skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> massive amount of people out there who look at the current cost/benefit tradeoff of compromising their privacy and decide that it's worth it

I don't agree with this characterization - it's too willful. To me, it seems more like a helpless coping mechanism. Since they "overestimate the degree to which their privacy is compromised", they resign themselves to not being able to do anything to protect their own privacy. The phone is listening to them, the satellites are tracking them [0], websites are recording them - basically every electronic device they encounter is not under their control. Their privacy is already gone.

Then, they watch TV and see actors using surveillance systems to capture Really Bad People. Since they've already resigned themselves to the collection, the only thing they have left is to hope that said surveillance results in things that are good and just. And when you try to bring up real-world problems, they revert to coping mechanisms of how it doesn't bother them - because if it did, they're still ultimately powerless to change anything.

To cross this divide, I think we need to give people actionable packaged-up solutions they adopt to protect their privacy. Part of the difficulty is that most people use their phone as their primary communication medium, and the phone ecosystem is a privacy dumpster fire. I don't have a recommendation for increasing phone privacy besides LoS+microg and also stop using your phone so much - do most of your communicating from a real computer running Free software.

Incidentally this is why this Apple news is so terrible - they had seemed to plot a course for more user privacy. Even with Apple retaining control, it could have let people see there can be boundaries. But now they've basically thrown away user empowerment in favor of putting a government agent on every phone. And so we're right back to the understanding of "everything I do is surveilled".

[0] I'm obviously describing their perspective. I've tried to explain to people that GPS satellites do not themselves track you, but rather let your phone figure out where you are. And by them taking an interest in the software on their phone, they could prevent it tracking their location. But I generally hit a wall of cognitive dissonance where the "satellite tracking" was really just some talking point, rather than something they think they could prevent.
How the Immune System Works
I wanted to think that, but the article (though interesting) seems to be written by somebody quite impressed by themself. I may be biased, though, because most of the (few) people I've known to have so many tabs open seem that way to me. The ones I know not only have so many tabs open, but they really like it when people notice the great number.
>It's not even that I have anything to hide but I'm scared that one day, police will knock at my door because of a hash collision or a borked logfile or whatever.

Easiest thing is not to worry about that and just use the services as normal. You’d have to trigger the system multiple times before there was even a chance of having police involved and even then there’d be no actual evidence if you don’t have that content.

I have some respect for privacy absolutists that want to go down that path on principal but it sounds like a massive pain in the ass with no upside for most people.
Most people I know avoid using cramped rush hour transit when they can. So overall more steady state operation is likely to make public transit more appealing. Even if they cut back from a train every 8 minutes to one every 15 during rush hour.
Greg Egan and Sam Hughes/qntm are both excellent science fiction authors which I have found other HPMOR fans like.

https://www.gregegan.net/

https://qntm.org/fiction
Blue shift (aka increased apparent frequency) is caused by the velocity between you and the source, not the velocity of the source. That is how the speed of light works in General Relativity. If you move toward a photon is doesn’t get faster, it gets higher frequency. If that’s in the visible range it shifts toward the blue end of the spectrum.

If you move fast enough, all of the ultraviolet light coming from behind you becomes visible light. A little faster and all of the ultraviolet light in front of you becomes X-rays. And all of the hard x-rays become gamma rays.
I did it switching companies, but only because I had a prior relationship with senior leadership who could vouch for me. All other attempts I had to make that transition at random other companies were met with silence or "We want somebody with leadership experience."

Generally I think you will have better luck within the same company.
Connector Basics
Is it even possible to actually “count” without using some form of language in your head?
The UI/UX team's salaries need to be justified.
As co-founder and CTO of my firm, I agree with many of the other responses: internal would be best, by far, assuming you like the existing team and have solid relationships therein.

With that said, shameless plug: if you are a senior-level IC who may be interested in getting a foot into management, we're hiring :)

Our company: bractlet.com

My email: brian at bractlet dot com

We're helping solve climate change through energy efficiency, and need talented folks to help us scale our systems and business to the next level.
Agree with all the advice that doing it internally will likely be easier (per the "When you're doing something new, don't do something new" maxim).

That said, changing companies can enable rapid evolution. It'll (potentially) make it easier to be the manager you want to be, as opposed to the manager they think you'll be. In many cases it's likely better to do it where you are, but wanted to advocate for the benefits of the alternative, it's not guaranteed to be worse.

My path involved switching to a combo IC & manager at a place where I was an experienced IC, but my skill as a manager didn't really develop until I switched companies.
A timeline of Elon Musk’s bailout of SolarCity, informed by court transcripts
From the article:

> Facebook (FB.O) and Twitter (TWTR.N) also cut pay for remote employees who move to less expensive areas, while smaller companies including Reddit and Zillow (ZG.O) have shifted to location-agnostic pay models, citing advantages when it comes to hiring, retention and diversity.

