skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lest we not forget that DDG plainly refuses any external auditors to verify their claims of user privacy, despite having received a large investment recently and employing about 50 people (or more now) in full time.

In this case, DDG asks users to have "faith" that their privacy is indeed being respected.
In my experience, almost every driver drives for multiple services.
On a brand-new project, I agree wholeheartedly. To do otherwise is to miss half the benefit, in my opinion.

However, those of us that are in love with TypeScript often want to refactor existing JS into TS, where allowing implicit `any` and allowing `null` make it a bit easier to convert larger codebases.
I don't think that's really fair. By that argument, every magazine, radio, and TV show are ad companies. That includes NPR which runs ads for sponsors and ads for pledges. NYTimes, The Guardian, etc...

Do all those companies make money from ads? Sure. Does that make them ad companies? No, they are first and foremost companies that provide a service for the user. If that service is good enough (gets enough viewers) then the ads are seen/heard. If not they go out of business. Because of this they have an incentive to provide the best of that service. Best search, best TV shows (drama/news/comedy/etc...), best music, best talk shows, best articles, etc. Where "best" = gets the most viewers. If Google's search starts sucking people will go elsewhere so they are a search company. Chiat Day and Dentsu are ad companies. They sell ads.
Ideological and rational are not in opposition.

Also, he doesn't think all software is good just because it's foss; it can be bad for other reasons. But all non-foss software is bad, because it violates the rights of users.

I don't see the problem with being this consistent. If I say that all non-consensual sex is bad, am I an irrational ideologue too?
Well, the second one isn’t too crazy if someone was introduced to Amazon via AWS and not amazon.com
Could Misbehaving Neutrinos Explain Why the Universe Exists?
Quora is a good place for product placement and is commonly used as such. In fact, I believe that’s Quora’s revenue generation model...
> > “We all use Uber. We all use Amazon, right? How many of you have ever spoken to a human at Uber?”

> Uber support via the app is absolutely horrendous. I do hope that's not being used as a model.

The problem is not with the business model. My company resells AppRiver products like spam filtering, secure email, and email continuity. I suppose they have phones you can call, but I wouldnt know. Their chat-based tech support is simply hands-down the best tech support I've ever seen, phone or no-phone.

The quality of tech support is not causally related to the medium, although I would guess it's correlated due to cheap/worse companies with worse tech support picking cheap/worse chat-based tech support
No kidding. This does not inspire confidence. v9 already does weird things like show stopped cars bouncing around randomly. This kind of thing along with crazy branding really makes it feel unsafe.

It’s one thing that the stereo goes to 11, that’s funny. But I’m not going to die if the stereo has a bug.
Thanks, we've added “Phones” to match the opening sentence of the article.
I find airlines make it extremely easy to upgrade your flight, or anything that involves giving them your money. No need to talk to anyone - just press a button.

The minute you want to cancel something and get money back though, the more hoops you have to go through.
I think the distinction is that it won’t just be typical customer service, where the customer speaks with a representative who can perform sophisticated actions on a user’s account. It’ll be much more self-serve, so the set of actions a passenger can take is much larger and covers a larger set of circumstances.

To me, that’s a pretty reasonable value proposition. Usually my flights are pretty low-hassle, but ~10% of the time there are problems/delays where I might want to make substantial changes, and ~1% of the time it’s an absolute nightmare that requires going through phone trees and talking with disinterested customer service reps at the airline counter.

I wonder if those long-tail customer service interactions actually cost airlines a significant amount of money, I.e. paying people to be on-call and available all the time to deal with massively inconvenienced travelers.
So it is now Uber vs Tesla vs Scooters.
For god's sake, thepointsguy is horrible.
DuckDuckGo was a thin layer of perl scripts written by a single programmer, a wrapper around Yahoo's Search-as-a-Service (YBoSS.) When Yahoo shut down search and started serving Bing results, a YBoSS derivative was grand-fathered into the deal and DDG continued existing.

I would not stake the future of my company on such a deal.

This is why I believe DDG is now using Yandex in addition to Bing for serving results.

The underlying question behind all privacy issues is that of trust.

In this particular case, the question is: Would you trust Google, a company that has delivered real value, has helped democratize access to knowledge at a global scale and has everything to lose if it was revealed that they are misusing sensitive information, or would you trust a tiny wrapper-company that claims to not store your personal information but actually uses a Russian search engine for searching ?

If you still went for DDG, what about when they decide to also use Baidu ?

