simonkafan

Well, the same is true for lawyers. I know attorneys that have to look up everything in books. And I know attorneys that can cite basically any supreme court verdict from the last 10 years out of their head.

Not sure if anyone here has heared about the case Claas Relotius before. Relotius was a German journalist mainly working for "Der Spiegel" and well known for his remarkable, well-written articles. He wrote primarily about civil war, refugee children, racism, often with a pillorying undertone about the heartbreaking cruel world we live in. His view of the world (which he incorporated subliminally into his articles) was well received in his circles; he was awarded over 19 prizes.

Long story short: In 2018 was revealed that most of his articles were fake or embellished. He got away with it for so long because everyone _wanted_ the world to be the way he portrayed it, almost nobody looked closer.

I think this is symptomatic of modern journalism: Many journalists are only interested in getting recognition in their circles, so they do whatever is necessary to get it, even if it means bending facts. This is also problematic because it casts a bad light on reputable journalists who reflect the events of the "boring" world correctly and not through lies or Hollywood stories.

Impressive how much power the USA has over UK. It is known that Cisco has backdoors in their routers - and UK politics doesn't care. Now the Trump administration is spreading the rumor that Huawei hardware _might_ have backdoors (when the most plausible actual reason for this warning is to gain the upper hand in the trade war) and England is already putting the wish into action.

In Austria there is a law in place saying if a company has a monopoly (e.g. public transport) or a quasi-monopoly (e.g. only supermarket in a 100 miles radius) the company is required to serve any customer and is not allowed to turn any down.

It is time that all countries introduce laws that prohibit online monopolies from denying access to their users without good reasons.

I can think of a trivial motive: Pastime.

Bill Gates loves to play Bridge, Warren Buffett enjoys playing Ukulele and Maxwell likes to spend time on Reddit.

But I agree, it makes no difference.

It's truly remarkable how ignorant the US now acts towards foreign students and talents given that a lot of world class scientists, artists and innovators are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants.

I hope this will give Europa and Asia the chance to get some of their emigrated talents back.

Why? VW earned 13 billion EUR after taxes in 2019, Tesla is still negative for 2019 in total. And yet the market cap of Tesla is 187b USD while for VW it's 80b USD.

Stock prices have apparently nothing to do with company earnings and performance so how do you know Tesla isn't worth 2000/3000/4000$ per stock?

Investors buy Tesla because they hope a lot of others will too in the future. As long as this hope is there and more people put their money into Tesla, the stock price will continue to rise.

I recently visited Uber's engineering blog (https://eng.uber.com/) and I can't help but it seems they have engineers goofing around with new technology completely useless for their core business ("Look, we now also use meta learning like all the hip kids!")

A company that is swamped with ad revenue money may can afford this but for the rest (especially when they are VC backed) there will come the time when they have to ask themselves if they really need 4000 engineers to maintain the service that brings in the money (= a few apps and a cloud based backend)

I don't want to sound like an old man yelling at playing kids but sometimes I feel that SC startups are like a horde of locusts flying over a well-functioning industry, pretending to improve it positively but all they do is destroy the competition - with the help of VC funds that allow them to survive for years without a positive cashflow.

I wonder how many companies in the world are basially built on warm words without any real value behind. I made the experience that a lot of people don't really care if a company has positive revenue streams anymore, they don't even know what a balance sheet is. They simply invest because other people do. And those other people invested because people before them did. This new style "invest billions now in a lossy start up and hope for a positive cashflow in a few years" is absolutely insane, it transformed the economy into a pure gambling hall.

What makes it even worse, in case of wirecard, their auditor EY had audited and certified wirecard's balance sheet for years with no objection. They were satisfied with a clumsy fake audit certificate for 2 billion euros in a Philippine account! For how many companies EY did the same? How superficially do they check their customers?

I wonder how many companies in the world are basially built on warm words without any real value behind. I made the experience that a lot of people don't really care if a company has positive revenue streams anymore, they don't even know what a balance sheet is. They simply invest because other people do. And those other people invested because people before them did. This new style "invest billions now in a lossy start up and hope for a positive cashflow in a few years" is absolutely insane, it transformed the economy into a pure gambling hall.

