Divver

Isn’t that this one that temporarily died due to Texas legal stuff until 1 month ago when Amtrak helped save it? Yeah I hope it succeeds but there’s a lot of influential Texans who want it to fail or kill it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-21/texas-hig...

“The regulations exclude revenue from audiobooks, podcasts, video game services, and user-generated content. The exclusion of revenue from user-generated content is a win for Google's YouTube.”

Yeah it also makes sure Montreal’s thriving video game industry isn’t negatively impacted either. And Google have branches in Canada employing Canada maybe Netflix doesn’t have as many I wonder about that.

This is another reason why I hate it when countries do stuff like this because they always implement it very hypocritically too. They didn’t innovate the wildly popular product that has come into their country or “being dumped” into their country which is usually their word choice driven by envy and their local competition can’t compete so they pull nonsense like this to get at some of that revenue.

India and China have done variations of this for years but now Europe and it looks like Canada are doing it or planning to and I’m sure soon other countries.

Even here in America this has started with Biden’s recent moves on China and Trump wants to double those if elected. So both parties are moving into this mindset.

Most American multinational companies generally thrive in a global marketplace, same with Japanese, Chinese, South Korean, and German companies. I know Spotify was Scandinavian but they moved to the US some time back right?

I guess rest of the world got fed up with this small set of countries dominating the Consumer Tech and Entertainment marketplace and wants to grab at some of their revenue when it’s coming from people living within their borders using the international product.

Companies will probably just pass these costs on to the consumers and try to minimize absorption.

I think this guy is like Shadow in this video: https://youtu.be/n__GJuqLb00?si=4kqBifugIQGSdp2q

Hmm at Berkeley 10-14 years ago during undergrad we used MIPS in both our computer architecture class and compilers class and I wouldn’t call it obscure. Uncommon yes but not obscure.

It had a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) which at the time was considered academic but not popular in real world computers since CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) ISA like amd64 was all the rage but since Apple Silicon and its RISC-based (ARM) architecture that notion has been turned on its head. And the upcoming Qualcomm ARM laptop chip is also following the trend on high performing RISC architecture chips.

The ARM comeback has made RISC popular again for uses beyond mobile phones and academia.

If it makes you feel better I saw this and I don’t know what a “front page on Hacker News” is because all HackerNews articles I see are from Facebook or Twitter (before I left Twitter) I don’t actually visit Hacker News website directly where ever that is.

So perhaps many others saw this as well.

I wish this was updated for 2024

His RISC being “No” most would agree is somewhat incorrect though it seemed correct back in 2015.

But it kinda goes to show how these yes/maybe/no things can evolve unexpectedly over time and not be to taken as gospel that will stand the test of time.

Meh I don’t judge others but I personally don’t want an arranged marriage I feel like in most cases it’s always focused around the man and not the woman so the woman ends up with a suboptimal match which I think is wrong.

It’s interesting (but not surprising) how people of the same race and religion can have very different cultures based on the region of the world they were born or grew up in.

Malaysians like my parents who are Indian genetically/ancestrally (been in Malaysia for multiple generations though) and Hindu by religion date in high school, Pre-marital sex is not uncommon and some speak openly about it just like here in the “West”, and usually get love marriages.

Same applies to Malaysian Chinese Buddhists and also to a much much lesser extent Malaysian Malay Muslims.

But in South Asia, Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims (not all of course) have this arranged marriage notion (Although I’ve been told it’s less common now) and dating in high school in very rare and I’m guessing Pre-marital sex is either very rare or you can’t talk about it openly because of social stigma.

Same race from a genetic point of view, same religion,

But different views of feminism, sexuality, and dating.

Not surprising of course.

As an American myself my views are mostly “Western” since I grew up here and I guess my parents were pretty progressive (at least on this issue my mom went against her parents to marry my dad).

The society in which you grow up in plays a large role in how you end up seeing the world and people around you.

Yeah I agree with you.

But scheme especially when you have code like this:

(letrec ((even? (lambda (n) (if (zero? n) #t (odd? (- n 1))))) (odd? (lambda (n) (if (zero? n) #f (even? (- n 1)))))) (even? 88))

The level of nesting can get rediculous.

Writing that on a midterm is harder than Python or java.

I’d say Python is nicest when writing out code.

As a side note,

Scheme and parenthesis hell when writing code on the midterms....

