skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
W3w was a pretty nice idea and I know some people that have been involved with the company. However, it is indeed not open. It's also VC funded which means that openness is incompatible with making money for them. Which means that most of its potential is lost or off limits unless you are a paying customer. They have a few of those and have had some success doing deals with postal services in countries that lack formal addresses or for use cases where formal addresses are not that useful, like e.g. logistics or big public venues like airports. But the closed nature of this of course holds back most of the interesting use-cases.

For those who don't know, w3w simply encodes locations to 3 words using an algorithm that translates coordinates into what is probably a quad tree path (e.g. geohash) and breaks that into 3 chunks that get mapped to words. The proprietary part is the algorithm and the mapping of words to these chunks (mappings actually since they have them in several languages). Probably you could reverse engineer the algorithm but then you run into the little problem that the mapping is likely copyrighted, some patents may apply, etc.

There are some nice touches to the algorithm like e.g. associating shorter/common words with the most relevant locations so that if you are German speaking, the German version of the algorithm generates short codes inside Germany and longer ones on the other side of the planet.

A couple of issues with w3w: the codes are not hierarchical. So you can't rely on e.g. the first word denoting a bigger location; the second word denoting locations inside that area, etc. Consequently, two almost identical locations will have completely different words associated with them. So you can't at a glance tell where any combination of words is unless you run the algorithm. They are easy to remember but meaningless.

Open location codes and Geohashes are similar except they don't provide easy to remember human readable codes, which is the reason why neither is commonly used by consumers. However, I've always liked geohashes because things with the same prefix are in the same place, which is awesome if you need to build search engines (though more efficient ways of doing that are available). With 7 or 8 letters you get pretty good accuracy with those and the algorithm for encoding and decoding is pretty simple. OLC is similar but stays closer to the degrees/minuts/seconds notion. Also the codes are longer.
Corrupted Blood Incident
Company Valuation: The Five Step Research Process
In the UK, there's a privately-owned steam train that runs on the National Rail network. It was built from scratch starting in the 90s and completed around 2008. You can read about the history of the project here https://www.a1steam.com

The aspect of it that I found most interesting is how they solved engineering and manufacturing problems. These issues were commonplace in the heyday of steam, but few-to-no companies have the capacity or skills to complete them in the modern day.

It fun imagining what the equivalent will be for our generation. An iPhone which no-one knows how, or has the capacity, to recreate in less than 100 years!?

Edit: spelling
Chaos Engineering with the GraphQL API
That's great news if true! But is it a sales ban from 2030, or will they work to remove them all by 2030?
Fun statistics:

2010 total plastic marine debris[0]: 4,800k - 12,700k metric tons
2010 EU plastic marine debris[0]: 50k-120k metric tons (Higher than the US by ~1k)
2010 EU plastic marine debris percentage[0]: 1%
2016 EU export of nontoxic garbage to a country in top 10 plastic marine waste[2]: 269,000 tonnes (a lot missing statistics so wide error bars here)
2015 percent of nontoxic garbage export that is plastic/mixed[1]: ~9%
Hours wasted digging through overly verbose pdfs and mislabled charts: Too many

Probable amount of EU plastic that gets exported to top 10 country: 26.9k - 53.8k tonnes
Crude adjusted EU ranking if 100% of the doubled amount makes it into the ocean: ~10th
Incredibly crude adjusted EU plastic marine debris percentage: 2%

Other stupid things learned: Netherlands imports hilarious amounts of garbage [3]

[0]: https://www.iswa.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Calendar_2011_03_... (the footnote of table 1 specifically)

[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[2]: http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do (You'll have to screw with the customizations to get useful statistics)

[3]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/waste/transboundary-waste-...
Yes, and that is why the F-35 can't replace the A-10, it is too fast, it can't loiter in the combat area & pick targets when they appear, this makes the F-35 a bad ground support aircraft when battles prolong for several hours.
Thanks for raising this. I listen to the economist (big fan of their podcasts) as well as occasionally reading.

I remember being somewhat shocked to discover that not only do they have a strong bias towards liberalism, but they aren't afraid to talk about it.

They absolutely are biased, but they tell you how and why right up front which is rather refreshing.
Sure downvote me for asking you to be accountable for your dispositions.
Well this is the most casually elitist thing I've read in a long time.

Anyone that's gotten through a 200 level programming course can probably throw together some kind of chat program that will let a few people talk.