Privacy is all about trust. I _trust_ Google. I do not trust a company that spends enormous time in smearing campaigns.
This was in the USA, in a smaller town without much biking. But I had a friend that built a couple ebikes. We were at a stop light and the people in the car behind us were visibly annoyed by the two bikers I'm front of them. We cleared the intersection before the even entered it. His was capable of going 88 km/h. The one I was using went to the range of 60. Eventually the torque bent the frame of the bike.
The cockpit of the Airbus A220 they bought is very interesting, 5 large touch screens:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/AirBalti...
There is an implication here that we (TechEmpower) have rejected PRs that would make the code in our Elixir tests more idiomatic. And if I understand you correctly, when we did so, we explained that the implementation did not comply with the spirit of our tests. To be clear, we do reject pull requests that we believe are cheating (e.g., caching results or other means to avoid specific workloads called out in the test requirements).

Can you point to which Elixir-related PR [1] we rejected on that basis?

Some of our most recent Elixir commits were contributed by a gentleman named Michał Muskała. For example, here are some he characterized as "minor optimizations" [2]. Since he is a one of 16 people on the Elixir language organization page [3], I take his contributions as representative of idiomatic code or at least what the organization wants to represent as idiomatic. Do you have a reason to disagree?

[1] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/search?q=...

[2] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/pull/3848

[3] https://github.com/orgs/elixir-lang/people
Has he never heard of retargeting? That model is essentially bidding on people. And I wouldnt be surprised if retargeting will become the most popular form or advertising targeting.
Using bash instead of sh is ok enough (some people won't agree), but what's bad is writing bash script and using #!/bin/sh
If current vehicle sales are an indicator, the future is still a lot of trucks and SUVs. Most Americans seem more concerned with comfort, lots of space, and the ability to survive a collision with another vehicle over changing society. Maybe it looks different in the Silicon Valley bubble, but outside of that it’s trucks, SUVs and crossovers.
EDIT: redacted
Hang on, do you think Quora is being paid to allow such answers, or that they allow them because controversial answers are popular ?
Amazon Go's model is "Extreme Loss Prevention" - have no checkers, monitor all customers, and just charge their account for what they "shoplifted".

Amazon Go stores are classist and ageist in a different way than traditional retail, because they effectively ban customers who don't have an Amazon account, or don't have a bank account backing the Amazon account, or don't have a smartphone. My parents couldn't shop there because they don't want to use smartphones.

Supposedly, the machine-vision and algorithms aren't quite there yet, and the stores depend on a very large human element behind the cameras.
> So the Debian mechanism had to be changed to detect the existence of systemd and stop/start the socket units as well

Huh. You’d think the more correct thing to do would be to do “systemctl --runtime --now mask $service; $DO_THING; systemctl --runtime unmask $service; systemctl start $service”. Or, even more correct, first detect if the service is running, then do the above, except only start the service again if it was running previously.
Pointing out "I am not against X, but ..." is toxic now? There are many instances where this is pointed out instantly, so I do it here too. Just write the second part, without the "but" to stop contradicting yourself.
So enforce speed limits for everything in the bike lanes. Some jackass training for time trials on aero bars is just as obnoxious as “14 year old kids.” Let’s also put a length restriction on dog leashes, especially banning retractable ones. On Stevens Creek Trail in Mountain View, more dangerous than the Lance Armstrong wannabes are the women walking small dogs on retractable leashes on the bike trail. My point is that arbitrary restrictions on a specific mode of transport is ridiculous if similar rules don’t appply to everyone. The “e” in ebike/scooter is irrelevant. The jackassery is mode agnostic.
Pies in the Sky: Fast food via drone takes flight
With so much money raised, they have no excuse to build their own crawlers. Its been done by many companies less known.
It's an interesting question, evidenced by the discussion here. And who could give a more authoritative answer than the CEO?

Yeah, maybe it could have been a one-liner instead of a marketing blog post, but you can't have everything.
Given their assessment of the book, I don't see what the point was in even bringing it up in the first place.
Some of the worst acting and complaining customers appear to use Twitter extensively (based on their posts) so I'm not sure it will be much of a barrier...
Amazon trials real-world fashion boutiques
They almost certainly track accident data for internal use, but I can't imagine they'd ever want to share it.
The Pitfalls of running A/B Tests
It's a good question. Right now if there is at least any sound (not muted) it will increase sound to maximum automatically but if someone will mute the sound it will be muted. I'm working on it right now to prevent mute the sound.
I’d argue encouraging bikes to be on the sidewalk are a negative trend. Hopefully that’s not a long-term change.
I don't know how adequate the 10-minute sessions promised by apps like Headspace are in the long run. In my experience, a 20-minute session feels a lot more effective than 2 10-minute sessions, and so on for 40 minutes over 20 minutes, and so on.

I found Headspace and similar apps to be a good introduction to meditation for the first week or two, but they really are 'meditation lite' compared to reading some of the classics and sitting in unguided meditation for at least a 30-minute session everyday.
>I _trust_ Google.

