udba

Apple employees don't put cases on their phones because they can easily get a new phone if their phone breaks.

Certainly the naming of the language as "Serbo-Croatian" or "Croato-Serbian" happened in the Socialist period, but the Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, etc. etc. languages are really variants of a polycentric language [1], whatever you want to call it. For those not from the Balkans, imagine the British, Americans, and Canadians insisting that their versions of English are completely different languages, or making up new words to distance themselves from each other.

Snježana Kordić's book made the case that there is a polycentric language shared by those countries and that much of the current politicking over this topic is nationalist in basis. I think it's easy to see that this bickering over language is yet another useful distraction from the catastrophic state of society and the economy in those lands.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_Lang...

Nikon FM2.

I like that it's fully mechanical and built to a higher standard (and with higher quality materials) than cameras today. I enjoy film photography because it imposes a constraint on the creative process and makes you consciously pause before shooting. I find that without such constraints it's too easy to take a million garbage photos. For mundane everyday use I have an iPhone.

If I were to get something else it'd be a medium format camera with similar build quality and reliability.

A high power workload on a phone might require ~5-10W over 100ms, i.e. ~0.5 joules. At 4V capacitor voltage, you would need ~30mF capacitor. Not likely to fit in a phone.

This assumes you’re powering the phone solely off the cap. Even with a battery you’d still need something in the mF range to make up for the battery’s degradation.

They say the goal is to help as many people as possible, and that this principle has guided their development and pricing of the drug.

How do they reconcile this principle with the huge price difference between the USA and the rest of the world? Or between the developed world and the developing world?

I assume they are still making a profit selling doses at low costs to developing countries. If the goal is to help as many people like they say, why not extend that pricing to everyone?

It’s disappointing that taxpayers fund the development of these drugs and then get screwed by the same companies when it comes time to make a profit.

Like someone in this thread said: "Medical care really is one of those things that no person should have to beg or borrow for, in a civil society."

There's nothing I can do for you if you think that access to health care should be contingent on your bank account.

>If someone wants an idea for an app or website - a way to lookup local ERs by price would be great.

>lookup local ERs by price

Incredible. It's absurd that an idea like this is a reasonable suggestion.

I agree with your sentiment, the car industry in its current state is getting pretty ugly.

I choose to avoid these trends entirely, and I'm happy to keep driving my 2.4L naturally aspirated, 5 speed manual, touchscreen-less shitbox until it dies. Parts are still cheap and it's easy to work on.

I agree with the author. Often I find it refreshing to step away from the absurdity of software development and go work on my car. Working on your car exposes you to the fruits of a bona fide engineering process: objects that are carefully designed, work reliably, and are made with serviceability in mind. They aren't just slapped together and thrown out the door like (100-epsilon)% of software out there.

Ironically this describes most of Silicon Valley.

I find this hard to believe. I recently worked at a firm that is making top-of-the-line cell phones in the United States. Even if you took the LRIP BOM cost, quadrupled the cost of parts and then doubled it all for good measure you still wouldn’t sniff $10000.

This looks like a writer trying to justify the abuse of workers and the environment overseas in the name of cheap stuff.

The UI being 1999 is a positive. The website has nothing it doesn't need. There's a Dieter Rams quote on this topic.

As an example, switching between folders in the source tree feels faster than it does using Explorer. This is what the web should be.

Typical of SV to focus solely on the business viability of a firm to the detriment of everything else. I’d like to work somewhere knowing that I have a clean conscience. Why not add:

Where do you get your data from?

If your data is sourced from users of your product, do you tell them what you’re collecting?

The Ehang seems interesting, but ultimately it's limited by battery tech and the fundamental inefficiencies of the design which makes it more of a gimmick than anything else.

There's enough open source information laying around on the internet to figure out the power draw of the Ehang in flight and from there you can figure out roughly how much the batteries on it weigh (spoiler: it's many 10s of kilograms for the 23min flight time they claim [1]).

Don't forget that these batteries will degrade with time, especially in such a high-load performance regime. This will further limit your flight time until you replace them. On top of that, having 8 tiny props is always going to be less efficient than a fixed-wing or helicopter-like design.

