Hacker News Reader

mayneackon California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

Yes, although the ones I've seen today all have humans in the driver seat.

mayneackon California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

I just started seeing Cruise cars driving around Santa Monica this week. Are they already paused in SF and we're somehow later or is pausing just a SF thing?

mayneackon A little-known pollution rule keeps the air dirty for millions of Americans

In an ideal world, I don't think opinionated manipulation of the underlying dataset is a good idea. If you want to avoid outliers dominating your analysis, you should aggregate it in an outlier resistant method like using the median or other percentile based strategy.

If you allow for manipulating the data, especially on such a politically charged subject, the manipulation method itself will get gamed like it seems is happening here.

mayneackon A little-known pollution rule keeps the air dirty for millions of Americans

I doubt we can control something like a volcano, but the main example in the article, wildfires, can absolutely be controlled more than they are today.

If your dataset excludes natural fires, but doesn't exclude controlled burns, for example, controlled burns would end up looking more negative because they cause pollution and don't get "credit" for any prevention.

mayneackon Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying

A pretty interesting history of Detroit in the 60s and 70s that relies heavily on first hand accounts and primary sources.

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/458-detroit-i-do-mind-d...

mayneackon Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff

Plexamp is my default music app. It's great!

mayneackon Google employees finding out if they're laid off by testing their access badges

Has that ever not been the case? Every single "Tell HN" starts out unsubstantiated - getting to the front page is what usually substantiates them.

mayneackon Substack is laying off 14% of its staff

If you add /feed on a substack site there's a RSS feed for it. I don't know about paid substacks, but that's how I consume a few free ones.

mayneackon The Worst Perk at Google

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United...

I've always heard it attributed to WWII era wage controls. You couldn't compete on salary so you had to come up with other benefits to tie to your job.

mayneackon Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

Plex (and plexamp) have really brought back the old iTunes interface I didn't know I was missing.

I can search and get a list, I can sort within that list by whatever I want, I can create a "smart playlist" for "100 tracks, with more than 5 plays that were last played more than 3 months ago". There's also a "shuffle albums" feature that I didn't realize I missed from iTunes. You can also add a tidal subscription within plex, but it's a little clunky so I just stick to my library.

mayneackon Ask HN: Are CO salary disclosure laws affecting remote work opportunities?

Isn't there a similar rule going into effect in NYC?

mayneackon Adversarial Wordle

This is a 4 step solution: https://twitter.com/zwegner/status/1480037275803308034

mayneackon Apple Music is the last library focused music service

Like several other comments here, I had the same experience as you and decided to go with plex. What no one mentioned is that plex allows you to add a tidal library in addition to your self hosted content. It's not a perfectly seamless experience because you have to mark tidal albums one at a time to add to your self hosted library and I don't think you can cache them offline on plexamp (for android at least), but it's the best I've found.

I'm hoping to give Roon a try someday, but plex works well enough that I haven't quite gotten up the activation energy: https://roonlabs.com/downloads

mayneackon Turmoil at Bezos' Blue Origin: Talent exodus after CEO push for return to office

Use the money saved on maintaining an office for peak capacity and pay for travel/temporary space.

mayneackon “A calorie is a calorie” violates the second law of thermodynamics (2004)

Did a double take when I read the authors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Feinman

mayneackon 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

It also differs within airports. I flew in LAX a week ago and one of the non-precheck lines only took off shoes, but left liquids and laptops in bags and did a generic metal detector. They didn't even randomly assign people to lines, it was apparently early enough for me to choose to use that line since it was obviously moving faster.

mayneackon Airbnb offers free accommodation for 20k Afghan refugees

I don't think the parent comment is describing the humanitarian crisis going this far back, but the US is at least partially responsible for the pre-9/11 Taliban going back to the support of the Afghan mujahideen in the Cold War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_mujahideen#Relationship...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Taliban#Foreign_inf...

mayneackon Illinois first state to tell police they can't lie to minors in interrogations

I'm pretty sure a lot more doctors, engineers, and lawyers lie in a professional context than there are doctors, engineers, and lawyers in jail. Maybe they go to jail more than police, I have no idea, but surely a majority of the time they get away with lying.

mayneackon YouTube algorithm recommends videos that violate its own policies: study

The original comment I was replying to was speculating about how they imagined youtube worked without evidence. All I did was provide an alternate explanation. I wouldn't even go so far as to suggest it's a bad thing that social networks avoid using more aggressive classifiers, just that I'm skeptical of the "we don't have the ability" explanation.