Not smart. It's not an either/or issue. Nobody with a shred of intelligence trusts any corporation.
There's a lot of food safety issues they ignored though

- 3rd party hubs means you get a wide range of manufacturers for refrigerated. Not all are rated equally. Sometimes the compressor goes bad, or insulation gaskets need to be replaced

- Food rotation. Because there is no staff at each location, there's a higher chance that you'll find meals 1+ weeks old. Its up to the consumer to see the date stamped

- If you rotate food often, unit will not be up to temperature (34-38*F) generally.

- If you don't have a designated employee at site to move food into refrigerator, it might spoil before it gets there. This deals with logistics

- Using 3rd party has a huge oversight in potentially tampering with food + legal implications.

- Inspections / legal is complicated
> Even then why is such culture legal?

In general, Americans see this protection as none of the government's business. If the business wants to provide it, or unions want to demand it, that's fine, but it's not going to be applied as a blanket policy.

Many businesses do apply some sort of lengthy process for firing people, for the simple reason that experienced talent is valuable and removing it capriciously is a terrible idea, but it's not required.

In my experience, however, even these processes are just drawn-out kabuki dances. By the time that you've been formally notified that your performance is deficient, the decision has already been made to fire you and nothing will change their minds.

---

As for whether this attitude is a good idea, I'm mixed. On the one hand, it allows businesses to take a risk and hire inexperienced or otherwise dubious prospects without fear that they'll be stuck paying a useless body for months after it's been found that they're a bad fit. On the other hand, it allows shitty managers to be thundering assholes and capriciously fuck with people's livelihoods.

However, I'd assert that the American attitude toward employment is critical to startups. A BigCo can be indifferent to keeping a shitty employee around for months. A startup has much, much less margin for error.
Google has misused information in the past. For example, they used to mine emails from Google Apps accounts for data even though they explicitly said they wouldn't, until it was found out and they stopped. I also disagree that I should trust a company that has provided "value" because I have found value in using Facebook since it lets me connect with people and friends that I otherwise wouldn't be able to, but I distrust them because they make money from my data and have, for example, used the number that was supposed to be used for SMS 2FA for advertising.
Scooters are great for taking cars of single, able bodied individuals; who are usually the most numerous in dense city centers. For people with kids, elderly, the infirm, a four wheeled vehicle with cargo space is still desired.
I really liked working at Netflix, but yeah... puhrty intense culture.

Also seems like the Hollywood office is becoming more "Hollywood", which might prove problematic for avoiding all of the dumb mistakes Hollywood people make.

With so much attention going to the content side of the biz, I also wonder if top engineers would feel more celebrated at Google, Facebook, or start-ups where their contributions are seen as the primary innovation driver of the business.
This sounds like a nightmare, people hate tech companies' customer service, it makes it nearly impossible for them to respond to unplanned for situations.
Google is both an ad company and a search company. They're also an AI company, a hardware company (phones), and a media company (Youtube).
Get an email when website content changes
> Since the time to IPO is so much longer than the average tenure at a tech company

It is inconvenient for those looking to IPO for a windfall, but keep in mind that most startups aren't looking to IPO but to be bought out. Only a tiny fraction of the unicorns IPO. Most startups are usually bought by other companies.

The software security startup I worked for didn't IPO. It was bought out by another more established startup. Which was bought out by some hedge fund or something a few years later.

Most ( but not all ) tech billionaires are created by these huge IPOs. But by far, most millionaires in the tech world are created by being bought out, not IPOing.
An example is custom software development. I've worked in a couple of companies where all software was Free, and most was published publicly. The difference is that we didn't sell a product, but a service: developing something that didn't exist yet.

I think that we would see much more of this is proprietary software didn't exist. But of course, re-selling the same development over and over and over again is much more profitable, so it's hard to compete with that.
It sounds like you are an atypical user or distorting facts. No one I know (including ppl who have driven for these services) has ever experienced any of the problems you describe. I live in large metropolitan areas in the west coast.
I'd be more impressed by this if they had fixed the problem where the car crashes into barriers at lane divergences. Kind of a turn-off to the whole thing until that's fixed, to be honest. Frankly I don't understand how the company hasn't been buried in lawsuits for this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/9pkvy0/psa_v9_...
> Google, a company that [...] has everything to lose if it was revealed that they are misusing sensitive information. [...] Privacy is all about trust. I _trust_ Google.

Facebook was caught with the cat in the bag regarding users' privacy and what did it lose? Google is too big to lose at this point.
"javinpaul"? who are you referring to?
Money can buy happiness, but not unconditionally
'A House for Mr. Biswas' by V.S Naipaul - Beautiful book in every way. I can't remember the last time I read a book this good. I'd read most of his shorter books before but never finished this one for one reason or another. I'm glad I did.

