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ellardon When it comes to privacy, default settings matter

Probably. This is generally the correct way to handle an upgrade while minimizing breaking changes to the user. Changing a user's settings during an upgrade will erode users' trust in doing so in the future, even if it's "good" for them.

ellardon The Streets Were Never Free. Congestion Pricing Finally Makes That Plain

The study that I remember off the top of my head is the one that came out of UC Berkeley. News article: https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/05/29/motorcycle-lanesplittin...

There's been a couple of others that I remember seeing, but I don't remember them or which sources I saw them at.

ellardon The Streets Were Never Free. Congestion Pricing Finally Makes That Plain

I'm disappointed that motorcycles/scooters and lane splitting aren't brought into the conversation more when discussions about traffic congestion come up. It feels like a win/win for nearly everyone to promote two wheeled transportation and allow them to split lanes or filter through traffic. Those who do not want to ever ride on two wheels still get the benefit of others doing so and essentially taking themselves out of the traffic queue. There's also been studies about how allowing lane splitting/filtering are ultimately safer for the riders too.

ellardon Facebook to ban white nationalist content

I don't know what Google's contracts and agreements are with local municipality, so the short version of my answer is that I don't know how i'd classify Google Fiber myself.

For a more general point of view, i'd take into account a lot of factors such as:

- who "owns" the service, both from an "on paper" POV and who builds and maintains it

- what does the contracts between the entity and the government say

- did the government pay for a service to be built by the entity, vs the entity asked for permission to build the service, vs the entity built the service using non-government-permission-required resources

- what was the spirit of the relationship between the entity and the government

- who will be using the service

- is the service a government-allowed monopoly

- etc.

Facebook does pass some of those tests (eg. the "public at large" is the target userbase for it), but fail a lot of the other tests at least in how they operate in the United States. Comcast's general laying out of wire + offering services over that wire passes a lot more of those tests and puts the service into public infrastructure in most folks' eyes.

edit: formatting

ellardon Facebook to ban white nationalist content

One is contracted by the US government to provide public infrastructure (and AFAIK still hasn't fulfilled their end of the agreement), and the other is an entity that operated and grew organically to provide a service that the government didn't ask for.

ellardon Java 12

Serious question: Isn't Java still one of the default languages if you are choosing a "safe" language to build and maintain a large piece of software? Considering how long it's been around and how many libraries exist for it now, i've generally viewed it as a language that's:

- fast enough for most things without a lot of pitfalls/gotchas

- easy enough to read for most developers

- easy enough for most developers to pick up if they've never used it, even if they aren't exactly enthused by the idea of doing so

- supported enough that you'll never be the only person who is debugging something

- widely used enough to never be alone when you are trying to use it in unsupported ways

- has commercial support from multiple companies

Basically all the things that a lot of "enterprise" companies love.

Edit: formatting

ellardon Volkswagen’s Costly Bet on Electric Cars

You've already touched on it a bit, but yes there are responsible off-roaders out there that work to minimize the amount of impact that they have on the lands that they traverse through. A lot of these folks will avoid areas that hikers and horse riders frequent. Of course, there are also asshole off-roaders too but the same can be said for everyone.

ellardon The phone-makers bringing back buttons

I'm a short guy who has driven my manual car while my right hand was basically a stump from having a knife put through it and having it bandaged up. I did drive slower in general as I couldn't shift as fast and it hurt to do so using the stump, but otherwise I was fine with one hand on the wheel.

For everyone else, we've had automatic cars for forever. There's also a video online of a man with no arms who learned how to drive their car without them.

Edit: changed to be specific about the one hand on the wheel.

ellardon The phone-makers bringing back buttons

I think that we've gotten some fantastic UI/UX designs that came from having to work within the limitation of pre-existing controller inputs. You also have the benefit of being able to assume that the user has some level of competency with the controller. Even with Jobs' example, UI/UX on computers generally remains the same within a given ecosystem as changing them forces your users to re-learn things that they already knew how to do. Individual products on that system mostly congregate to using the same patterns too so that they can reap the benefits of users being pre-trained to look for things to perform specific actions.

ellardon California keeps a secret list of criminal cops, but says you can’t have it

I don't disagree with your sentiment. That said, these kinds of jobs are generally poorly paid positions relative to the amount of bullshit that they have to deal with pre-employment and during employment. If we want a higher volume of "good" folks applying for these jobs, we're going to have to make their lives easier and/or raise their pay. Teaching and Policework especially are both classically stereotyped as jobs that have idealistic, hard working, underpaid people who keep things running mixed with lazy/corrupt/incompetent folks who can't get fired because they need bodies or it's bad for the optics of the organization to do so.

ellardon Elizabeth Holmes' Final Months at Theranos

It's not about yourself, but about understanding others. People grow up differently, have had different experiences, and hence have different risk assessments on who they trust and what they're willing to lose when that trust is misplaced.

ellardon Elizabeth Holmes' Final Months at Theranos

I'm not sure why it's hard to understand why someone could be convinced by words that match their bias backed by confidence. That's sales 101 and there's a reason why it works.

Now, yes, the medical breakthrough part should have been a red flag to serious investors, but my guess there is that once someone bought into it, other investors were scared that they might miss out on what could be the next big thing and jumped on it.

ellardon Can Big Science Be Too Big?

I've generally viewed large organizations at the best as being better at refining, expanding on, and scaling ideas more than creating brand new ideas on their own. After a certain size, companies tend to favor working on things that are 'proven' and tested as their priority shifts from exploring new ideas to maintaining and iterating on their primary products.

ellardon ‘A Minefield’: How Scholars Who Don’t Drink Navigate the Conference Social Scene

If you want to look at it that way, sure. Most communities ban certain behaviors to cultivate a welcoming culture for their target audience. Even HN has the guidelines which highly discourages certain posting behaviors to keep comment threads civil.

ellardon ‘A Minefield’: How Scholars Who Don’t Drink Navigate the Conference Social Scene

It's the difference between a tolerant atmosphere vs a welcoming one. A simple example is that when i'm with mixed company, I speak in English even if everyone i'm currently talking to can speak another language that i'm familiar with. This allows others to listen in and maybe join in the conversation. This is tossed out of the window when i'm speaking to the same folks but in private. Being welcoming means taking the extra step to make others comfortable, even if it means you end up inconveniencing yourself. Having no alcohol is more "welcoming" as it takes into account folks who might be recovering from alcoholism, while inconveniencing folks who casually drink.

ellardon Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

They probably have a system in place that automatically flags pages that look suspicious until a human approves of them.

ellardon Suicide increasing among American workers

On the flip side of this is David Foster Wallace's essay.

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/anthony-bourdain-...

If thinking about suicide as a form of giving up helped you our of your funk, then more power to you. I don't have any real experience on the matter, but I want to share this as not everyone relates to your experience and sees suicide as a form of giving up.

ellardon Beleaguered Didi Is Said to Lose $585M in Just Six Months

Validity of a complaint is also a hard problem to solve as it's mostly one's word against another. Crafting a well-worded negative review isn't difficult and there's been enough anecdotal stories from systems such as Yelp where a customer will threaten to leave a horrible review on a business if they don't cater to their every whim that using one valid-looking review to remove a driver would also be seen as unfair.

The number of negative reviews serve as a way to help strengthen the signal that a driver is truly "bad" in some way. Of course, the quality of those reviews should also be taken into account.

ellardon The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/us/san-francisco-firefigh...

You're not wrong, but it's more that they are in a position to help and the city doesn't seem to want to have another organization deal with the homeless. They're not exactly gunning for the role of taking care of the homeless.