logicalmonster

First, prove that a credible death threat actually happened. And by credible, a baseline for that should be an actual police report being filed, putting somebody on the hook for possible false police reports if it was fabricated.

All public claims of death threats when somebody is going through a bad PR cycle should be considered somewhat suspect unless some kind of police report or credible evidence is provided.

> Would anyone else here have a need for a real-time translation video chat app?

I have to question if this is an actual post, because asking if a real-time video translator that works well would be useful to other people seems bizarre.

The answer is yes, that's a great product, if it work well.

Be prepared for the obvious coming bait and switch.

The Feds always sell a radical expansion of power by saying it will only be applied to unsympathetic people (pedophiles, terrorists, etc) and once it's in place, "oh yeah well actually, we're just going to apply it to everybody".

For what it's worth, I think some people on HN are going to convey some (IMO faux) offense at the ethnicity aspect of this project, but it seems interesting to me. I'd like to see what Greek or Italian people my age wear if I'm planning on vacationing there and want to have a solid party outfit. Or maybe I'm looking for a gift for my friend from India that would be something he may want to wear.

That said...

a) I think the categorizations and groupings can use significant work.

b) The site needs to be seeded with far more and more realistic content to have a chance.

c) There's a giant step 2 of this project missing. Ok, I see some great outfits on your site. Now what? Can I buy them from you, or can you tell me where to get them? What's the endgame and benefit of using you over Pinterest or other fashion boards?

PS: You spelled Nigerian wrong. Since people are sensitive to this stuff, you should really ensure you get it right.

Often when IQ is brought up, it seems that HN leaps to explain why those tests aren't accurate, don't really mean anything, etc. Is anybody going to make that case here?

If I had to make a wild guess, on top of a lot of ways of handling this technically, there's probably a set of business-policies they follow in the event of some problem like a room being double-booked, or a lodging otherwise becoming unavailable after the reservation is made.

> In the (hopefully rare) event of a problem, they probably try and keep people happy through a standard playbook of things like refunds, giving future coupons or discounts, and trying and arranging alternative lodging.

> Even if their databases could somehow guarantee to be perfectly consistent and no random booking problems occur, they still need those standard policies in place to deal with random hotel problems like flooding or other problems.

> Great point! But do you think people of China trust WeChat? I doubt you need to have reputation to do what Elon plans to do with X. You just need lots of power/money.

That stuff flies when the media is indifferent towards you, or even supportive. But what about when you're on their shitlist and every media piece is an opportunity to whine and groan about you?

With Elon being on the mainstream media's shitlist due to many reasons, I think he'll have to work harder than average to get customers right now and doing some things like customer service in a radically atypical way would be a smart decision.

a) I feel that any comments about X (please respect how they identify themselves) have the well poisoned right now. Whether they do anything good or anything bad, it's impossible for them to get an objective opinion right now so posting this on here is just inviting really vapid criticism.

b) Should X have banned you? Probably not.

c) Was it kind of dumb of to post a random copy/paste message to multiple people with a link on X knowing how algorithms are dumb? Probably.

d) A suggestion for Elon. Zig where others zag. Most SV giants provide no human customer service to fix issues like this. Can you figure out a way to provide good customer service in some form to resolve the issues these customers face? If you want X to be the method to handle online payments and anything else you envision in the future, you have to be trustworthy to people and be able to handle problems with intelligent humans.

My first instinct is "this is exploitative and disgusting".

That said, after thinking about it for a minute, the devil may be in a lot of details here.

I've been to past free photo hot-spots that were beyond crowded and impossible to have any breathing room in, in complete disrepair and borderline-dangerous, dirty, no amenities like a restroom or water fountain, no parking, etc. Having a relaxed time trying to take an amazing picture and enjoy the view was impossible.

Some kind of fee to facilitate a special experience doesn't seem too unreasonable, though the price point mentioned seems far beyond reasonable unless the experience is truly luxurious and first-rate.

No news source is completely unbiased, but I feel like I can put more trust in news sources that are willing to really "call out their own team" when they're full of shit.

For what little it's worth, I disagree with guys like @GlennGreenwald on some topics, but he's fearless in being willing to call out the left when they're stupid on issues like war and many other things. That's the mark of somebody actually attempting to be a newsman and not an advocate.

1) Most job applications ever done for any professional job don't have the job applicant meeting 100% of the actual job requirements. Don't stress out about applying. The worst thing that will happen to you is you won't get the job.

2) Please do recognize that we're in a down economic period and employers can afford to be more stringent with the requirements. Your odds of getting an interview are probably lower than average.

3) That said, wasting ~15 minutes of your life to make a half-decent application for a job you really want seems worth it.

How did Google come up with that kind of solution with their teams of developers that pass those crazy leetcode interviews?

Matching strings like this seems like a solution that an average high-school programmer would find some question marks with.