Also car caar cdr cddr etc etc (you can theoretically nest as deeply as needed)

hahaha that class...

My First CS class at Berkeley (CS61A) was the last semester (Fall 2010, my first semester of college) where it was taught it in Scheme.

After that they apparently switched the class to python.

My professor was Brian Harvey whose doctoral advisor at MIT was one of the authors of the SICP book we used for the class.

It was a good book. One of the few CS textbooks I actually read. Many CS books are pretty badly written imo.

But there are a few that I consider very well written. This book was one of them.

When I become a parent, I shall do the same thing with my kids. Thanks for sharing your wisdom.

Having worked at Microsoft and now at Apple (and a startup before these two), in my opinion

The overall distribution of proficiencies and talent across engineering teams (both hardware and software teams) in my opinion were about equal across the three.

(One major difference though is finding engineers who don’t mind doing nitty gritty dirty work like Dev ops and/or setting up test automation stuff is harder in big companies because somehow many of the senior engineers at big companies feel that if the setup isn’t given to them by someone else, it’s not their job to set it up for their team, so they just use what’s available/existing even if it’s insufficent for good quality.

(Not trying to bash on any oldies on my existing or previous teams of course there were few exceptions)

At startups though engineers don’t have this “that’s below me” Attitude and will put in the time to set up automation if it makes the team more agile.

In fact setting up developer automation was one of the first things I set up for my team before getting to my feature development tasks and team has acknowledged it made huge difference in the overall team agility and reduction in regressions found by the QA folks every time code was checked in )

Anyway this made me realize the importance of good marketing which Microsoft lacked a lot imo and also engineering leadership product vision

Since generally I’ve noticed you’ll get about the same distribution of engineering talent

And what really makes the difference are a good marketing team and good engineering management team

who believes in the importance of code quality (ensuring things like checkstyle and findbugs are enabled as required to pass for check in and having required code review approvals for check in) and automation in tests (ensuring some set of unit, integration, and functional tests are run to be passed before check in), and automation in deployment.

Oh I wasn’t equating my experience to yours.

I saw people commenting trying to say you were race baiting and stuff for your comment about your experience growing up in America.

And I disagreed with them and didn’t like how they were saying you were being racist with your comments and they were implying like that stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore.

I disagreed with those commenters because at Berkeley we had folks who were part of the BLM movement mentioning what they went through growing up and also all the statistics surrounding incarceration and police brutality.

What they experienced was so bad and nothing like what I experienced in my lifetime.

So I shared my experience to say I agree with you that there definitely are prejudiced folks out there.

I was in no way saying my experience was similar to yours. I’m so sorry if that’s how it came out.

When my Malaysian immigrant parents bought their first ever house in America (actually still to this day their only house),

It was in a neighborhood in what was a small town about 20-30 minutes away from the Capitol city in Boise, ID

It was around 2000 and we were the first non-white family to move into that neighborhood.

Our experience there was a mixed bag.

There was some of the nicest neighbrods who helped us move in with their pick up trucks saving us a ton of money which we didn’t have at the time.

And even a year ago when my parents moved to California, many of the neighbors got their pickup trucks again and helped them with the move.

But that was the good parts. Sadly there were also other kinds of folk.

We were Buddhist/Hindus but because we were brown and many people didn’t know about Hinduism, basically all brown Asian people of middle-eastern or south Asian ancestry/ethnicity/looks got lumped in with the same stereotypes

And my parents had met some Malaysians who were studying abroad here in Idaho which got them so excited they invited them over.

They were Malaysian Muslims wearinf the headscarf and stuff and so when they were leaving our house

My mom gave the wife of the couple a big hug and one of the not so friendly neighbors saw that so I’m guessing they assumed we were Muslim.

And I got lots of terrorist comments and mean bomb jokes thrown at me.

I guess I never understood Xenophobia towards Muslims

Because my mom (who is Hindu) had best friends from her childhood in India who were Muslims

And also I had visited Malaysia which is 60% Muslim.

And they were very open minded and modern people just like here in the West.

In fact Malaysia was far more progressive than India (which is where my mom grew up during her childhood because Malaysia was having race riots at the time so she stayed in India for her safety).

Malaysia is a multi-ethic multi-religious countries made of multi-generation Malays (Indonesian immigrants), multi-generations Chinese, and multi-generation Indians.

