g_sch

This seems like something that would be difficult to do on a mobile device such as an iOS or Android, which trains the user not to think about the filesystem at all. Is there a user-friendly mobile solution for this?

Great point, I'll ask my landlord if I can pay my rent in status this month.

I think the author's point about stealing has more to do with the way low-wage workers are assumed to be criminals by their employers, and have to deal with various invasive security measures their employer requires.

If you're accepting an offer to work for free for a major company, why do you think you'd have enough leverage to negotiate those other things?

One thing I've always struggled with in these "financial planning" products is how to make the numbers make sense on a gut level. My problem is that, after doing some level of "taking charge of my finances" to make a savings/investment plan, it still feels like I'm treading water and barely making any progress toward my goals. Yet when I plug my numbers into any financial planning app (including this one), they inevitably not only tell me that I'm going to be a millionaire when I retire, but also that I'll have tons of money within just a couple years. This usually makes me reflexively dismiss their conclusions.

I realize that part of the problem is that it's hard for my brain to extrapolate a few months of observations into a decades-long trendline, but I really would love to see a product that helps my brain bridge the gap between my own perception and the big money chart.

Based on the post, it sounds like there's some data parsing going on (possibly to present the data in a user-friendly way?), and the parsing step uses outdated versions of software (such as ffmpeg) which have well-documented vulnerabilities in them.

The problem with being boring while attacking powerful institutions (like LEOs or nation states) is that it only works as long as you're small enough to stay below their radar. After a certain point, the material reality will sink in that you're a threat, and they're going to take action against you regardless of how you carry yourself. It's totally possible, given that we're starting to hear more and more accounts of powerful people using Signal, that we're approaching that tipping point, and a more gloves-off approach might be necessary.

That being said, I agree with you 100% on the cryptocurrency payments issue and think that was a misstep on their part.

It's a simple order of magnitude calculation. 2^256 is greater than one billion to the eighth power, times 100,000. There are probably several possible ways you could estimate how many different objects a person could distinguish between, but I think it's unlikely you'd come up with even a single billion.

I've had pretty good experiences with Hired before. Coming out of a product consulting background, I wasn't sure I was going to have the requisite experience to transition to an in-house role, but they found several leads for me and I ended up landing a gig with a significantly higher starting salary than I expected.

My point is that, if a country no longer derives its power and wealth from controlling the banking system through military might, rather than freely giving up that power, it's going to flex that military might in other ways to ensure that it maintains that power and wealth. If crypto merely displaces military resources (as I think it would) instead of replacing them (as you seem to be arguing), then it's not really fair to count the military as part of the banking system's energy/carbon footprint.

I don't really understand this argument. If militaries are part of the embodied infrastructure of a country's banking system, this would imply that replacing the banking system with something decentralized (like cryptocurrency) would cause countries across the world to reduce their military footprint.

I find it much more likely that military resources would be diverted to somewhere upstream of mining in the value chain. For example, if we continue relying on carbon-intensive proof-of-work blockchains, why wouldn't armies simply be diverted to secure energy resources?

I know, from watching Signal's development and public writings over the last several years, that their strategy is to bring privacy and security into as many people's lives as possible while matching the UX of the best for-profit surveillance capitalists out there. In HN threads like these, I usually find myself in the minority because I believe in this mission and how they've prioritized it over other goals e.g. decentralization, free software, etc.

All that being said, I feel like they're really unfairly dismissing a lot of real concerns by characterizing them as just saying "cryptocurrency is the worst". The Signal Foundation absolutely understands that the key to winning the competition against FAANG and surveillance-based tech is just as much PR as software development. It requires people trust the app and the foundation to have their best interests in mind. Cryptocurrency may be popular, but it's definitely not synonymous with "safe and trustworthy" by any means.

They also don't really answer the regulatory question. Governments, in particular the US government, really doesn't like unregulated finance. If there's a case to be made by some SEC or FBI busybody that the Signal Foundation is involved in financial crimes, they have a lot of resources available to bring the hammer down on them. And that's just the worst-case scenario. There are plenty of other avenues that the US government could use to kill this feature (or the app as a whole), including exerting legal pressure on Apple/Google to remove it from their App Stores, or simply making MOB next-to-impossible to purchase legally.

I am in support of their mission to make payments private and secure. And I think there is a universe in which I can see this working out for Signal. The last few years have brought news of several well-known powerful people using Signal. US politicians have been known to use it, and the latest Facebook data leak seems to indicate Mark Zuckerberg is a user as well. If Signal is widely understood to be so valuable that people in positions of power are interested in using it, maybe they're betting that no one will dare touch them because they're too big to regulate. Here's hoping!

Amman is the largest city in Jordan by some distance _now_, but when it was designated as the capital in 1921, it was much smaller. Its growth has come almost exclusively since then, and as a result of its designation as the captial, it became the largest city in the country.

I believe in some cases a capital was moved to a minor but already-existing city. Amman and Madrid are examples of this, so maybe they don't count as "purpose-built".

Madrid, Amman, Naypyitaw, Brasilia, Washington...history is replete with examples of governments who wanted to move out of unruly urban centers and start with a "clean slate".

The reason the OODA loop was useful, though, is because it took a decision-making process that was normally used by individuals and brought it into organizations. It seeks to answer the question: how do we minimize the overhead cost of making decisions in large organizations without compromising on effectiveness? Given that it originated in the military, the lack of a "wait for orders" step is what's notable.