I can't find discussions related to the other companies referenced here. Did those not make it to hacker news?
I've been using Gnome for years and it's basically the best kept secret among desktop environments. Simple, unobtrusive, and continuously improving without many sudden changes that force one to relearn how to use it. I've tried tiling window managers but they just eat up time configuring to my liking. Compared with Windows and MacOS, I'm delighted with how easy it is to configure and use Gnome right out of the box. The UI is consistent and these guidelines are refreshingly concise.
I think it would be very hard to switch from IC -> management by jumping companies.

My current manager made the switch from IC -> management a few years back. Internally, he was able to leverage the long relationships he had to get appropriate mentoring. He also had the trust/support of the team he was managing, giving him a large cushion to try out/experiment not worry so much about failure.
Read the technical details. Half the required data for the system to function is in iCloud, it doesn’t make any sense without it being uploaded there.
The devs at my company have been emailing patches to each other for the last couple of hours. It's been fun actually.
More to the point, the stakes are really high for FF now.

I use and love FF, but FF's market share is very low and shrinking. If they can't do anything to turn that trend around, web developers will ignore it, and it will become useless for many sites.

FF users have to wish/hope that FF rights this ship, and that means they can't afford to lose any more users (and really, that they must somehow reverse course and acquire new users). So every update feels really important - the shrinking user base is an existential threat to the browser.
> To engage workers, managers must fulfill the 12 essential elements of engagement

Hm. There are few jobs that can become life goals, most are boring. And with a years long pandemic and uncertain future, to work or not to work? Work for what purpose? No level of engaging is enough if people can see through the ruse. If anything i d expect more people to go solo
The idea that there is secret knowledge that only the elect should know goes back to classical times, and probably to the time the old testament was put together. So it might not have to do with stigma per se.
Yes, companies used to wait until they were making money to go public, but they have more options now. My larger point is the capital stack a company chooses to fund its growth is a function of its particular business and market, along with the investment climate. (For example: companies stay private longer now because there's far more private capital available than in 1980 when Apple went public. There's no one right answer. Amazon would likely be a much smaller company if it had maintained profitability all along. Perhaps would not have produced AWS, which bled oceans of money for a long time.

For every Google or Facebook (arguably two of the best business models in history), you can name an Amazon, Netflix, Broadcom, DocuSign, Square, or Tesla. Success comes in different flavors.

(Tesla notably spent something like $10B before getting to profitability. This is an artifact of the intersection of their market and their global ambitions. Unlikely they would have had the impact on major auto manufacturers as a much smaller, profitable, boutique firm.)
I’m not sure that CUE or any similar system can fix the essential reasons that configuration languages become hard to use.

A big problem with configuration parameters is understanding what they do. Typically you depend on the documentation and experimentation, which is okay for a text editor but more difficult when software gets more complex and abstract.

To find out what a function does, you can read its definition. But the meaning of a constant or a configuration parameter doesn’t come from its definition. It comes from the code that uses it. Typically, it could be used anywhere in the program, and the code could be of arbitrary complexity.

But users typically don’t read the source code at all, so basically you’re tweaking a global variable and you hope it does what you think.

Configuration files are written in little languages where each parameter has potentially global effect and the interactions between them is usually unspecified. We hope they’re orthogonal, but this depends on the good taste of the language designer. When constants get turned into configuration parameters on an ad-hoc basis, this language is unlikely to be designed well.
NAFTA was replaced last year with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). I don't believe it goes into full effect until 2025-26. It's basically the same as NAFTA, though.
The ultimate litmus test for any GUI is to ask a relative with average computer skills to perform basic tasks in your program.

If he/she asks questions like "why the fuck is the Confirm button up with on the window handle?" Or "Where are the small previews when I'm selecting images?" you have failed. In its current state GTK is not only a footgun, but a footgun factory with the biggest manufacturing throughput in the GUI library world.

And I'm not writing this out of spite. I want GTK to be successful and I do believe some of the underlying tech is great but the actual ui/ux choices it want's to steer you towards are consistently terrible almost to the point of "want to do $THING? Check how gnome apps do it and do the complete opposite."
it's such a mind game. Google no longer will provide that employee with $10 of thousands of office space, and $1000s in perks when the employee is remote. Having an employee transition from in office to remote is _already_ saving the employer money as the employee now pays for the sq footage (and food, foosball, and gardens) ... But of course this is doublespeak to confuse employees.
Just an FYI for everyone: you can use a local backup system with iOS. Fully encrypted local backups over WiFi (connect your iPhone to your Mac or Windows iTunes, use full backups - encrypted, and enable backups over WiFi).

