Hacker News: darpa_escapee

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Tesla Software Version 10.0"

darpa_escapee — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 05:44:16 +0000

Tesla owners are known to be willing put up with things other car owners aren't. I don't want to fool around with a touchscreen in traffic.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Young People Are Going to Save Us All from Office Life"

darpa_escapee — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 21:15:15 +0000

Not really, it's a very old observation. For example, Cicero observed that "whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves"

And there are many types of slavery that are not chattel slavery.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Recruiting Software Developers – Checking Out a Company"

darpa_escapee — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 03:36:57 +0000

Glassdoor is only useful when there are a significant amount of negative reviews for an employer. It means that the employer is bad, so bad that they don't care enough to pay a firm to pad their Glassdoor page with glowing reviews.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Health system sues thousands of patients, seizes pay and puts liens on homes"

darpa_escapee — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 22:33:04 +0000

Total health expenditures have skyrocketed[1] along with the amount of hospital administrators[2] over the last few decades. This particular hospital is unlikely to have escaped the trend.

[1] https://img.datawrapper.de/z8VeH/full.png

[2] https://gomerblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Doctors-and...

New comment by darpa_escapee in "50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust investigation of Google"

darpa_escapee — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 22:24:57 +0000

The worst is the blog spam that reaches the top of Google's search results.

I don't think it's a coincidence that those poor quality results are given precedence when they also happen to be littered with, and optimized for, Adsense ads.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust investigation of Google"

darpa_escapee — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 22:19:41 +0000

Automated bureaucracy without a means for recourse is nightmare fuel.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Amazon Employees Pledge to Walk Out as Part of Global Climate Strike"

darpa_escapee — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 22:08:50 +0000

Rich people can afford to insure and rebuild on disaster-prone, but otherwise highly desirable, property.

I lived near a barrier island that would get hit with hurricanes each season, and every 5-10 years a storm would devastate it. Despite that, property owners would rebuild their several million dollar vacation homes exactly where they last stood, but raised just a little higher than the last time.

I don't blame them, it's an amazing spot in the summer.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Sunsetting Python 2"

darpa_escapee — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 16:45:47 +0000

> For instance "requests" vs. "aiohttp".

"asks" implements a requests-like interface over asyncio/trio.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "South African authorities admit to mass surveillance"

darpa_escapee — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 00:55:22 +0000

Also, assume that states have access to root certificates.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Nearly a quarter of U.S. rural hospitals are on the brink of closure – report"

darpa_escapee — Sun, 01 Sep 2019 17:02:26 +0000

You don't believe Democrats because they compromised with Republicans to get a bill passed?

If you recall, Republicans used the filibuster in the Senate, which meant Democrats needed a 60 vote supermajority to get a healthcare bill passed. When they floated the idea of a Medicare-for-all bill, Republicans promised to filibuster in the Senate.

Democrats compromised with Republicans on policy that Republicans wrote themselves, and Republicans still filibustered and not a single one of them voted in favor of it.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd"

darpa_escapee — Sun, 01 Sep 2019 16:37:54 +0000

> I do not want to write a "service" that has some "only run once and then discard" flag or whatever.

Then just use cron.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers"

darpa_escapee — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 18:38:38 +0000

Amazon is AliExpress with a domestic retailer's markup. At least with Walmart I know that when they stock something on their shelves, they care about liability and bad PR.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Brazil's President Blames NGOs for Amazon Fires"

darpa_escapee — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 17:20:05 +0000

Very few problems are solved by simply ignoring them.

General awareness of a problem is needed to mobilize political action. If the solution to the problem is political, awareness of the issue might inspire direct action, or at least voting for policy that effects change.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Brazil's President Blames NGOs for Amazon Fires"

darpa_escapee — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 17:17:10 +0000

> Merely being aware of some tragedy occurring far away doesn’t do anything.

The first step on the long road of change is acknowledging that a problem exists.

Just because you can't imagine how you can effect change, doesn't mean it isn't possible. Problems of this scale require a sufficiently scaled solution. Economic sanctions and treaties would provide incentives for change. Hit Brazil's government and business leaders where it hurts: their wallets and their power on the world stage.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "AI made from a sheet of glass can recognise numbers just by looking"

darpa_escapee — Sat, 13 Jul 2019 22:51:33 +0000

AI is gradient descent?

New comment by darpa_escapee in "New antibiotics effective against resistant bacteria in mice"

darpa_escapee — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 00:27:42 +0000

For reference, 80% of antibiotics used in the US are used in agriculture [1]. Animals are fed antibiotics to prevent infection, but they’re also fed to animals as “growth promoters” [2].

60% of infectious diseases in humans originate in animals, and 75% of emerging infectious diseases in humans originate in animals [3].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4638249/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1804117/

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html

New comment by darpa_escapee in "FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches"

darpa_escapee — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 00:20:42 +0000

> Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people.

You hit the nail on the head. Any system that hinders law enforcement’s assumptions and hunches will be touted as defective, anything that confirms those assumptions will be exalted.

This is why narcotics dogs are used. Studies show that dogs will signal upon trainer instruction, and that dogs aren’t accurate nor precise in practice. Such dogs exist to establish probable cause, not to determine whether or not a suspect possesses narcotics.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Docker protects a programming paradigm that we should get rid of (2018)"

darpa_escapee — Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:15:27 +0000

Wait until you need to deploy to a platform that doesn’t have a precompiled version of a dependency uploaded to PIP. Docker shines in that regard.

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Uber/Lyft drivers say they were misled into petitioning against workers rights"

darpa_escapee — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 15:20:34 +0000

A few years ago Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay all successfully kept engineer pay down through anti-poaching agreements[1].

Unions provide checks and balances against that type of abuse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

New comment by darpa_escapee in "Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client"

darpa_escapee — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 23:09:50 +0000

> With the previous generation of MagSafe/MagSafe II power supplies, if the cable gets frayed, you have to replace the entire power supply. If the MagSafe connector gets hosed, you have to replace the entire power supply. Basically, if anything goes wrong beyond the AC input side, you have to replace the whole power supply. I ended up buying a whole bunch of these things over the years, so I am particularly sensitive to the amount of money I've spent.

This is a design issue that doesn’t require a USB-C cable to fix.