r_klancer

Can confirm. That was the life. (My Dad worked at Holmdel until the divestiture.)

I still remember visiting on the Christmas Eve open house they would hold every year, with a brass band playing carols in the big atrium and all kinds of tech goodies to check out.

Regarding GP's point, New Jersey actually has a pretty strong heritage in engineering. There was Edison of course, and RCA (including their research lab near Princeton that did a lot of defense work in WWII) and lots of smaller radio companies--don't forget that especially pre-WWII the economic geography of the US was a lot different and the radio "startups" of the day would design and manufacture right in urban areas of the East Coast.

Marconi set up shop in NJ in the early days -- in fact my Dad does a lot of work these days with a museum of early communications technology, located at an old Marconi transmitter site not too far from Holmdel (infoage.org).

Other parts of the Bell System were in New Jersey too, with offices, labs, and facilities spread all over the state (including the famous Long Lines NOC where they monitored the health of the long distance system in real time.)

There were (and still are) plenty of chemical and pharmaceutical companies that hired scientists and engineers.

But I'd say that in the postwar era until about 2000 most scientists and engineers didn't particularly aspire to live in or commute to NYC. The suburban life was the dream. I remember in the late 90s/early 2000s it felt like all the technical work going on there was backend stuff for banks or dot-com startups with a media/marketing focus.

You absolutely can get hex bits for drill/drivers. Do yourself a favor and pick some up at the hardware store; I refuse to set up knockdown furniture without one.

That said, be careful to set the torque fairly low. (Invest in a driver with a clutch if you don't have one!) It's way too easy to overdrive the fasteners.

My favorite anecdote (so far) from working at Fitbit is that until 2017 or so you could log "Starting a fire, indoors" as an activity.

In the early days the web app allowed you log arbitrary activities; it would tote up the calorie value of all of them. Where did they get the activities? From a public domain list of activities and their caloric value--compiled by U.S. government economists starting in the 1930s when they wanted to estimate the caloric needs of Americans to make sure there was enough food for all the hungry farm workers and factory laborers during the Depression.

I was there the day we removed that database and ceremonially typed in "starting a..." and there was no longer an autocomplete for it.

Let's be clear. Green vs blue is a bit of a red herring.

The real issue is that Apple has to have some fallback protocol for texting with non-iMessage devices, but refusing to upgrade the fallback protocol beyond SMS/MMS makes the texting experience worse for everyone, as described in the article.

(To avoid additional red herrings. No one is thinking here about opening up iMessage itself to non-Apple clients, just upgrading the fallback option. Also, I can't speak for everyone, but among the non-terminally-online Gen Xer and late-Millennial Americans I know, "texting" means using the built-in app on your phone. Switching to another app is a relationship step. Many of them are blithely unaware that they can't "just" text a photo or video to me or other Android users, nor that I can't just sign out of a group chat when I feel like it.)

I'd be a bit worried about this from a digital hygiene standpoint: the default device for storing your passkey will be your phone, and every unlock is temptation to get sucked into the world of notifications and social apps.

Fortunately it looks like security keys such as https://cloud.google.com/titan-security-key can be used instead.

I don't know. The last time I regularly used a standard def CRT TV was in 2005. Pretty sure I could hear it then at 30-ish. Sometime last year I pulled up a Youtube video that plays a rising tone up through 20kHz. I stopped being able to hear the tone somewhere between 10kHz and 15 kHz. My kids could hear it fine.

The sound lives on in my memory. I can vividly remember the squeee of turning the TV on. Actually I can hear it right now! But I believe that is something called "tinnitus" :)

My favorite endangered sound is probably too subtle for the museum and, alas, one I can no longer hear anyway: the 15625 Hz squeal of an NTSC cathode ray tube TV.

I can remember knowing whether the TV had been turned off or was just on mute (with no video input) well into the 90s just by the sound.

Was going to make the same suggestion. The Evan Doorbell tapes you link to are great for learning about that lost world.

I can remember that when I was a kid, once you started dialing, the phone would go silent--almost. What you would actually hear was hiss, ghostly clicks now and then, and, occasionally, very quietly, down near the noise floor, short bursts of tones - beep boop boop beep boop beep!

I learned about blueboxes and the like later (in what were histories by then) and I know what I was hearing was some kind of crosstalk, but I never found out whether the tones were MF tones (one telco switch signaling to another to set up the call, in the voice band, but just before the phones on either end were patched into the circuit) or (similar, but different) DTMF tones from modems and fax machines on the local circuit. (I vaguely remember occasionally hearing tentative tones like from a real person pressing buttons.)