Your phone will backup when charging overnight on the same WiFi network as your designated backup Mac/PC. The backup files are encrypted with a different password chosen when you set it up so it doesn't rely on only keeping your backup computer secure.
As an aside: I use voip.ms sms api to send/recv text messages. Works great.
> My time at Google was the easiest/most relaxing of my career by far. Hell, that's why I left.

Would you mind if I reach out to you? I'd be curious to learn more about your life/career path, if you're willing to share.
"rightly so" because I feel that denying people life saving treatments (and I really mean life saving, not prolonging life by a bare month in pain and misery) just for demographic reasons is immoral.
I don't understand. Aren't you describing S3? Why would Amazon offer a second version of S3?
> ...Everyday he had a list of questions ready for me that he had judiciously picked.

Your story is very touching, thank you for sharing it.

It also emphasizes the importance of a motivated teacher. Also I believe that such parent's involvement makes the process and the subject of learning so much worthwhile.

It's not a secret that as parents we want/need to outsource the kids into schools just to free ourselves up for what we want/need to do. Yet paradoxically we want the kids to know no less than we know ourselves.

It's just a luck if kids come across a good teacher which would help the kids demonstrate to us parents that they are worth of our attention. Kind of backwards...
oops that was supposed to be a wouldn't/wasn't construction. The is doesn't make sense.
YouTube suspends filmmaker Oliver Ressler’s account without warning
My experience with going back and forth between manager and IC a few times over my career (I prefer to be what I call a radical-IC, usually a specialist consultant), it's important to understand how different the competencies are.

First, a manager is not a super-engineer. Rarely are super-engineers good managers, and rarely are exceptional managers really good engineers.

Second, we need to separate management from leadership, and this razor does it really well: leadership scales effort, management extracts value.

Super-engineers have some natural leadership because they can scale their brains by adding others with clear explanations, mentoring, and leveraging others. However, this also is why you can have great team leadership on products that go nowhere because there is no one managing to figure out how to extract the value from the amazing technical feats your scaled and well-led team is accomplishing.

Teams with lots of management but little leadership feel like optimizing to get blood from a stone, because micromanagement is the antithesis of scaling effort, as it's about micro-optimizing extracting value on a linear, monotonic basis without any scale. But that's just the anti-pattern. Great management is when you have customers who are happy and interested in what you are doing because you've managed to extract value from your team and made them that way. You've given customers the thing that empowers them in their own organizations because you understand the factors that go into your product, and how to balance them so that what comes out is valuable to others.

Third, to transition to management, find a role to do pure management in a domain that isn't your top skill, where you can focus on the aggregate value instead of getting sucked into solving the problems themselves. This is counter-intuitive, but most important things are, so if you are a good programmer, don't start with managing developers. Do ops or better, a customer success/support team. Product is cool and interesting, but it's still an IC role, management means extracting value from teams. The path to CTO means managing teams and departments, so find something unsexy (like customer support) and take that on.

Alternatively, join a small company or startup and take over one of their teams, or get a 6-12mo contracting gig as a project manager with resource accountability. Long comment, and YMMV, but consider these dynamics on your quest.
I'm excited for the Debian 11 release this weekend, because that means the testing repository unfreeze will allow Gnome 40 to come into play soon
Tesla 2020 Impact Report [pdf]
You mean the Ophanim? Be not afraid, my child.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/878/385/a57...
There's an interesting talk[1] about this and other images that show evidence of psychedelic use in early Christianity.

[1] - Starting at around 9'50" in "Psychedelics - In Spirituality and Religion (by Aware Project)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEkF2ER0Zwc
Why do you want to be a manager? (This is a genuine question, not a challenge or an argument.)
Newsom is next!

https://recallgavin2020.com/

https://www.electelder.com/

Let's get all of these commmies out of office!
It has to do at least in part with complacency accumulated in time as people accept some resource for granted.

E.g. in the beginning actors wanting a certain market good could be fighting very hard for it, but once acquired, over time, maybe across generations, energy put in place to retain said resource will begin to decrease. This is where "solutions" will come in place mostly in the form of increasing "efficiency"(put less energy) by centralization.

Take a look at US retail. In colonial times you had to provide for yourself and your family, hunt, farm, etc. While that continued for a long time more and more actors would pop up on the market doing hunting wholesale increasing efficiency for the community. The hidden tradeoff is a raise of a monopoly in said community so that efficiency wasn't really free. In the beginning people clearly understood the tradeoff and acted accordingly, their children understood it less. Snowball this to current days where many rural places in the US have only a Walmart as the single place where they exchange money for things, where culture is concentrated.