By all account YouTube are arbitrary with bans and blockings. That's not the same as unlenient.

The standard example of the phenomenon I'm describing is from Twitter. They successfully keep nazi content out of German twitter, but not the rest of the world. That suggests that Twitter's moderation is partially constrained by their own policies, not just technical ability. I don't think this is a far fetched understanding of how any social network works.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/twitter-germany-nazis/

mayneackon YouTube algorithm recommends videos that violate its own policies: study

"Brad, we can't deploy your conspiracy theory classifier because it would reduce the number of high value viewer engagements by 2.7%. Let's just stick with the version that depends on accumulating reports. It's not a big deal because we can always intervene if something embarrassing slips through."

mayneackon YouTube algorithm recommends videos that violate its own policies: study

Sure, that's plausible, but it seems equally likely that Youtube _can_ detect videos that violate their policy and yet chooses to wait until they get some threshold of reports/media attention because those videos are also very engaging. Having the policy allows them to react when they get pressure without impacting the bottom line.

mayneackon When pop history bombs: a response to Malcolm Gladwell

Carlin actually had Gladwell on recently to talk about the book. He wasn't anywhere close to as critical as this review, however.

https://pca.st/5rvqo9kz

mayneackon Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt for the wrong person

The app was actually originally framed this way and named "Vigilante". It's been bad from the beginning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_(app)

https://www.businessinsider.com/citizen-vigilante-app-crime-...

mayneackon Update on beta testing payments in Signal

> And this adds to the PIN & cloud "features", insistence of a phone number

the PIN & cloud features are explicitly designed to facilitate breaking the phone number requirement.

mayneackon Donation page "not compliant with Google Play Policies"

Charities are not the only entities that receive donations. Political candidates and other advocacy groups (like the ACLU) are mostly donation based non-charities. This year I've seen dozens of restaurants asking for donations to keep afloat. Google may have a more constrained definition for their TOS, but I don't think this use of "donate" is outside the common understanding of the word.

mayneackon It 'Might Take Weeks' to Free Ship Stuck in Suez Canal

oil

mayneackon Square acquires majority of Tidal in $297M deal

I haven't, but this thread got roon on my list to explore. I've used plex for movies for years, and google music's end got me looking for new things.

I have two music libraries: tidal and my own music (I'm using about 80% my own music). The music is well tagged already using picard, so I don't know how well that works out of the box. When I'm in the tidal library, I usually will mark an album/artist to be added to my normal music library and then it will start showing up there mixed in with my self hosted stuff.

The killer features (to me) are 1: playing by album instead of by track. I use the "random album" shuffle all the time and usually want to listen to an album all at once and 2: smart playlist builder which lets me make dynamic playlists around how many times I've played a thing, my personal rating, or when the last time I played it was.

https://imgur.com/a/7zchJC7

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

mayneackon Square acquires majority of Tidal in $297M deal

After the end of google music, I switched to Tidal + Plex. It's great for library organization, custom dynamic playlists, and mixing personal files with streaming.

mayneackon Facebook is pushing back on Apple’s new iPhone privacy rules

I didn't downvote, but "It doesn't matter if it's true, It's bad that I'm concerned" is used to justify all sorts of alarmist policies. Right now that's what's being used to restrict voting rights across the US and has been used for a long time to justify NIMBY and tough on crime policies regardless of evidence.

mayneackon A Statement on Recent Events Between Signal and the Anti-Censorship Community

I've submitted 10+ signal bug reports (none security related) going back to the TextSecure days. I've never had any rude or dismissive responses from the team, but have had my issues hijacked by other people with the issue being overly demanding or rude.