All the electromechanical hacks from the midcentury systems that were sometimes still in place in the 80s and even 90s are fascinating -- the earliest direct dial systems had to set up the connection digit by digit because they had no memory. Later they invented systems that could remember some of the digits by temporarily connecting your circuit to a literal mechanical stepper on the telco end that would replay those digits to the next switch down the line (and then disconnect) once you had dialed enough digits to fill it up.

I'm redoing my kitchen (in the US) with induction and ruled out anything with touch controls. I noticed that particular issue as soon as I stepped into the showroom. Thanks for letting me know about the auto-off problem.

The other problem to watch out for is poor reliability due to gradual "cooking" of the circuit board -- after all, the knobs are not physically connected to the power electronics; they're just a digital input to a controller, same as for the touch controlled units.

The showroom had this Beko range with knobs and no Wifi or "smart" stuff for ~half the starting price of their (so-called) "pro" ranges: https://www.yaleappliance.com/kitchen/cooking-appliances/ran...

I think I'm going with this GE ("Café") double-oven option for my small kitchen, as long as I can confirm the Wifi stuff is strictly optional and isn't in the failure path: https://www.yaleappliance.com/kitchen/cooking-appliances/ran...

Other options with knobs were from Miele, Fischer and Paykel, and (less expensively) LG. I believe Samsung also sells a range with knobs; see the photo in the article.

Sure you can make the case! Manuals are more fun. But they've been dying a slow death in the US and are already down to ~1% of new car sales here.

Performance can be handled by an automated manual, economy by a CVT, and the future is EVs. And apparently fun and 1% of the market is not enough to convince automakers to commit to the extra $$ needed for the extra tooling, supply chain complexity, and emissions certification required to offer them as an option.

Me too.

On Sunday I happened to park right behind exactly the car I would try to find and buy used if my occasional-use Volvo XC70 had to be replaced: a red VW Golf Alltrack wagon with tan leather and the big sunroof and 6-speed manual. (2020 was the last model year.)

I fantasized a bit about whether I could buy one and keep it long enough for my 9yo to learn to drive stick, but of course that would be a determinedly quirky and antiquarian skill to learn by then, like writing with a quill pen or using a coal furnace. (https://www.npr.org/2019/03/03/699325560/for-the-few-who-hea...) Also the used prices have gone up since I last checked a year ago!

(What will finally put the nail in the coffin of the manual is the electric car. And--yeah, I guess I obsess about this--electric wagons from Volvo and Volkswagen will be coming to the US in the next few years, though for various marketing reasons they both shy away from the word "wagon": https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a39263104/new-volvo-evs-wa... and https://www.reddit.com/user/HDiess/comments/soje69/hi_reddit...)

Solid point. Gen X would never put up with this bullshit.

Interesting, I'm sure somebody has made a Youtube video of them. Only been to MV once and that was before these were around.

(EDIT: of course, there's also an East Coast/West Coast, or at least an old city/new city issue here. Based on your experience, can you imagine them working in NYC?)

Well, the tide has been turning in many cities towards building more human-scale infrastructure by improving walkability and protected lanes for bikees/scooters etc. Delivery bots have a severe risk of wrecking the "flow" of sidewalks and bike lanes by being slow or just behaving robotically instead of like a person.

(Side comment/why I'm interested: I finally have bandwidth for civid engagement and I decided I'd like to work on helping my already cycling-friendly city enact policies to encourage food delivery services to use bike delivery, as part of its upcoming bike network plan.)

What's the business model here? It seems like delivery bots could only work on wide walking paths on closed campuses. Or are the startups here assuming we'll build dedicated infrastructure for them?

I can't imagine they would ever work in real world cities (putting rolling roadblocks on busy public sidewalks is antisocial at best, and besides they're bound to get blocked by obstructions en route that require them to be lifted up and over the curb--trash cans, outdoor seating, carelessly parked scooters...)

And if I ever came up behind one put-putting along in a bike lane I'm not sure what I would do but I like to believe it wouldn't technically be illegal.

I'm relatively well informed but I always just assumed oat "milk" was an inferior substitute marketed to the actively or wannabe lactose intolerant. [EDIT: and vegans of course.] (No idea if "wannabe lactose intolerant" is really a thing, but i'm thinking of the way gluten sensitivity became a faddish self-diagnosis for a while.)