I definitely agree that 3-9 months (especially at the low end of that range) isn't enough to feel sufficiently rooted somewhere, but one quick thing I would add is that I did all of this while speaking German fluently already, so my time in Germany at least was not consumed by trying to surmount any language barrier. I'm just someone who makes friends through my existing friends (instead of strangers), so starting from zero isn't something I do well.

I'm interested in a lot of these responses because they don't reflect my experience - I wonder if that's the result of sampling bias (e.g. people with good travel experiences are drawn to this thread) or if I'm the aberration.

Granted, I didn't quit my job, but after graduate school I moved to Germany from the US and took a job consulting. For three years I lived in places like Berlin, Madrid, Split...etc for 3-9 months at a time. There were enjoyable things about it, sure, but I really underestimated how difficult it was to discard your entire social circle and start over. A few years ago I moved back to the US, in a city where a lot of my friends had moved to, and it was probably the most positive decision I've ever made in my life.

I also feel like my time abroad didn't "broaden my horizons" all that much, and I find myself skeptical about the claims that international travel makes you a better person. I think what you get out of travel is heavily based on how you decide to relate to places and people, and merely leaving your country does not guarantee this will change.

She called the decision (presumably his) to fire Dr. Gebru "obviously very dumb"

He resigned after they refused to run one of his articles as written. I think this is an important distinction because other journalists have been fired for their speech, but he wasn't one of them.

I use Signal for 1:1 messaging and some small groups, but Telegram is much better for large groups and communities. Admin tools, UX, performance, and discoverability are all far better on Telegram. I'm quite happy to use different tools for different purposes, and I'm glad they both exist.

I think you are vastly overestimating the significance behind having a "previous CoC violation allegation on [one's] permanent record". Who's keeping, and enforcing on, permanent records of this sort? Every org is going to call this one for themselves, and the facts are out there.

I was hoping there was going to be some explanation about how the climactic effects of the eruption influenced events elsewhere in the world. The way the article teed up the story of Napoleon's return certainly made me think it was going in that direction.

I don't feel like your analogy makes sense here. The fact that there were explosives stored in the Beirut Port for years is exactly the same kind of institutional failure as PG&E failing to maintain their equipment for decades.

It's true that there are natural factors at play here, but in the case of Beirut, that might be more akin to asking "why is there such a large market for ammonium nitrate?"

Does the cell network have a single point of failure which could explain these concurrent outages across carriers? I have a (somewhat crude) mental model of how the internet works, so if this were a nationwide internet outage I would at least have an inkling of whether it was an accidental misconfiguration, bad actor launching an attack, etc. I have no such model for the cell network!

I did this exact calculation and it comes out to 730, exactly like GP said.

I think the author's frustration here is warranted, but it's directed at the wrong part of DoorDash/GrubHub's product strategy.

Advertising on competitor listings is a bread and butter marketing strategy that happens everywhere. If you're a BBQ restaurant owner, you want to advertise on your competitors' branded keywords because it's an obvious place to acquire new customers.

The underhanded move on the part of food delivery platforms like GrubHub, DoorDash, Caviar, UberEats, etc., is that they increasingly are nudging their users to completely remove the restaurant brand from the loop. Open up one of the apps and notice a few things about the user experience they're pushing:

- foregrounding "dishes" and "cuisines" rather than specific restaurants

- hiding/burying the ability to just browse a list of restaurants, instead opting for themed or algorithmically generated collections of restaurants and dishes.

I get the distinct sense that DoorDash, GrubHub, and the other delivery platforms want their users to think of the platform as the source of the food, rather than the restaurant. "Let's get some ribs delivered from GrubHub" rather than "Let's get some ribs delivered from Saddleback BBQ via GrubHub".

This makes perfect sense for a company operating a two-sided marketplace - you ideally want to become indispensable to both sides. Restaurants need to realize that the marketing opportunities the platforms are offering will only provide them value as long as they're not entirely captured by the platform. And since restaurants have much lower brand recognition and far lower marketing budgets, it's going to be tough to fight back.

I think the idea that workers need "profitable" degrees to work "profitable" jobs isn't as obvious as you think.

It used to be said that a college degree was a ticket to a well-paying job. Now, a few decades later, we're told to get a STEM degree, because other degrees are worthless. Who's to say that the criteria won't get even narrower in the future?

Degrees aren't a symbol of skill nearly as much as they are a way for the market to allocate well-paying jobs, and the allocation is getting smaller all the time.

All over the world, I see people trying to stop people from being outdoors, regardless of the health and safety implications. In the UK, police are issuing citations to people in parks. NYC has set up a tip line to report "social distancing violations" and is closing some parks.

I don't understand it. I understand the imperative for social distancing, of course. But it seems like enforcement has been targeted at relatively low-risk activities (hanging out in large, public outdoor spaces) and not at all at the high-risk ones (e.g. where I live in Brooklyn, half the laundromats have closed and the remaining half are constantly crowded).

I can't help but think that part of this impulse comes from a certain sour-grapes mentality that sees people trying to enjoy themselves during a trying time and wants to take it away from them. A real public health intervention would ensure that all necessary activities - getting groceries, doing laundry, going to work - are just as safe as going to the park.

It's strange to me to hear people blame turnstile jumping for the decline of the MTA. Its budget for operations has been repeatedly cut or diverted to large capital projects, which do nothing to improve service if operations are poor. Declining ridership and fare intake were a reflection of the poor operational state of the system - in 2017 and 2018, as the number of delays and major incidents skyrocketed, ridership went down. And when operations improved over the latter half of 2018 through 2019, ridership went up again.

Even if a low farebox recovery rate were the problem, the solution isn't increased policing. Many people in NYC simply can't afford to ride the subway, and you're not gonna magically squeeze money out of them.