That's lightyears from a scalable, non-buggy, chat system with modern features deployed at scale.
Not OP, but I'd expect that it is because W3W is a basically a marketing campaign for a technology that doesn't actually solve a problem

(or, more precisely, solves one corner of a problem while destroying many much broader solutions)

Creating a knock-off that solves the OS problems still fails to recover from the broader problems that the W3W 'solution' provides zero ability to actually navigate without a continuous link to their server. A knock-off with better OS cred would still fail the same way.
I've never heard of this company, but I'd like to say I really think the graphic designer who came up with the logo really nailed it.
> Each new Android version starts with a beta which previews and advertises the behavior changes, how is that not a reasonable deprecation timeline ? (real question, not trying to be cute)

Testing against betas can cause regressions for non-API reasons. That's why I'm reluctant to test against them, preferring to wait for final releases.

For apps that need maximum stability with minimal effort deprecation policies have to preserve BC at least for one release cycle.
Of course. But it arose in the midst of, and makes explicit and implicit references to (and fun of), many debates and attitudes that were current at the time, not just concerning programming languages but also operating systems, structured programming, goto, etc. For instance, a few months before this essay Brian Kernighan had published “Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language” (https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html) which ends with “Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming”.
Pilots can switch planes like programmers can switch programming languages so "protecting career" is unlikely.

"Obeying my boss" is what is most likely happening here. I get the sense that they are literally instructed not to give bad PR about the plane. Or even worse, this entire article is scripted.
There are already alternatives to getting people to not use W3W is the whole goal.
A big selling point of this scam is the "tune-up" to disable the loads of bundled crapware that comes preinstalled from OEMs. How much bundled crapware comes preloaded in a Mac?
so much nonsense/editorializing in the article & headline.

how does this float to page 1? (pardon the pun)
And how many 'engineers' would tack on 1000x too much complexity to justify their 'engineering' effort?

software in many cases is more art than science.
It does exist in developing nations, where street names change very quickly and are not very reliable (and the rusty government can't keep up with the quick development). First hand experience, Vietnam - I currently live in a street that wasn't there a year ago and isn't in Google Maps. If you put it into Google, it will send you to another place, 200 meters away. (They are getting better fast, compared to Apple Maps for example which suck hilariously, but still isn't perfect.)

You can share a long/lat, or a link to Google Maps, but that's hard to write down.

So it's a problem.
“The China Study” and Longevity
> Windows 95 didn't even ship with a built-in TCP/IP stack.

Are you sure about that? Win 3.11 did not, you had to install trumpet winsock, but win95 did have winsock.dll shipped with it IIRC. You may have had to separately install it, but it was on your handy win95 cd-rom IIRC
Readers might find this piece (“Four Cars Repeatedly Crashed to Test the Latest Automatic Braking Safety Systems”) interesting:

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a24511826/safety-featu...
I drive a 2018 VW Golf Variant (Station Wagon) and the Adaptive Cruise Control from VW also has this problem. I regularly use it for city driving from traffic light to traffic light which means that I basically only have to steer a little, but if I'm driving towards a stationary car waiting in front of a red light, it will not detect the car until it starts to move.
They tend to be in the range of aerospace engineer salary. High end of engineer salary but not approaching silicon valley pay. Check out ONET for government data on salaries
Garfield phones beach mystery finally solved
Given that at least some of the expert companies involved have attempted coverups of previous failures before, a little bit of skepticism is healthy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues

Authority should not be free from skepticism, even by people who are not authorities.
Yes, but this is software engineering. Where there is no such thing as malpractice, and where managers can not be prosecuted for criminal negligence even when their overriding of the engineers professional position gets dozens of people killed. In this delightful world, managers rule the roost and engineers do not have the ability to refuse to do anything.
The idea of Land Value Taxation, which was George's proposal, is that improvements are to be exempted from taxation, and the effort of property management is to be considered as authentic labor.

Only land is to be taxed. Not capital. Not labor.
The God is on the side of bigger battalions and US battalions are MUCH MUCH MUCH bigger. It is a matter of spending in the end. US can outspend Russia and China combined without even noticing. In 20 years.. well we have no clue what will happen in 20 years.
If this isn’t antitrust, then I don’t know what is.
>It is overly reductionist to say that a company exists solely for the benefit of the shareholders.

It's not reductionist at all; that's exactly how it is in a purely capitalist system, and how it is in America. It's different in other countries, like European ones and Japan, where companies really do have a responsibility to employees and society at large, but in America they don't have any such responsibility, no matter how much you would like it to be otherwise.
I work at a 5 person startup, so wouldn’t want to endorse that at this stage but maybe if we get to 200 or 2000 employees it’d make more sense. I highly value protecting workers and ensuring fair compensation.
Interesting. I'm curious about whether the time they hijacked Baidu Analytics to launch a huge denial of service attack against GitHub was considered "politely" asking or not.
But there are some APIs that don't work, e.g. ExifInterface (that you need to properly process image orientation) can only read from InputStream starting with r24, and you need access to the raw File before that [0].

[0] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/ExifIn...
No the investors get the real numbers that we don't get. Number of customers, customer acquisition costs, revenue, trailing growth, churn, etc. etc.