If you're a Chinese billionaire, you don't care that your "flying car" has these limitations, but these same limitations (among many others) preclude the Ehang from becoming an actual practical method of transportation.

[1] http://www.ehang.com/news/137.html

I agree, supporting Trump doesn't look like the only reason he got booted. Let's not forget that YC has a Trump-supporting "part time partner" on staff.

I'm currently applying for co-op jobs (internships) and while trawling the university job board I've seen many positions requiring big data this or machine learning that.

What's not clear to me is why companies who don't seem to have any need for machine learning team (i.e. a subscription box company) are looking to hire one.

Surely part of this can be pinned down to the hype associated with ML that may well die out, but the proliferation of these tools doesn't bode well for Maciej's dream of a weird, creative, and interesting internet.

Which is an absolutely awful system, for a multitude of reasons.

One of the biggest faults that looks like it might be replicated here (the article does not specify) is that once employers (VCs) rank students (startups), the students can't see the numerical ranking they were given.

For example, if I'm a student who was ranked by several companies, I cannot see the numerical ranking they gave me. This introduces a significant bias against students for no apparent reason; employers do not lose out if we can see how they ranked us.

This is one of the reasons that UWaterloo as a school is hugely overrated (although the students are generally as good as they are hyped up to be).

Thankfully so, I've been eyeing a co-op with them.

Most of the students that do leave for the US would be more than willing to stay in Canada, even if they were not paid as much. It's a familiar culture, the cost of living is cheaper, and in many ways Toronto is a better place to live than SF[0]. When they do go to the US, it's because they're getting huge sums of money mainly from SV giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and so on. While many grads are willing to stay here, even for a pay cut, the scale is tipping in SV's favor. Companies like Joist are what used to be turning the tide, they offered pretty good compensation, a decent job, and you got to stay in a sweet city.

Regardless, I don't believe these moves are rational. If you're the CEO, you're giving up close proximity to a lot of cheap talent, cheaper offices, cheaper cost of living etc. Sure, you can hire new engineers but you're gonna be paying a whole lot more money + 25% for the exchange rate to make them do so. Joist was paying engineers up to 130k CAD in Toronto[1], which ends up being around 100k USD. You're not gonna be attracting the best and brightest talent with 100k USD when Google is around the corner giving them 130k USD + 25k signing bonus and stock options. You're gonna have to pay at least 130k USD (=165k CAD) plus the signing bonuses and equity that are necessary to attract talent in SV. We're still not talking about how much more an office costs in SV, how much more of your employee's salary is going towards comically overpriced housing etc.

Let's dispense with the idea that moving to SV is some sort of rational or genius executive decision: does it really make sense to fire 2/3 of your staff, move everything to SV, and rehire 60 people in an expensive city for far higher rates?

[0] - http://pages.eiu.com/rs/eiu2/images/EIU_BestCities.pdf [1] - https://angel.co/joist/jobs/112984-data-warehouse-engineer?u...

As an engineering student at UWaterloo it's pretty depressing to watch most of the best upper year engineers finish their studies and then abandon Canada for SV. There's logic in it for them: American companies are offering huge sums of money by Canadian standards, the weather is nicer, and the opportunities seem better. If I didn't have serious reservations about living in the US, I would probably do the same.

However, I find it particularly reprehensible when companies make the move. For them, it's counter-intuitive: they have access to a huge pool of talent, both experienced devs and the vast armies of grads from UofT, UW and others. Furthermore, they're getting this talent at dirt cheap rates, since the Canadian peso is awful at the moment and salaries are significantly lower here than those in SV and the wider US.

Their expenses go up because they have to pay in USD (instant 25% hit in purchasing power), and they get thrown into the rat race of competing for talent in SV. I really wonder what goes through the mind of some of these moronic execs when they make moves like this.

The Hot Zone is another great book about biological warfare. The first chapter detailing the life of Ebola's Patient 0 from the moment he contracted the disease to when he dies is blood-curdling.