'Shira' by Shmuel Yosef Agnon - Was introduced to Agnon by an old friend. Having not read any major works by Israeli writers(especially those set in early 201th century Israel), I found this book to be very beautiful also. Did read some of his other material, a collection of short stories. Hope to dive in further when time permits.
That’s a good point. I would like to see those numbers myself, seems useful to understand the different bubbles that exist. What do you think of European nations imposing deadlines for the final sales of fossil-fueled automobiles?
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/20/google-doctor-fork/
Regulation often leads to regulatory walls around businesses, protecting them from competing with innovative new solutions, leading to lower quality of life for all. How does your worldview discount for this?
I know this is old but I'm catching up:

Note that with Equifax you never signed any sort of permission or ToS for the data collected, so they'd be hit with a fine regardless.

Many companies collect data on people without a contract. So this would still have teeth even with waived rights.
> Make could have been the engine behind a lot of unix infrastructure.

Possibly, if the problem with file names containing spaces was fixed.
Do you mean Naomi Wu?
> Would you trust Google, a company that has delivered real value, has helped democratize access to knowledge at a global scale and has everything to lose if it was revealed that they are misusing sensitive information

This is so generous to Google that it's almost comical. This is like claiming that if a company like Experian had a data breach, they'd lose everything. Except they were responsible for the largest consumer data breach in history, and they're doing just fine.

Google is entrenched, they can misuse data without it affecting their bottom line. No, I do not trust Google.
Are you utopcell@google.com as in [1]? If so, I would say that's worth mentioning.

[1] https://research.yahoo.com/mobstor/publication_attachments/w...
Yes, he is out of the norm. Very few people ever ride 90km on a touring bike. Many bicycle enthusiasts do but they are in the minority of people at large.

I’m not sure what point you’re making about the downhill speed? If you dropped a cyclist out of a plane, they’d do like 320kph. Nobody needs on an electric assist when they’re going downhill at 40kph.

Also I’m not sure who you think is averaging a running speed of 15mph for more than a few hundred feet. If you can hold that speed for 4 minutes you’d be one of about 1000 people in the history of the world. Even holding 11 mph for more than 10 minutes is out of the realm of possibility for the vast majority of people.

Electric bikes at reasonable speeds help people of average to below average fitness (whether by age, disability, or other reason) get out and be active on a bicycle. I don’t believe they should be souped up to help some MAMIL (middle age man in lycra) set a new Strava segment record.
Alpine lake mysteriously disappears in Italy
Interestingly someone pointed me to this company recently https://aevy.com/about/dataprotection who scrape public data and resell it to recruiters.

I downloaded the JSON document they had on me and it was pretty accurate. Again, public information so nothing surprising.

I opted out anyway
Best of Uber support:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/13/uber-fail... - I can't find the article, but one victim got the impression Uber would report the crime, but they simply didn't.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/01/uber-sexu... - the converse story!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/15/uber-indi... - Uber executive gets medical records of rape victim.

Uber support was so inadequate, the licensing agency in London had to force them to run a 24/7 phone line.
1) can you use systemd to supervise a single process without adopting most of systemd?

2) based on the train of horrors for every single network daemon they write, do you trust that their systems level code is somehow good?

3) well their record on systems level code isn't that great either, username parsing really didn't go well

4) is systemd demonstrating engineering excellence of as simple as possible, but no simpler?

5) out of the box, my experience with Debian + systemd + a crashy service (from packages) was that the specific crashes I was getting didn't result in a restart, because it got a segfault instead of simply exiting. --- also, it changed the boot process so I couldn't ctrl-c out of slow things, so that was net negative.
> Could you explain why you feel safe unsafe with cars around you?

A 150lb person on a scooter or bike runs into somebody at 15mph; the most likely outcome is everybody walks away, with small chances of death, and mediocre chances of broken bones.

A 3500lb car doesn't see a scooter, bicyclist, pedestrian and turns into them; and your best outcome approaches serious injury and your expected outcome becomes death.

woefully overinvested streets and underinvested sidewalks; And woefully under trained drivers.
Well... normal for the 1% of us tech savvy computer users.

This reminds me of a podcast I listened to last night where a physician explained how to get a flu shot: go to your place of work and do it yourself. Of course she was being sarcastic.
Eh, I'm a North American and I found iy humorous, but I could see the confusion as it is literally an overstatement though that's what makes it poignant to me.
The Waiting Time Paradox, Or, Why Is My Bus Always Late?
I can’t get over ther branding. I know this is a terrible reason for not switching but I can’t stand their name or logo. If they were named something more modern and less annoying I’d consider. Call me shallow but branding is important if I’m going to use it every day.