I still don't drink the stuff, but it's only dawned on me in the last year that there are other reasons, such as environmental concerns or ... actually, I'm not sure. Opening two tabs to Google "oat milk why" and "oat milk why site:reddit.com" now, which conveniently makes this relevant to TFA :)

One of my favorite niche forums is https://archboston.com. It has years of deep-dive discussion from passionate users about the history and progress of Boston area infrastructure and real estate development projects.

For a while there the site was up but not allowing new accounts to be created -- someone was paying the hosting bills but didn't have time to do any admin tasks. Thankfully, someone else stepped up and people post new stuff every day (albeit with banner ads at the top of each page now, which is honestly not too bad)

I'm happy, but it could have gone poof so easily.

Growing, yes, but from a much smaller base and probably with a lower ceiling. (I'm a regular Zwift rider in the winter.)

Fundamentally, Zwift is for road cyclists who are training or stuck inside, and Peloton is for spin class fans, and never the twain shall meet. There's a big gulf between the two groups that is larger than it might seem to someone just casually observing that they appear to be doing almost exactly the same thing.

Coincidentally, I was (also) going to jump in this thread to say that at Fitbit we never employed even near 2800 people.

Of course, per the standard corporate model nowadays, Fitbit in its time as an independent company didn't directly employ the people who do the manufacturing, logistics, retail sales, or front line customer support (nor of course the people who do janitorial services, security, food service, etc for those folks.)

So I don't think it was fair of GP to say:

> All your comment really shows is how little you know about how many people it takes to run a large business

Although perhaps it was more fair to say:

> you don't really understand what Peleton do

Personally, I concluded from the headline that there must be an interesting story there.

The northern part of the Turnpike corridor and the Sopranos give a misleading picture of the whole state.

My grandfather was a South Jersey farm boy who grew up to become a professor of entomology in the Rutgers ag school by the 1930s. He saw the postwar suburban expansion eat up much of that farmland first hand in his work with the ag extension program's pest control officers, and he often lamented how much first-rate farmland was being "wasted" growing a crop of houses.

It's interesting to note that Hacker News really loves Strong Towns.

I chatted with Chuck Marohn (founder and face of Strong Towns) once at an event a couple years ago, and they're quite aware that they get a lot of traffic from HN.

Actually, I'm very rough with my phones and considered buying a ruggedized phone, but went with a Pixel 5. It has a rubberized back and has held up very well over the last 10 months of use with only a screen protector (no case). In fact, it held up better than my previous phone, a Moto Z2 Force I bought because Toms Hardware Guide named it the most durable: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/toughest-smartphone-drop-t...

Also, it turns out that the camera sometimes matters more than you might expect. Other people in my family care somewhat that the pictures and videos I took of my kids using the Moto were pretty meh--and some pictures didn't get taken because the camera system was so slow. (Oh, and the audio on those videos was poor.) The Pixel has a much, much nicer camera and microphone.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I became a Google employee a few months after purchasing my Pixel.)

If I send an email to someone appearing to expect a reply, and I don't get a reply within X days (I think X=5), Gmail surfaces the email with a chip saying "Sent 5 days ago. Follow up?"

If I receive a travel reservation confirmation email, I receive a calendar reminder on my phone a few days before the trip.

This is personalization. But years ago Google made a commitment not to use Gmail data to customize ads (after initially doing so). So there's a real difference between personalization data and ads data.

Closer to home for me, we are legally barred from using Fitbit data for ads or allowing any system (or person!) in the Ads organization to access it in any way. But nobody said we can't personalize your Fitbit experience based on data derived from, say, your Fitbit exercise history.

I'm also a Googler these days (via Fitbit). The assumption being made in this entire discussion is that the purchases are mined from Gmail, but that doesn't appear to be correct.

From the screenshot, the items are part of the "Purchases and Reservations" activity category that the parent points to. According to to the help documentation of the category, it specifically refers to purchases made directly within Google Search, Maps, or Assistant. I personally have precious few (4) items in this category, particularly when compared to the large number of purchase confirmation emails sitting in my Gmail account. And there is a UI for deleting the purchase records from my history.

Meta-comment, I find discussions of this type tend to elide the distinction between data used for personalization with data used for advertising. Say what you will about the very fact that the same organization has both, but I do think the distinction is both important, and communicated well neither by Google nor by anyone else writing on the topic.