Reading anything other than the title in these types of posts are not worth anyone's time.
Ah, absolutely true. Evolution doesn't explain the origin of the cosmos. My lazy brain fell right into the trap.
The issue is that tesla packaged up a radar designed for adaptive cruise control as part of their "autopilot." Maybe there is some disclaimer somewhere that says autopilot will happily run into stopped cars, but I don't know that most drivers of Teslas are aware of this.
Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains
> Can any other Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC) stop in such a case? (Real question, I don't know).

I haven't found conclusive evidence, but the lack of news around other TACCs crashing into stationary objects is an indicator it might be a Autopilot specific issue.

> My current understanding is that Tesla's TACC is the best on the market. Correct?

Define best. It definitely has a lot of features few or no other systems have; on the other hand, it's a test program. It's officially Beta-Software, given to drivers to test and identify issues. So from a feature-set it's probably the best you can buy - but it turns you into a Test-Driver rather than a user of a product.
A thought experiment: how do you feel about whatever it is you're doing?
Announcing Unspent: a crypto portfolio tracker that goes beyond tracking
The alternative is malware having free reign over the entire filesystem. This is a real problem which is happening today. With your all-or-nothing solution the user has no ability to limit what files an app can access, which is totally unacceptable.
Sold His Business to Steve Jobs for $275M and Learned One Lesson on Success
I realize crypto winters aren't the times when there's the most attention directed to crypto. However I'd argue that it is when things are calm that it pays the most to analyze the situation, review one's strategy, get familiar with tools that allow to better understand your portfolio and overall markets – tools like Unspent.

I'm launching Unspent after starting working on it full time in 2018, and I'd love to hear what you think!

During 48 hours after posting this comment, I'll be offering a free year of Unspent Pro to everyone posting a comment here, so that you can try Unspent in its entirety. Note that even Free users have access to all features, since Unspent's goal is to help everyone in the ecosystem as much as possible, but Pro users unlock more advanced facets of some interesting features :)

Looking forward to your thoughts!
That's not how a store of value is supposed to behave. It's supposed to be stable, it shouldn't go up or go down faster than inflation/deflation.
Dumb, this is a waste management issue almost 100%
The reason why it's done essentially universally is not necessarily because it is good for the economy in general, it needs only to be good for those who control the issuing of currency (governments).

And it is beneficial for them to do so simply because it enables them to spend more without having to take unpopular measures like raising taxes.

I have read the vast majority of the arguments for having inflation or deflation and to be perfectly honest I find most of them to be unconvincing and essentially boil down to "it's good because its good".

Both inflation, deflation and stagflation have their benefits and drawbacks and they all have a place and should all be used, because economic scenarios and circumstances differ over time and place. To state that we should all have at all times everywhere 2% inflation is dumb, dangerous and frankly if you hold that sort of view you have no business being anywhere near monetary policy because you're not an economist, you're a priest.
Chrome extension: Travel Tab (photos from unsplash)
At some point maintenance was taken over by a startup,
and they moved to POSIX as the primary API as a industry standard (over "RTEMS classic" which was purely Ada). The move to C was part of that I believe.
Calling Kong _just a wrapper_ is dismissive of the features and value it brings to just a web server. Kong is an ecosystem in it's own right, with a plugin development kit and an open source community supporting creation of an intelligent proxy.
It is fair to mention that when javascript was created it was indeed the best tool for the job
Do you think it will save costs if the united states moved F-35 manufacturing to China? Quality will be lower but Apple was able to do it with the iPhone without compromising quality.
I wonder how fast a continent would have to move before you could practically extract power from its motion?
Google maps now includes plus codes which are open so I don't think W3W stands a chance anyway. Not should they. It's an idea you can implement in half an hour. It doesn't need to be a commercial business.
Yes.

These are the design constraints. Really it should be 2 or 3 different, almost certainly cheaper, aircraft.
I was thinking more like "Oh, to be young again and be able to have the memory of a twenty-something me again. Happy days."

I saw the headline, and struggled to remember any details of the book, and ended up having to read a summary of it. I only remember reading the book and talking about it with coworkers during the dot-com craze.
Sure. Well, there's no pressing need, for me because I'm self-employed (I'm member of a sort-of/kinda union for self-employed people, but it's not quite the same thing thing), and I'm currently contracting for a bank, and unions for bank employees already exist. Anyone who wants to join a union already can.

But in general, sure. I think it's good for employees to organise and be able to present themselves in a united manner to the concentrated power of corporations.
What about (maybe) lasers + LEO, basically what Musk does?
OP reads as if their main issue is the lack of inherent openness. All I'm saying is make an open alternative if is really so bothering to OP.
I haven't had a smartphone in some time, but I highly recommend AntennaPod which is available of F-Droid.

