If service to others and to society mean anything to you, working in Starbucks or any fast food job will teach you more about humanity and human society than most college grads learn from a humanities degree.
1,483 karma · joined June 8, 2023
1. a long dragged out distraction over decades trying to make it work
2. a painful but quick 40B write down and the ability to refocus the company on better projects tomorrow
.. then they are, quite rightly imo, going to pick #2. In fact I would assume this going to be the next announcment.
Even if there were no such thing as GPS, simply the act of running a fleet of trains or trucks or buses on a schedule, means that anyone could do a bit of math and roughly calculate the position of every vehicle based solely on the schedule.
If this is something you’re able to do and people like it, I think that’s great.
However, the post is about a paid app and that’s going to have a significant influence on the type of support requests you get, and whether or not it makes financial sense to develop according to those requests.
In small doses, and short terms, I might agree with your classification.
But when copyright is 150 years It no longer has anything to do with reward for the author or encourage you creativity, it’s just a cartel.
There are many ways our economic system is entirely compatible with stopping global warming, but it would require putting prices on things people consider sacrosanct like unlimited driving and unlimited municipally treated water for lawns. Wake me when the socialists are willing to talk how they will equitably tell citizens that they can’t do environmentally destructive things when the citizens are telling them that they want to do those environmentally destructive things. I’m not saying there’s an easy answer, in fact, I’m convinced that there isn’t. He had every day we are told that if only we have a revolution, suddenly these hard problems just disappear, and I don’t think that’s true. After the revolution, people will still be selfish. Perhaps the selfishness won’t be measured in dollars, but it will still exist.
> Many assume the central conflict in society is between the haves and the have-nots. In reality, much of the struggle is between the haves and the have-mores—people who are already doing well but want the money, resources, and status of those above them. They often disguise this ambition as concern for the have-nots.
> The affluent were the most likely to agree with statements like “I want a position of prestige.” Elsewhere, a University of Edinburgh study found that malicious envy—resentment at others’ success—was one of the strongest predictors of support for coercive redistribution. The impulse, in other words, is not to lift up the poor but to tear down those who are one rung higher.
This is definitely part of it, but the other side of it is the network effect that allows a minority of the population who happen to be especially afflicted by shiny object syndrome, to drive population scale moves from one platform to another. I feel a good analogue is the way that new restaurants become the hot place, the place to see and be seen, but they can usually only sustain this for a time and then the buzz moves elsewhere. The difference, of course, is that the scale is much much larger, and restaurants generally don’t have a way of attempting to directly addict their users.
I have no doubt that there are people who wish to attend meetings to vote and argue about minutia involves in the running of bakeries and other organizations. But just because people exist does not mean that the most ethical organization is one that gives them the most opportunity to exercise their particular interest in attending meetings.
The vast majority of people do not want every organization their lives to run like a mini democracy. Not only is this not necessarily more ethical than other alternatives, but it is definitely less efficient and that matters when it comes to the supply of material goods. I don’t want a vote on whether or not my bakery puts sesame seeds on the bread. I just want to buy a loaf of bread thanks.
The party vanguard of the worker co-op is exactly as capable of selfish or abusive behaviour as the private owner.
There will always be injustices in the world that require people to organize political support to fight. However using this as your sole lens risks putting the cart before the horse - are we trying to organize tech workers because they are marginalized class, or because your political ideas require overthrow and rich tech workers would be useful foot solders if you can recruit them?
Again, this is entirely dependant on who is consuming the statistic and for what purpose. For some use cases, yes demand data will be quite crucial. For others it will not. It's quite apparent the site's author doesn't see this as crucial and for the purposes I need to consider memory pricing, I agree.
The audience who would benefit from hypothetical $/usefulness would be people who don’t know what memory is and don’t know what’s inside of their computers, or what it does. This is a fine audience to be in and to serve, but obviously not the audience of that website and not HN.
If you think that audience is under served for memory market statistics, I encourage you to make such a website and serve that audience.
For people on HN, who do you know what memory is, $/GB is a fine metric.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe...
To be clear, I'm sure anyone who wants to can dig up examples of other types of bias, and of course, truly excellent articles on non-political topics. If you restrict your reading to avoid anything related to contentious political narratives, you'll probably do ok. It just seems like the organization as a whole tilts in one particular direction, and this seems bad for something that is supposed to be a neutral source of knowledge.
An argument about whether or not to deploy differential privacy on large statistical databases has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you give your address to have a package delivered. If you want the package delivered, you have to give your address.
On the other hand, it’s not at all clear that people should have to involuntarily, my force of law, offer up all sorts of personal details about their lives. And questions about whether the use of differential privacy can or should justify the collection of sensitive information are quite valid.
The census is justified by the idea that it will help us plan for the future. But the track record of central planning is poor to disastrous.
A small example: in theory population changes could inform land use decisions. In practice however, the ability of population to increase is softly capped by the amount of housing that exists, or will exist. If you restrict or frustrate housing, you will also restrict people from living where they want to live. Then the planners will point to the census data and tell you that nobody wants to live there and therefore there’s no need for change.
Ironically, if you wanted to measure where people want to live in order to get information for planning purposes, the number is right there and doesn’t require any personal data collection at all - it’s the price. (in this example $ per square foot of floor space). But in my experience people who like central planning don’t believe in prices so they ignore that and they look at their reams of personal data and they conclude that all is well in the world. It is hard for me to be sympathetic if one day folks like that had have less data to look at.
I think he has it backwards here.
Techniques like differential privacy hide the fact that a trade-off exists, except for a small cadre of experts who live and breathe this stuff.
I don’t know enough to defend this decision, but it strikes me that if there is a real trade-off, not having access to these techniques will force people other than statisticians to confront the trade-off.
If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place.
Someone who’s never seen it before, who has no exposure to the cultures that produced it or the discourse around it, can be impressed by the size, but otherwise not care.
Worse, if such a person is actively hostile to the cultures that produce it, then learning that it is valuable to that culture will lead them to assign negative value to it.