The funny thing is, I was a subscriber to Agre's mailing list (the archive of which is still at https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/rre.html)

I was impressed by his methodical way of dissecting the design of information systems and how they interacted with the social context. The didactic brilliance was consistent with his (and David Chapman's) famous AAAI paper about the "Pengi" system https://aaai.org/Library/AAAI/1987/aaai87-048.php -- although I didn't realize at first that he was the Agre in "Agre and Chapman".

Yet, somehow, I missed the importance of whatever he said about privacy. Like others I was more interested in what new things we could build if we were all as sharp as him.

(The "Surveillance and Capture" paper mentioned by the Post seems to capture an important distinction between two modes of privacy invasion; even 20 years later I see attempts to discuss privacy concerns founder on a failure to reckon with this distinction. I will now read.)

Like autonomous electric buses every 2-3 minutes in dedicated lanes that are demarcated by paint?

Autonomous because labor costs (and shift considerations) are a major factor limiting the frequency of service you can provide. Electric because they will cost less in maintenance.

They are also an important part of a possible solution for helping lower density suburban areas that suffer from housing shortages. It's worth listening to this whole talk by Peter Calthorpe, the planner who developed the now-well-known concept of transit oriented development: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/01/07/talking-headways-podc...

So both the real and the entirely imaginary nudges really bother you, huh?

> Strongtowns and Citylab were both conceived by single, childless white people

You're talking through your rear orifice. Strong Towns was founded and is led by a fairly conservative guy who lives in small town Minnesota and talks all the time about his wife, two kids and dog.

In Volvo's case I think it's a matter of platform refresh times. The (brand-new) XC40 Recharge BEV is based on the new "CMA" platform that is designed to be flexible enough to support ICE or PHEV or full BEV configurations.

The S90/V90 are built on a platform that wasn't designed to support BEVs, but given Volvo's commitments I expect the next V90 will be available as a BEV. But the current V90 was released in 2016 so the redesign probably won't arrive til 2024 or so.

My neighbor has a gorgeous [*] new V60 sitting out on his driveway. But that model was just refreshed a couple years ago, so given usual model lifetimes, I figure it'll be five or six years before the next V60 redesign, and that there won't be a true BEV V60 until then.

On the other hand, I hope they don't retire the "Eurowagon" form factor at the same time! I don't like crossovers and SUVs, so I'm hopeful that Volvo and VW Group (Audi, VW, or both) will have compelling electric wagons for sale by mid-decade when I expect to retire my ICEmobile.

[*] Yes, I just described a Volvo wagon as gorgeous, but there it is. What is this world coming to.

Wow, thanks for this. Around 2005 or so I was super into synthetic biology but have paid almost no attention since. If you told me this was a speculative "letter from 2020" written back then I would almost believe you, it's so jam-packed with the kind of thing we were expecting. (The obvious stuff, anyway--that the Baker lab's protein design work would be an enabling technology. That some kind of design parallelization was needed to replace hand-construction of gene circuits. That logic and sensors would find practical applications in something like cell-based therapeutics.)

Interesting thing about these revolutions and their makers. Back then I actually went and did a first year grad school rotation in what I thought of as a synthetic biology lab--they had published one of the two back-to-back Nature papers that kicked off the hype in 2000. Surely this was the place to be! But pretty quickly I was confused and puzzled by the lack of any late night bull sessions about the future of synthetic biology, the lack of interest in the stuff that Drew Endy and Tom Knight were doing, and the lack of anyone mentoring newbs in the secrets of the field. People who had done synthetic biology projects seemed to be wrapping up or leaving. (Though I later learned that one guy who almost never talked and worked by himself late at night was doing kickass work--he eventually became an MIT professor.)

I even saw the lab attract another wide-eyed synthetic biology enthusiast--who coincidentally I knew from del.icio.us ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23986789 )--as a junior year intern, assign him a non-synthetic biology project, and then regard him as kind of a flake for being so interested in synthetic bio (he later founded a science related nonprofit that got some press.)

Anyway, it took a while for it to really sink in that the same lab could help kick off the field and yet not be "all in". Turns out the lab was basically a vehicle for its ambitious and very politically savvy PI to branch out into different fields. Which is a fine environment to work in! ...For other, more career-minded people, especially ones who bring their own expertise to the table (as postdocs, etc).