Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
> These folks halfway across the world aren't bothering, nor do they actually threaten my freedom in any way shape or form.

As a counterargument, you can't know that. It seems like this argument could be restated as "I don't trust the US government to dispassionately determine who is a threat and even if they were a threat I am not in favor of killing people as a response." Which seems fair but the world is a complicated place and there are justifiable uses of drone strikes.

Comment · 6 years ago
Yeach, we're seeing `Authentication Expired` for our firebase auth calls. Firebase static hosting still looks up.
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
> There have been a total of six deaths related to Autopilot misuse over 3 billion Autopilot driven miles by the fleet. Humans are terrible at risk management.

Or, humans rightly assessed that despite marketing to the contrary autopilot only really works on the easiest part of driving (highway miles) and still managed to kill 6 people.

Comment · 6 years ago
Because he was a schmuck on a bicycle exploring a region more than twice the size of Texas, and not an actual journalist? Seriously, the OP was from freaking buzzfeed and it still listed the research team. These are not equally valuable accounts.
Comment · 6 years ago
I think treating it as a job where 75% of the salary is experience is probably the right attitude. FWIW I worked with a lot of grad students and anecdotally saw the best outcomes from people who within 2-3 months of showing up knew exactly what they wanted to do, were in the lab 10-8 to do it, graduated in 4-5 years and immediately got top-tier jobs.

I knew people who spent (7, 8, 9, 10, 11) years as a PhD student and they sure didn't seem happy or end up particularly good places...

Comment · 6 years ago
Narrator: they can't.
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
If they'd done this right at the PY3K transition and only allowed the function-call-without-parenthesis syntax for `print` calls it could have been a good idea. But now that the community paid the decade-long price to get print as a normal function why backtrack?
Comment · 6 years ago
Weird, as anecdotes go I've always thought the signal iOS app was very polished. I just checked three of those issues (camera access, shared links, search) on an iPhone 11 Pro Max and I wasn't able to reproduce. I suspect Signal may not have a QA group large enough to test on every phone/environment.
Comment · 6 years ago
Pay 10% more than other non-FAANG companies (who are on a different planet) and offer a real mission and opportunity to make a difference in the product/world/industry. Make sure there's free coffee, smart people, and no jerks.
Comment · 6 years ago
Amazon just lists it as a "subtotal," which I think is probably the best way to do it. I don't know about the "UX designer in a couple of hours" line: automatic shipping is a nightmarish bag of worms and isn't really a UX problem. What do you do if they order multiple SKU's that don't pack nicely into one box or are warehoused in different locations? Or if there is something weird about their shipping address? What do you use for box size and weight, and what approximation did you use for dunnage?

You can approximate UPS/FedEX costs by fitting a trend line, they are decently modeled by a linear (base charge + K*distance) function, but when you go to buy the label you might be way off. This puts you in the lose-lose-lose of either eating the difference of wrong estimates, overcharging for shipping and losing conversions, or just making people hate you by increasing the shipping over the estimate. Making a shipping API call is noticeably slow, so most people require an interaction after the address is entered.

Tim Sweeney's hot take was that "the two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation and shopping carts!"

Comment · 6 years ago
> do you think our government is better than theirs? For how long?

America has problems, but your order-of-magnitude calibration is way off if you think a concentration-camp operating (i.e. the real kind with over a million people who committed no crime and are held just for their beliefs and culture) expansionist (Hong Kong, Tibet, Taiwan) totalitarian (speech is monitored and punished in a "go to prison, right away" manner rather than "twitter deleted my racist shit and nothing else happened to me" way) government. So yes, occasionally ineffective democracies that value human rights and freedoms (i.e. the west) is better than the CCP government, and will continue to be better now and into the foreseeable future.

Comment · 6 years ago

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