> Not really - it shows nuanced understanding that some content by itself / with a small audience doesn't cause harm, but the company doesn't not want to amplify it. Protects peoples speech but also declines to promote them to a bigger audience.

Putting aside the issue of what specific content causes harm or not (which is a very contentious issue), my issue with this kind of justification is that it puts mega-corporations in a position to have their cake and eat it too.

With a straight face, depending on their audience, Google can claim to both not be censoring content at the same time as they're claiming to be censoring content. This feels like they're putting themselves in a position to walk a legal tightrope on what they're actually doing and flout any laws they want.

Just speculating out loud, but in some cases, having a recruitment process that fails might be the goal.

Some manager might want a recruitment process to fail to promote their favored internal candidates, or to justify going the H1B route.

To do that, you might need a horrible recruitment process that is repellent to the best job candidates that fails so your desired outcome happens.

* Regarding OP's example, I wonder if the problem is unclear documentation. The documentation for the geofencing might not have been clear exactly who they were restricting the software to: whether it was to people within the US or people living in the US. Without physically traveling to another country and signing up with a foreign account with a foreign address with a foreign phone account, the devs might never realize that there's an issue accessing the system.

* It's sometimes the case that geofencing is applied for major contractual or legal reasons that cannot be bypassed.

> A service might be restricted to X state because there are stupid laws that govern it. For instance, many sports betting sites are really careful about geographical checks because they don't want to run afoul of complicated state laws so they check if you're physically in X area for each action.

> A video service might be restricted to Y country because there's no way to get the rights to play some video content in Y country, so doing that is necessary to avoid running afoul of Hollywood.

* A lot of App review spam or fraudulent credit card checks come from overseas, so there might be an arguably semi-valid reason to restrict people from using a service that is useless unless you're physically there.

1) Hopefully your income stream will last, but just remember that monthly $5K you're counting on might not be around forever. You're probably going to have re-invent yourself multiple times in your life.

2) Pick a profession that you might be able to meld with your technical/computer skills and interests in the future. Maybe you'll have an idea for a future startup that combines your job that other people without the tech background haven't recognized.

If certification was offered instead of the current multiple rounds of technical interviews, homework assignments, and leetcode gymnastics, this might be a positive move forward.

But instead it's just going to be a certification arms race where you're going to have to have 5 great certifications to merely qualify for the opportunity to start the cycle of interview bullshit.

* Being around the end of the month during a troubling economic period in the tech industry I'd explain the increase in random messages by guessing that lot of low-level recruiting shops are desperately trying to meet some arbitrary quotas.

* Not saying you can't ever find a job with them, but these kinds of recruiters are almost always bad communicators, pushy, disrespectful of social norms, have questionable motives, barely understand anything about the tech they're recruiting for to the point of even getting the names of technologies they're looking for wrong, and are rarely worth dealing with.

Putting aside the ethics of censorship for a moment, there's a few oddities to me here.

* It seems to be sending mixed messages that content is so "problematic" that it cannot be recommended by YouTube, yet not "problematic" enough to be banned by YouTube.

* It seems odd that Google, with all of their algorithm geniuses, can't work out a system to not recommend "problematic" content for generic 1776 keywords. Aren't there hundreds of reputable channels that deal with pure history stuff? Aren't there maybe thousands of history videos on the Revolutionary War that have no connection to present day politics that can be linked to?

* Google's algorithm seems incredibly stupid if they're recommending more than an infinitesimal percentage of 1776 keywords to "alt-right" content. Recognizing 1776 as a very important historical year has been done in American schools forever. It's up there with 1492 with random years that kids are taught about remembering. The overwhelming majority of anything ever created with 1776 as a keyword is not about January 6.

"Only interested in remote only jobs" is a somewhat misleading phrase.

All other things being equal, I'd definitely prefer a remote job, or at least one that afforded some reasonable flexibility.

That said, I'd take a job with less flexible conditions for a significant boost in pay that makes up for the hour commute each way, and extra expenses such as transportation and lunch.

I understand the concept of saving the most characters. If you were designing some kind of compression algorithm or something, that's the variable that would matter the most.

But from a human perspective, I might be wrong about this, but it feels like there'd be a mental tax to typing this way in that you have to deliberately think about your typing too much rather than focusing on the words. I think it's nice to mostly focus on the words.

Even if you get to the point that typing that way is 100% automatic, I'm not sure that this is always a huge win. Imagine being out and about and needing to use a friend's computer for some tasks. All of a sudden, you've got the muscle memory of randomly compressing lots of common words where it doesn't work with the system you have to use. There's a reason almost everybody uses Qwerty keyboards despite there arguably being more efficient keyboard layouts possible.

That said, I'm not trying to dissuade you from doing whatever you want and if it works great for you more power to you.

Using some typing shortcuts for common tasks sounds smart. If you frequently post a 30 minute meeting invite with a link and wanted to write that out as "m30" or something, hey that's a legit timesaver.