And they all date in high school and are super liberal-progressive and big of fighting for women’s rights and taking rose and sexual assault seriously it is very surprising

Since on average most Hindus and Muslims I’ve met or seen in India or the Middle East are very conservative and the record on women’s sexual rights in India and the Middle East is very limited still to this day.

So I guess SouthEast Asia or at least Malaysia is oddly different.

So my experience with Muslims in general is probably quite different from most conservative Westerners who haven’t traveled I guess.

It’s sad how ignorance and lack of exposure is probably one of the biggest contributors to bigotry and ignorance, of course trying to maintain power and control over minorities is probably also a strong reason.

I remember in Middle School all the stuff people kept saying about Hindusm

“Why does your religious step on babies?” Etc etc.

I remember asking my mom that when I got back home from school and she laughed saying “If we stepped on babies I’m pretty sure India wouldn’t be overpopulated”

But prejudice by the majority race/religion isn’t limited to America.

When I visited Malaysia (I’m an American citizen but was a child immigrant who left Malaysia at the age of 5 and grew up here in the US my entire life since the age of 5) in 2007 there was an old fair skinned Malay lady in the train and when an dark skinned Indian man sat next to her

She started yelling racist things to him telling him to go back to India

Even though he’s a 4th generation Tamil (Tamil is South Indian) Malaysian.

And in India recently I’m starting to see some rising Hindu nationalism similar to the Trump Christian nationalism.

Both of which are silly since they go against the founding Constituonal principles of secularism and religious freedom enshrined in both country’s constitutions.

I don’t understand why but this phenomenon of the majority race or religion fearing minorities and wanting to suppress minorties to maintain power

Is quite widespread on a global scale.

Anyway there wasn’t really a point to this ramble other than to share a story and some perspective on race and religion issues.

Yeah I agree with you that fear of the unknown shouldn’t be a reason to not try something new.

Although for many of us (myself included from time to time), it ends up being the strongest reason to resist change, especially when you happen to already be in relatively fortunate/satisfactory position.

Lol I guess that hackneyed FDR quote about “fearing fear” was a lot more poignant than I initially thought haha.

While I agree with the overall sentiment here, on an unrelated note I noticed someone commented “If I saw Terence Tao’s name on it I’d assume it’s true” (I’m paraphrasing what they said)

That kind of assumption has actually bitten Mathematics in Academia in the past:

“ In the final sentence of the same paper, Gödel added:

In conclusion, I would still like to remark that Theorem I can also be proved, by the same method, for formulas that contain the identity sign.

Mathematicians took Gödel's word for it, and proved results derived from this one, until the mid-1960s, when Stål Aanderaa realized that Gödel had been mistaken, and the argument Gödel used would not work. In 1983, Warren Goldfarb showed that not only was Gödel's argument invalid, but his claimed result was actually false, and the larger class was not decidable. “

So although statistically assuming the proof is correct for a super famous “genius” mathematician isn’t a “bad” assumption since you’re “probably” correct in that assumption.

That’s not the same as certainty.

And before using that proof in further works

It’s very important for some others to go through and validate the proof as well.

Even the smartest humans are plagued by the simple fact that they are human and thus prone to mistake/error from time to time.

Source of the anecdote: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/139503/in-the-histo...

How come nobody discusses the countries which already employ universal basic income for their citizens like Saudi Arabia or the UAE?

I guess because it serves as a counter example to many of the claims of universal basic income so it’s intentionally left out of such discussions.

But basically Saudi Arabia and the UAE both have some form of universal basic income for their citizens derived mainly from their massive oil profits.

And the irony is for so much of their labor,

They use so much foreign labor that the percentage of foreign workers is actually larger than the percentage of citizens (at least in the case of UAE not sure about Saudi Arabia)

Basically almost all the labor is done by those who aren’t eligible for the universal basic income (only citizens get the universal basic income)

And their laws essentially make it impossible (or insanely difficult) to become a citizen

Because once a person becomes a citizen they are eligible for the universal basic income payouts, so you essentially get people sitting on their ass getting paychecks.

I mean I don’t see a progressive revolution of art, culture, and modernity with people “following their dreams” since they are untethered by paychecks

Happening in the UAE or Saudi Arabia which is what people say will happen if you had universal basic income.