There are things that authorities can do of course, but this cycle is very old(described many times in the Bible for example) and it's up to people in the end to maintain a healthy market by directing decisions towards preventing monopolies. (e.g. co-ops)
Pretty obviously can't have a real great resignation without significant wage increases, which would most likely increase inflation (or more accurately, be symptomatic of latent inflation that hadn't yet reached prices).
this version o' firefox is an' a' th' foremaist major piece o' software tae be translated intae scots - a leid spoken / understaun by 1.3m fowk in bonnie scotland.

Mah afore company worked oan th' translation 'n' thay tellt me thay hud fin trying tae come up wi' suitable equivalents fur tekky wurds sic as 'minimise' 'n' 'maximise'.
You don't think neuroscience involves theorizing? You think the neuroscientists can just image the neuronal activity and read it out in some complete scientific explanation?
Personally I hate large font sizes. What do they think I am, 5?
> I am,

Good.

> but that's beside the point.

Is it? I think legal insight is relevant to what we are discussing.

> Look, you're a huge sucker if you think that the boundaries of the tech and the stated policy today are 1) not fluid

Who would think that?

> and 2) here's the bigger part -- aren't there primarily for the purpose of laying the groundwork for more intrusive spying.

It’s obvious that you think that is the agenda. Calling people who aren’t as convinced as you ‘suckers’ tells us you are sure of yourself, but not much else.

>> That's the "nerd" charge.

Sure, but it’s uninformative. It’s pretty obvious there are people who think what you think, so no news there.

> If you follow the words they are saying and treat those as gospel and limiting, you're a nerd and a sucker.

Agreed, but so what? If you treat the words as gospel you are a fool, but equally if you ignore them altogether you are simply ignorant.

Those aren’t the only options.

> And to take it further, if I seem paranoid or whatnot -- that's fine; it's better and smarter to be wrong in my direction than it is in the sucker direction,

I like this line of reasoning. I agree that it’s often good to take a precautionary position.

However in this case I just think the maximally paranoid position is weak, not just rhetorically, but effectively.

As for ‘intrusive spying’ being the primary purpose. That is an open question. Nobody is denying that law enforcement, and presumably intelligence agencies, want that, and will exploit what they can, in secret if they can get away with it. But they aren’t the only actors here. Is it Apple’s primary purpose? Is it NCMEC’s primary purpose?

That’s why understanding the technology matters.

> where you can't put the toothpaste back in the proverbial tube.

Now who is being a sucker about the boundaries not being fluid? The toothpaste in this case was out before the tube was ever invented.

Privacy technology is not binary, and always exists within a social context.

The state is always going to employ paranoid actors, and the public is right to be concerned about them. Law enforcement is always going to push for more power, and the public is right to want that power checked.

The rest of us, Apple included, operate in a complex and fluid environment. Defaulting to paranoia is like being a stopped clock. You’re right twice a day but you never know what time it really is.
Degraded performance is what it says. Things that took 20s are currently taking 60s. Things that took 60s are now taking 180s. Things are going slower. Maybe by a constant factor. Maybe exponentially.

Where this sometimes turns into a "partial outage", is that there might be response timeouts somewhere in the backend of the stack, meaning that things that took 60s are now taking [100s and then a 504 error response]. ("Because," the backend dev thinks, "why would clients want a response after 100s? They've probably given up and gone home already at that point.")

Or, equally likely, there's a response deadline somewhere in your client—where you figured "their API will never take more than 100s to respond", so even though the API is still chugging away at the 100s mark, your client cuts it off, drops the connection, and displays an error.

Either way, the literal problem at hand is still, simply, "things are going slower."

"Degraded performance" can help you predict whether you'll be one of the customers encountering failures, in a way that "partial outage" cannot. Were your particular querying workloads to the API fast before? You'll probably be okay. Were they slow before? Then you might experience the further slowdown as an outage.

If you want to design for fault-tolerance of this case, it's important to know how APIs you talk to deal with long-running workloads. Do they have timeouts? Are they customizable? Are they different per plan level? These are things the API's documentation should communicate.

Once you know these things—and you have metrics on how long requests to a given upstream API are taking to complete—you'll know exactly whether "degraded performance" will affect you or not, before actually getting customer reports.
What about S3 didn't meet your use case? I don't work for AWS. I don't care if they lose business, I am interested in how different companies parse their requirements into manage vs. rent.
$1000/dose is too high when everyone knows the unit costs aren't that high, and there are several other suppliers. And there wouldn't be much willingness for developed nations to pay for doses for developing nations at that price.