What makes it even worse, in case of wirecard, their auditor EY had audited and certified wirecard's balance sheet for years with no objection. They were satisfied with a clumsy fake audit certificate for 2 billion euros in a Philippine account! For how many companies EY did the same? How superficially do they check their customers?

I read the paper and I find it highly unserious how frivolously they assigned some probability to the question how many intelligent civilizations there are in the universe.

Their key assumption is: "We assume that if an SP remains in the circumstellar Habitable Zone (HZ) for a time equal to the current age of the Earth it will develop intelligent, communicative life." (page 5 at https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2004/2004.03968.pdf)

Why? Why do you assume a planet will develop intelligent life when it remains in the Habitable Zone long enough? Just because it happend on Earth?

And they continue with: "[...] according to the Copernican Principle – we propose that the likelihood of the development of life, and even intelligent life, should be broadly uniformly distributed amongst any suitable habitats"

We have no clue how likely it was at Earth that life developed at all. Maybe it was just a chain of many lucky coincidences that happen once in 10 billion years. How is distribution any relevant then?

Isn't this a good example of "feature creep"? I dont see any reason why it makes a browser more useful when the URL is partially hidden.

It reminds me of a company which developed a product which was more or less done. So the SWE manager and the product manager made up new (pretty useless) features just to tell their bosses the devs are busy and the team must stay intact.

GPT2 being "too dangerous to release" was a marketing stunt from the very beginning.

Like any social network, the value you get out of it is the cumulative value your connections bring in (through news postings, recommendations, leads). If you don't have much connections and the few you have are basically just celebrating themselves ("look mum, I got promoted!") the value gain is limited.

Status of Stadia? Well, you still have a little over 3 years to try it out... http://stadiacountdown.com/

Large corporations use their market power to gain competitive advantages - fully understandable from Amazon's point of view. However, it is completely incomprehensible why the authorities do not intervene in the market in a regulating way in these cases more often.

It is irrational to compensate a negative event now incoherently with positive discrimination.

It's like saying: Germany started World War 2, now Germany must send soldiers to stop Syrian war to compensate its bad karma.

Wait, isn't exactly this discrimination? Selecting or not selecting someone based on his/her skin color?

Peer review is broken. More than once I've learned that papers get easier through peer review if you cite the paper of a reviewer (of course you don't know in advance who reviews it so it's basically luck). I often got comments about missing related work "from relevant authors".

I've never heared of this term before and it's interesting to read people's interpretation before they knew what it means.

I thought this may be a colloquial expression of IT infrastructure admins when all their Docker hosts suddenly fail.

To underline this statement, take a look at this "Spotify for AR" concept: https://mixed.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/spotify_magic_le...

Did someone at Magic Leap seriously think, people will buy an expensive AR device and wear it just to see virtual album covers placed on their table?

Bird, just in case you haven't seen (heard) it: https://youtu.be/wxTYKCOnRe4

My feeling is that a lot of companies think: "We need a data scientist because all the big players also have one!"

In fact, they actually don't need a data scientist. At best they need someone who cleans data, creates pie charts or even worse, they relabel the database admin job as "Data scientist".

Kubernetes was released in July 2015. And given that no one would have directly jumped into using Kubernetes in production in 2015, how many people do you think have 3+ years of production-level experience now in early 2020?

What essential product offerings is Azure missing that AWS have?

My experience is that once AWS offers a new service that gets attention, a few month later also Azure offers it - and vice versa.

It's not so much about an additional fee (honestly, 0.10$ per hour are nothing) it's more about Googles practice of suddenly charging services, shutting down services as they like, not giving a shit about us customers. Azure and AWS are much more customer friendly here.

Of course this is sarcasm.

But after all, most of the newer Google products really seem to be there just to entertain their own people and give them something to do. No one can tell me, for example, that there was a serious business case behind Google Allo.

The only way to make companies like Google stop this arrogant bullshit interviews is if no one applies anymore. But as long as hundered desperate freshman Software Engineers fill their pipe because of "money and free food", they can continue this game.