Heck US, India, and Japan has tons of art/music/culture that they export and none of these three countries have universal basic income....

In fact sometimes I wonder if the massive oil profits played a role in keeping them so ultraconservative since it allowed them until recently to prevent half their population from getting an education and roaming/working/driving freely/indepedently around the country.

If universal basic income was so successful and didn’t kill people’s willingness to work, I feel like these two countries wouldn’t have to keep bringing in low wage foreign laborers.

Don’t get me wrong. Universal basic income sounds very cool.

But I’ll be honest if I got enough money to cover my rent/transportation/healthcare and I didn’t have any loans,

I would immediately quit my high wage tech job

And probably go to Hawaii to teach STEM to entry level college kids to prevent/reduce the number of college kids who drop out of STEM.

But instead since I have massive college loans to pay off because my parents didn’t give me a cent for college tuition or housing (they did give me food money thankfully),

I work in this extremely high wage but sometimes rather mundane “tech job”

So I can pay my college loans, housing, car, food, helping out my elderly parents, brother’s, etc.

Oh wait shoot I think I basically just said if there was universal basic income

I would end up following my dreams/passion instead of working a job mainly for the wage.

Lol whoops killed my own argument against universal basic income.

So I guess universal basic income might actually be cool haha.

But the thing is there’s no way to know how many will just sit on their ass doing nothing, how many will turn to crime or darker endeavors with all their new ideal time, and how many will actually use it effectively.

Like how can anyone do a reasonable analysis to predict the outcome of this system.

Human nature is a mysterious beast.....

I’m sorry I’m just highly skeptical on universal basic income.

It’s so counter to all the existing economic theory I was trained/educated in

That I guess it’s hard for my brain to accept it.

My apologies.

Before I joined Apple I was at Microsoft and I did use a Windows Phone. It was a Lumia 1520.

And honestly the OS was rock solid and worked great (unlike my experience with the Lenovo Windows work laptop I was given which would keep blue-screening after going into hibernate for more than 5 minutes. I ended up switching to a SurfaceBook once that was available and it worked perfectly. Amazing laptop. Like a MacBook Pro. Except without Bash which sucked so you had to learn PowerShell to script things (well until recently now I think there’s Bash on Windows using some kind of emulation trick I guess))

Windows Phone was a solid system with a decent easy to use UI it is kind of a pity it didn’t take off.

But because the app ecoosysem was so poor after about 6 months I switched to a Samsung Android phone (there was no Google Pixel at the time), which had worse battery life but it performed fine.

I use an iPhone now and the biggest thing I miss is the lack of certain categories of apps that I could find on Android or Windows that I couldn’t find in the iOS App Store.

And the feature set of iOS usually lags behind Android but after using it for over a year now it’s really not that bad and I really like the cross-OS integration features with macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.

Universal copy paste is a killer feature imo.

To be honest I’m happy with both Android and iOS. They both have the same set of popular third party US apps in their App Stores.

I’m wondering if the study differentiated between analyzing the effect of piracy on large companies with big profit margins versus small companies with thin profit margins.

My conjecture is that piracy would have a stronger negative impact on the latter.

My guess is Piracy doesn’t hurt big blockbuster entertainment and software corporations much because of their corporate deals and large profit margins.

But if you limit the study to smaller mom-and-pop musicians/entertainers/actors/performers, small video game development studios, and other small software companies which have thin profit margins,

I think we’d see a noticeable negative impact caused by piracy.

Btw I see a lot of folks here always taking shots at the USA and it looks like there is a fairly large international audience in this “Hacker News” group.

But as someone who has somewhat extensively studied American history and government back in the day.

(I’ve read the Constitution, Federalist Papers, works by Thomas Paine, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin, many of the majority opinions in many landmark Supreme Court cases, etc etc)

And there is actually a significant amount of misinformation and paranoia about America and the American government.

Now some of it regarding foreign policy is rightly justified given the actions by the CIA or military.

But on domestic policy, there is some misinformation every once in a while by someone’s comments.

Now while I usually prefer to talk about math and engineering stuff,

I feel most folks here already know that stuff and usually someone usually replies with the correction on Math or engineering issues/topics.

So I’ll limit most of my comments to perhaps pointing out what in my opinion are half-truths or falsehoods on American domestic policy or legal issues based on the limited knowledge I have on whatever is being discussed.

