redthrowaway

So, stating true, scientifically verified facts that challenge Google's official political ideology is now a fireable offence.

This is insane. The speed at which this ideology has taken over SV is breathtaking, and a massive disincentive for anyone not already so inclined to work there.

He's pointing out the absurdity of various incentives that exist, not defending them.

And pretty much everything useful is blocked. We rolled out an update that broke our app for all of China, because cloudfront was blocked. That was a new one for me.

Having spent a painfully slow 10 hours in the airport in Beijing let me appreciate just how much of the Internet breaks when you block the biggest sites. Serve up jQuery through googleapis.com? Not in China, you don't. Hope it wasn't doing any heavy lifting for you.

Considering there are a grand total of 2500 people in the BIOT, all of whom are British or American military personnel, it might not be a great idea to route a good chunk of the world's tech traffic through them. The disparity between how important the .io TLD is for the Internet and how few resources must go to running it is pretty appalling.

>this process has about an 80% roundtrip efficiency

How is that possible? Even if you assume frictionless pipes and lossless power transmission, that's assuming 90% efficiency for both the pump and the generator.

>Convenient of this article to ignore that the Berkley study only looked at food service workers while the UW study looked at a much wider range of jobs than previous studies.

And the UW study was consistent with the Berkley study--for food service workers. It appears food service workers really weren't hurt by the increase, but non food service workers were.

We got audited. They just reduced the payout. It's the appeals process that's a pain in the ass. Takes about 3 years.

I suspect that means they no longer need to, and have better ways of targeting ads at you.

That car is driving oddly. It stopped for pedestrians who were on the sidewalk, and several times it stopped after making a turn. I could see that being really frustrating for other drivers and even dangerous if it's doing unpredictable things no human driver would do in those circumstances.

That's almost certainly by design. Just as with tweets, it would be massively abused.

Sounds like General Atomics has a good lobbyist.

I've had profs like that. What really struck me about Irani is that even without the homework, even with only weekly quizzes, it still stuck. It wasn't an AP class, but he encouraged us to write the AP exam at the end of the year and nearly everyone got a 4 or a 5.

I do agree with the notion that profs are more effective when the homework is harder than the exam, however. I had the exact opposite for a fourth-year crypto class. For homework, we'd work through some basic cryptanalysis with lots of hints. Then the test would come around, and two or three of the ten questions would involve breaking a cypher, from scratch. I got about 25% on the first test, which ended up being 65% after he scaled it. Brutal class.

By far the best math teacher I ever had, Fred Irani, taught math in a way no teacher I'd had before or since did. We didn't use the textbook, and we didn't have homework. We just worked through the problems in class, the way the people who originally figured them out did: by working from what we already knew and making logical inferences.

Learning calculus from him was as much history as it was math, but the math stuck. I really wish more math teachers taught that way.

That's a great writeup, and it highlights the fact that sometimes these things happen for purely pragmatic reasons.

Burn-flip-burn is nice. It'd be nice to see them performing realistic burns to alter orbits, but that might be too much to ask for.

>minus the epstein drive which is basically magic

It's canonically a fusion rocket, isn't it? So beyond today's means, but hardly "magic".

Let's not go giving The Expanse too much credit, here. That no-thrust gravity slingshot around all of Jupiter's moons in 2 hours was...stretching it.

Did you listen to the podcast? My main beef with the Vox piece is how it mischaracterized what Murray and Harris were saying. I'm not competent to judge the science, but I can tell when somebody's lying to me and that's how the Vox piece came across.

Economy cars have gotten heavier, largely due to safety concerns. Bigger cars have gotten lighter.

So perhaps it would be fair to say that vehicle weights are converging on the low-mid 3000lb range.

The thinking I've seen is about batteries being replaced by explosives.

Even so, the US isn't the first to do this. China won't let you take Li+ batteries beyond a certain mAH in your carryon.

i18n from the get-go, ladies and gents. Don't be this guy, leaving millions on the table.

Could anyone explain why being submerged in water would lead to particularly good fossilization? I would have thought it would do the exact opposite.

>"Violence" is always somehow brought into the mix by conservatives.

It ain't conservatives rioting or assaulting professors.

>Ann Coulter is ... somehow is having her right to free speech stopped by not being able to give a lecture on campus at the most crazy liberal college in the nation.

Your right to speak at a publicly funded institution is not limited by your ability to speak elsewhere.

>we've seen how far conservative belief in free speech goes for Colbert this week.

Was there anybody saying he didn't have a right to say what he did? I'm pretty sure most people were criticizing what he said, not rioting about it or saying he didn't have a right to say it.

Coulter routinely says atrocious things in order to gain attention. I think it's stupid of campus Republicans to invite her to speak. But once that invitation is given, she has every right to speak and they have every right to listen. And the campus left, for their part, has every right to protest. But not to shut the event down, not to riot, and not to assault professors.

No, but they seriously considered it, and said they were basing their consideration on information that had been shared with them. Which would suggest it was not an attempt to impose a Muslim ban.

>We're talking about moving laptops from the passenger cabin to checked luggage, as a purported security measure.

Yes, just like moving liquids to your checked luggage was a security measure. Remember that one? Tried to take a bottle of water through security lately?

>Not sure why Canada and UK doing something similar would be make it any more likely to be a true terrorist threat

Because Canada and the UK aren't likely to be in on your "it must be a muslim ban" conspiracy theory?

>Calling this "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is pretty damn nutty, besides being whiny.

Take it up with Fareed. That you think it's "whiny" does not change the fact that large parts of the left seem to have lost the capacity to distinguish normal from abnormal behaviour on the part of the Trump administration.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/liberals-have-to-avo...

Or 3: the administration had nothing to do with it, and it's an actual security measure based on actual terrorist threats.

Which might explain why Canada and the UK (you know, Five Eyes countries with whom the US shares intelligence) also did the same thing.

Seriously, Trump Derangement Syndrome is getting a bit nutty.

http://www.news1130.com/2017/03/20/ban-aimed-at-electronics-...

Absolutely. The talent in the US is certainly higher than it is in Canada, due in no small part to the brain drain which has been happening for decades.

Toronto is the finance & arguably tech centre of Canada. Great universities & access to VC cash, lots of startups. It also shouldn't be ignored that labour costs in Canada are less than half of what they are in the US, due to the weaker dollar, lower wages, cheaper medical insurance, and SR&ED credits that let you write off developer salary costs.

Cookie-cutter is also what 99% of programmers work on. Yes, it's nice that you were on the team at facebook that built the first react prototype, or that you were the first software engineer at oculus. The rest of us are building apps, adding an endpoint to an api, figuring out what the new database schema should look like, etc. And there are a hell of a lot more jobs openings for "blue-collar coders" than there are for geniuses.

I mean, it's great you're working on the latest computer vision algo to make the billboards in Minority Report a reality. I just spent the day wrestling with Google's client API registration and authentication nonsense so I could get per-page bounce rates.

And I doubt anyone at the National Review would consider that a slur.

>However, I don't think you can discount the politics angle as a reason that a sizable number of people have finally decided "you know, I can do without ESPN."

I don't. In fact I agree entirely with the notion that ESPN is shooting itself in the foot by constantly pushing politics that play well in NYC & LA, but actively turn off viewers in the rest of the country. I'm just saying it would still be failing; albeit more slowly if it "just stuck to sports".