overeater

Sure your point is a good one in general, but you're combining multiple profiles to create this narrative. Dylan didn't go to Stanford, he went to Brown University. Being an intern, you usually don't have a car, and it's not as easy to get from Sunnyvale (LinkedIn headquarters) to Palo Alto as the story sounds, especially pre-UberX. So the "dropping in" is not like they were living in the same city.

> Uber has engaged in some pretty "creative" (i.e. unethical) business tactics to muscle their way into the taxi industry while avoiding both regulations and the payment of decent wages. They moved fast, but it was only a matter of time before government regulators (and their own reputation) caught up to them. Transportation is, indeed, something that's going to go back up in price in the short-term, if only because Uber and the Uber-wannabe's were using a business model that was never sustainable. I'd expect considerable contraction of this market as multiple companies fight each other for dwindling profits.

I want to push back on calling Uber's methods to avoiding regulations to be unethical, separately from discussing the wages. When they were starting, taxis had regulatory capture with their de facto monopoly. Lobbying over many decades prevented fair and healthy competition for out-of-date reasoning (like medallions and landmark tests). To break this corruption required illegal (and gray area) techniques, but I don't think it's unethical to destroy something that is unethical itself. Not all positive change can happen from following all the laws. Had they gotten shut down in the beginning, I think that would have been a major societal negative, and other ride-share companies coming on their coattails would not have happened.

As a base law, that's helpful, but I'm wondering when it gets into cfaa territory. What if you violate the terms of service to scrape it? What if you have to implement tricks like IP rotating or useragent lying to get the data? What if you accidentally scrape some creative text which is copyrightable, embedded in the recipes and accidentally sell it?

What was that hobby?

This stories reminds me of the times before tech dominance, when programmers and innovators needed to get permission to do almost anything. Tech people were not allowed to run companies, or even manage people -- you needed MBAs for that.

Anything "disruptive" would be immediately shut down and threatened from the dominant industry. Anti-societal violence in video games were under constant protest (like the original Grand Theft Auto, or Mortal Kombat), and don't even think about trying to start a business like Uber or Spotify.

New file formats could be immediately crushed by IP concerns. Even web pages posting content about circumventing current systems or linking to sites like that were targeted. If you weren't a big player, you didn't have any way to accept money (besides asking people to mail you checks).

While tech is seen as too powerful now, I think it's at least nice that we no longer have the anxiety that plagued any idea or project in the past. You don't have to worry about going to jail for programming crypto code, or be unable to find a hosting provider for your website that shows scraped public data.

I think the procedure I described also can do this, but the 6-digit code is sent in the background. I don't see why a human has to physically write out 6 digits from phone to computer, instead of it just happening automatically.

I main difference here is usability. The current process is going into an app, finding+choosing the website from a list, tapping that website, manually copying from one screen to another, checking that you copied the digits correctly, then confirming. This is stressful and takes about a minute. A process where you just confirm a dialog, or use your fingerprint takes 2 seconds, and doesn't require the mental effort of memorizing and writing out 6 digits. If the people working on security can't see the enormous difference between the two workflows, then this is hopeless.

It's the same issue that plagues the security-minded people who think regular users will go around copying and storing each others' PGP keys.

I"m not seeing a huge benefit of the personal device being offline, while you're trying to log into an online service. But let's say there was a need for that, what about using bluetooth or wifi direct to push to the device?

I don't understand why authentication usually requires you to type in some 6-digit number from your phone. From an ideal user experience point of view, why not just pop up a dialog on your phone, wait 1 second (to prevent accidental taps), show "decline" or "approve" options, and that triggers the authentication to proceed? This seems like an experience that Apple would design.

Even better, use a thumbprint to authorize on the phone, to add one more layer of security. Then you hit the trifecta of verifying 1) something you know (the password entered on the website), 2) something you own (your phone), and 3) something about you (your fingerprint).

Does anyone know why there has never been any breakthroughs in air conditioning for 50 years? Windows air conditioners have been incredibly heavy, loud, expensive, and resource-intensive for so long. Even a small room needs one that is back-breaking to install. And pretty much everyone in the world (except those with central air) needs a couple of air conditioners now.

Sure the "efficiency" is improving but it's mainly tricks for turning it on/off at better times. I know there are some U-shaped ones now, but it's just a slightly different styling.

Edit: two commenters pointed out examples of air conditioners which are 77 lbs and 56 lbs. As a comparison, the OSHA recommended lifting weight is 50 lbs. I would love to see someone apply Apple's obsession with thinner, lighter, "revolutionary new design" to ACs.

> Note that the definition of "international student" excludes those with permanent visas. The number of foreign born PhD students is therefore significantly higher than 64%. Don't know if there are any stats for citizen/non-citizen share of PhDs though.

Why are you interested in the percentage of foreign born PhD students? You realize that a lot of Americans are "foreign born". It seems like an archaic way of thinking about things.

"International student" should indeed exclude those who are permanent residents. Which means they have been living here permanently before becoming a student, likely grew up in America, or just waiting for the citizenship, etc. "International student" means someone who moved here to study.

I'm assuming good intentions, but want to make sure we're not intentionally trying to gatekeep what it means to be an American.

I didn't downvote you but your tone is overly dramatic for some simple heuristics. Specifically you're just repeating two things over and over. Here's some simple answers:

1) you're right that ASCII was English only, but now utf-8 is the defacto standard, backwards compatible with ASCII, and good for every language. Use that, no BOM needed and the BOM is discouraged by the standard anyway.

2) dates can be YYYY-MM-DD as per the ISO standard. Also they're sortable as a string too as a nice side effect.

All good?