Ok no more rants from me for a long while. Apologies!

When I first saw that initial article of them mentioning their startup which was titled: “ Two Ex-Googlers Want To Make Bodegas And Mom-And-Pop Corner Stores Obsolete “ I already knew it was doomed. I mean an upper middle class Caucasian guy and an upper middle class South Asian guy who previously worked at Google make this startup with the idea of “making mom and pop corner stores obsolete” And they name the startup “Bodega” whose name has Latino roots....

How can these two be so tone deaf and insensitive to how people will react to this?

This sounds cruel and bad just from the phrasing of the headline. It’s like they didn’t use any common sense and have no heart for local businesses.

I just don’t understand why a decent amount of these Silicon Valley techies are so time deaf? Did they grow up with silver spoons in their mouths?

How can you be so smart technically yet so culturally tone deaf at the same time? I would have thought sharp critical thinking and common sense would apply to more than just technical problems...

You can complain about how people are overreacting and perhaps you have a point but that doesn’t change the fact that people will overreact.

Why are so many upper middle class and rich people so disconnected from the poor and middle class?

I’m fairly well off now but I still remember what it was like when my family was poor when my parents first immigrated from Malaysia (we were racial and religious minorities and Malaysia’s government discriminates against racial/religious minorities so my parents left) back in the mid 90s...

and we had to go to food banks in Michigan to get some food when my dad’s two menial jobs didn’t make enough.

And I also remember when my family was middle class (about 60K) back in Idaho. The middle class life was much better than when we were poor (no food security issues and we had a nice house) and we got a smartphone back when I was in high school. (Only one smartphone for the family, more than one was too expensive, they let me have it because I was the oldest).

So even though I’m upper middle class now here in Silicon Valley, I still remember those harder times.

And I want Silicon Valley to make startups to help those poor and middle class people, instead of trying to displace or hurt those people.

All the machine learning they use in Bodega they could have instead sold that as a service to local Bodegas to empower their businesses by giving the local Bodegas a way to know what to stock up on.

And I believe that would have still been profitable but also community conscious.

Ugh the level of liberal snobby-ness and elitism that you see on Silicon Valley

Makes me super bummed sometimes when I think about Silicon Valley

When I see the immense income inequality which I didn’t see as much back in Idaho.

Now I’m partially a hypocrite since I love my upper middle class tech job here at a top company which I would not have found in Idaho.

I won’t kid. This is the best standard of living and quality of life I’ve ever experienced so far. I’m very grateful for that.

But the income inequality here reminds me somewhat of what I saw in India when I visited there for the first time last year.

Like it looked like 1/3 of the population has a gesta upper middle class or rich life with great stuff.

But 2/3 in like abject poverty.

Now California isn’t as bad as that but out of all the States I’ve lived in or visited,

It’s the closest to that and perhaps that’s partly due to the fact that our education system doesn’t prepare Americans for these well paying tech jobs....

But if that’s the case then we need to fix that or we’ll turn into India if we don’t change or fix our current problems here in the US.

I didn’t vote for Trump but I understood why many of my friends back in Idaho did because hey feel hopeless in this new changing economy and their education system didn’t prepare them for it.

Anyway I refuse to believe that it’s impossible to come up with profitable startup ideas that also empower local communities and businesses.

Sorry I don’t mean to put anyone here down btw this was just a general rant on Silicon Valley.

I’m really sorry if I came off as rude.

I normally don’t comment on hacker news this is my second comment ever.

Pardon my typos I typed all this on my smartphone.

I haven’t ventured into the more rural towns in Idaho I suspect they must be more similar to your town in Oregon.

Rural poverty is a nontrivial issue in Idaho, especially when it comes to healthcare.

My town was only 30 mins away from the capitol (Boise)

So perhaps the capitol city tax revenue was also used in Meridian (my hometown).

When I moved into Silicon Valley I noticed the same thing!

In many Silicon Valley towns like Mountain View and Sunnyvale the sidewalks suddenly just stop and you’re forced to walk on the side is the road.

And in Cupertino many streets aren’t lit or very badly lit that it’s almost pitch black...

I never noticed these things before coming to California and I grew up in a small town near Boise, ID.

Streets were well lit and sidewalks did not just end.

And Idaho has a minuscule State tax revenue compared to California is so it shocked me this was an issue in these high income Silicon Valley towns.