However, I think abbreviating simple words like "the" seems like a really tiny gain that doesn't make it worth the potential disadvantages.

Ooh, I like this game.

F Bezos M Musk K Zuckerberg.

Eh, seriously though. To me, they all feel like conmen that engage in bad behavior to some extent.

I have to say that I admire Zuckerberg the least of this group because the bad behavior of Facebook feels so much more personal. I think you can almost get away with that stuff if you're charismatic like Steve Jobs and have good taste, but that's IMO not him at all.

As far as Musk goes, I think it's impossible for him to have a fair shake these days because of his disputes with the media in taking away their checkmarks and disagreeing with many of them politically. I can write out a long list of stuff I disagree with Elon Musk on, but I think most people aren't going to weigh everything fairly right now because he's having his 2 minutes of hate in the press.

With Bezos, it feels like he'd be willing to do anything to succeed, no matter how crooked. That's admirable in terms of succeeding in business, but maybe not so much as a person.

Of all of these people, IMO Musk is the only one that has a realistic chance at a super positive legacy. 40 years from now, Amazon and Facebook might still be some boring megacorporations or not. That's great for their descendants' wallets, but who cares about them otherwise? With Musk, you're probably not going to remember specific details of his shitposting on X that angered you, but the Earth might be a better place from some technology he was heavily involved in.

I think being a great frontend developer is the hardest thing on the web.

You're dealing with crazy environments, far faster changing best practices, libraries, frameworks, and tooling, increasingly demanding audiences, and any imperfections on whatever you deliver are extremely noticeable.

If a backend developer does a database query that's a little inefficient, odds are nobody is going to even notice that.

If a frontend developer does some animation that's a little choppy and with bad timing, they might have the entire company management crawling up their ass the next day.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that you and your Scrum Master peers were all top of the class and genuine in your understanding of development and desire to help facilitate project success and never acted in a self-interested way. That's a fairly big assumption, but let's roll with that.

And maybe, a really solid big-tech company with great people who "get it" can largely make Scrum work "well enough". I'm sure you oversaw a lot of products shipping successfully.

Was that because of Scrum, or in spite of it and you might have been even more successful doing something else?

Overall though, I think you recognize how Scrum might devolve in many typical situation, right?

PS: To make it clear, no disparagement is intended in anything I said or say even though the consequences of that might seem like an attack on your profession.

I think Scrum might be defensible when used for rare, genuine emergency situations. If a make-or-break the company project with a tight deadline comes along, you might want to change it up with something like Scrum for a short time period to manage that as a reasonable, defensible choice.

But I think it's devastating to developer happiness and overall productivity if you're just running as a Scrum forever and have people with literal job-titles like "Scrum Master" who (IMO) feel pressured to create as much process as possible to justify their position. The ceremonies and process are going to grate on developers long-term. IMO, the managers will have a bad long-term sense of the effort and difficulties and progress of each sprint if you're perpetually doing that.

If we had governments that weren't entirely corrupt for money and power, your train of thinking would be entirely rational and perfect.

But there's substantial government interest in having things like medical passports/IDs that provide them with substantial power and bureaucratic expansion (and more importantly, a huge financial win for the medical-industrial complex)

Additionally, those vaccines served as an idealogical purge mechanism where people who were willing to go against the grain and not just follow orders were drummed out of the government.

Hard to believe that they're just going to give up on this because it's the right thing to do.

> it seems better to be safe than sorry

All other things being equal, it is better to be safe than sorry.

But that's not the choice offered.

One thing that you never needed the benefit of hindsight to understand is that there's a non-trivial risk to the vaccines as well. This always exists. For instance, it took science years to understand the full impact of Thalidomide.

In the small chance that these injections end up having substantial long-term problems with something like cancer or fertility, a universally applied treatment could be the destruction of humanity.

Trying to compel universal injections was always a foolish risk-management decision.

> Mixing if and when is a very common linguistic quirk.

If this was a casual blog post or something, I think you'd have a fair counterpoint that would muddy the waters sufficiently.

But this is published in a renowned scientific journal. Every word choice should be carefully chosen, and it's fair game to critique it as such.

Putting aside many of the substantial problems with analyzing data in this field, along with not covering key issues in the overall risk-management decision such as weighing the known/unknown short/long term risks from the vaccines themselves balanced against Covid, I'd like to say that this section from the summary caught my eye.

> The immunity conferred by past infection should be weighed alongside protection from vaccination when assessing future disease burden from COVID-19, providing guidance on when individuals should be vaccinated, and designing policies that mandate vaccination for workers or restrict access, on the basis of immune status, to settings where the risk of transmission is high, such as travel and high-occupancy indoor settings.

Note that the summary posits "when individuals should be vaccinated" not "if", as a base assumption and leaves no room for individual choice and risk-management decisions. Ditto on "designing policies that mandate vaccination".

To me, the way some of these things are worded displays a starting bias and lack of credibility.