although working on different projects).

So the two tips I have are 1) build something for yourself or 2) learn something new and get a job in a different language/environment (it’s a big field).

I think they’re taking more or less the right approach. I do think they could have gone further and banned big events and told anyone with cold or flu to stay at home for 7 days (instead of with specific symptoms).

It’s already too late to ban travelers, and will do more damage than benefit. Well it’s possible to score political points by closing borders, the damage it will do the economy is not necessary.

Countries like New Zealand and Israel are so isolated from their neighbors they may benefit from closed borders, but tbh it feels like more short term planning when what we need is long term thinking. What happens in 2 weeks when the crisis is still unfolding?

I wouldn’t be surprised if more cases pop up in China in new locations because of the nature of this virus (delayed feedback system)

Since this thing isn’t going away in the next 2 weeks, seems illogical to buy too much. The advice is to buy 2 weeks of supplies in case you’re infected and can’t leave the house. People would need 6+ months worth of supplies, and even then would get infected once they came out of hibernation. The smart thing is for people to start thinking longer term for now. As for the solution, try buy slightly more than you usually would, until the panic buying is over. Try smaller shops and chat to owners about when they will have stock?

CityAM published a really interesting article about this https://www.cityam.com/what-was-behind-fridays-national-grid... It certainly fits the given explanation