Not only a great podcast app, but it respects your Freedom. It's the only thing I miss about not having a smartphone.
It's pretty crazy, but we're all just riding ships of bedrock that float on oceans of magma
Good thing those folks in Australia have retained the ability to fight their govt via the right to bear arms.... right ?
This article is from 2016.
Edit: They fixed the title.
The cost for an F18 is about 70 million in 2017[0]. The cost for a F35 is about 85 million in 2020[1], probably more than that because future estimates are always low. That's ignoring how much more useful an F35 is.

Once economies of scale kick in, it doesn't seem that much more expensive. There was supposed to be a more comprehensive review of the F35 vs older platforms, I'd love for someone more knowledgeable to chime in with an apples to apples comparison.

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-updated-f18-comparabl...

[1]: https://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2017/feb/07/do...
The EE degree is only there to make you employable as an EE. You'll have to teach yourself formal methods on your own. That's why it's a way to stand out.
Heh. I almost always type 'grep foo bar' and let the error tell me the right order because I never recall if it is needle haystack or haystack needle. I do this a lot.
> Radar can't differentiate between a wall, a stopped car, or a dead skunk

"Radar" absolutely can.

What can't differentiate between these things is the radar in Teslas that was intended for use in adaptive cruise control. There are any number of not insanely expensive radars that could do this job perfectly fine. Tesla just decided to go "full self driving" with this rather bad radar because "humans can do it with vision only!!!1!!!1!"
If a provider is missing it's because the developer of that app didn't create one.
If you care about security or privacy, it seems like you’d avoid Android.
This is the underrated "why iPhone" answer most people overlook.

An iPhone may be more "locked down" than an Android equivalent in terms of what you can install, but when the App store is so robust, you really don't feel any pain from the walled garden.

An iPhone user doesn't need to side load a bunch of software to get the job done -- the App store has high quality tools for 99% of use cases and most are available for a couple bucks.
This is why my podcast isn't available on Google Podcasts, but is on iTunes. I read the agreement required to put it on Google Podcasts (the usual "irrevocable worldwide license to do whatever we want with it" for uploading data to Google servers), and passed.

Additionally, I do use bandwidth as my rough listener metric, so letting it be hosted by Google Podcasts would impact that significantly. Which is closer to the concern the BBC seems to have.
To be clear, I wouldn't support that at all. I have no beef with Israel or Jews. What I'm trying to explore is where the logic in this thread takes us.

If I'm fine with or at least neutral towards Israel, and I am, and if Facebook shares this view, and it clearly does, and if Israel is an "ethnostate", which it is, then by simmannian's definition, I and Facebook would have to be OK with racist states. That sounds totally wrong but I can only see three possible resolutions:

1. Being an ethnostate isn't racist or problematic. But in that case, being white nationalist would also not be racist or problematic, which means Facebook's policy is in contradiction.

2. Advocating for an ethnostate is wrong if it's "white", but Israel isn't a problem because Jews aren't "white". Maybe there's some convoluted path by which this is true, but I use a simple definition of whiteness - do they look like me? They do, so, this one can't work either.

3. It's only problematic if westerners do it, for no defined reason.

Of those I can only see (3) being a plausible explanation for Facebook's behaviour here. Which unfortunately seems to back up the feeling some of these people have that white people are being 'persecuted' for views that are considered fine when other races have them.

This whole thing rapidly seems to hit unresolvable contradictions. It seems like Facebook should just stay out of it as a result: any path forward puts them in a position of hypocrisy, which I find to be one of the worst sins.

Note that none of the above means I'm myself white nationalist or approve of it. Just that I think it's really important that moral positions are coherent, internally consistent and people who claim to follow them follow them even when inconvenient. That's more important than almost anything else, in my worldview.
Simple, Complicated, and Complex Systems
The Soviet-era economies were generally horrible to live under from everything I've read and heard, even from people who actually lived under them. Did you? There's a reason they wouldn't let people leave East Germany, and actually shot them if they tried, and why those people risked their lives regardless to get out, and also why almost no one from the West ever tried to "escape" to Soviet-bloc countries.
This idea of mapping words over an information space seems to be floating about quite a bit in recent years. I was inspired by the XKCD about the superiority of passphrases (Correct Horse Battery Staple) and have thought of a handful of other applications that are more relevant than GPS location for word mapping. It's the wrong application of a generally great (but not novel) idea.
Your jumping to conclusions exemplifies why this move by facebook is so incredibly dangerous.

You jump from "censoring white nationalism will censor legitimate opinions" (such as there "there is a white race" - a question on which there are good arguments for both sides, and which it's reasonable to debate), to I hold such opinions. Then you jump from a few of those opinions to hatred. And then you jump from there to being part of hate groups.

Calm down and think.
There actually was a PE for Software Engineering, but it is being discontinued, because almost no one took it.

https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin...