brettproctor

Interesting idea but no, the lights never change based on usage like this.

These folks just put up a long post trying to weigh the risk v reward at various startup stages.

Mostly summarized into: "Joining at Series C may give you an ideal combination of risk and reward. Series C startups had the highest weighted growth in our analysis, followed by Series B and A."

https://www.joinprospect.com/blog/which-stage-startup

Is this really what is passing as journalism these days?

Anyone who spends even a modest amount of time looking at incidents of justified use of lethal force can quickly determine that an officer having a reasonable fear of great bodily harm to themselves or others is enough to justify the force.

Often times this reasonable fear is justified by actions that take place in under a second. A furtive movement towards a waistband in the right context will almost always qualify.

Articles like this that push an unfounded narrative are simply pandering for clicks/views while failing to even attempting to understand/explain the motivations for such a tool are worse than intellectually lazy. I think they quite likely result in needless excess deaths.

It really isn't rocket science to imagine a lethal robot like this being deployed in a situation which results in deescalation, where the robot operator doesn't have to take a shot where an officer would have been forced to. And to suggest that an officer is somehow going to feel more inclined to shoot someone because its pushing a button vs pulling a trigger just shows a truly impressive amount of bias.

I'd much, much rather send in a lethal robot than an officer to a situation where a use of force is likely, and I really can't fathom any logical argument that putting an officer in there is somehow going to result in less use of force. Unless your world view is that every officer is just trying to execute as many people as they possibly can.

Just watch the 10 seconds here. Guy has stolen a car, walking away from officers, yells "shoot me" and "fuck you fuck you!", digging in his pockets, then quickly points at the officer in a drawing motion. If this was a robot POV instead of an officer, zero chance anyone pushes the button to shoot the guy. Why would you and deal with risking your entire career/life? You're still on the hook for all the consequences of unjustified use of force, and you have the time to wait and verify if the suspect has a gun, so you do. The officer on the other hand is put in an impossible situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SeiCU55e3s&t=104s

I'd much rather have a lethal robot be put in that above situation than an officer, and I'd love to hear anyone explain otherwise.

(Also, I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be "casual", not "causal": `“legal precedence justifying the causal use of weapons”`, but I ain't no english major)

I figured it was unlikely google would make such a mistake, so I looked at the docs. They use public key cryptography to generate a private shared secret that is hashed alongside the message. This prevents the brute force hash attack.

https://developers.google.com/business-communications/verifi...

For posterity, they updated the post on Mar 7 and will be emailing anyone affected.

"Update March 7, 2022: We appreciate the feedback from the community and our customers, and will be emailing users as part of this disclosure. We apologize for not doing that at the same time as the post/disclosure on Friday, March 4, 2022."

I could see this being really useful for the team I'm on, specifically for doing docker builds of rust binaries. The build always has to start from scratch, and being able to easily used a remote high power machine could really speed this up. Thanks for sharing!

I'm aware of the impracticability of everyone divesting out of USTs right now. Your points are entirely valid and are the reason the system is still being held together.

My point is there exists some set of circumstances in which that assumption changes.

As an example, at some fed balance sheet level + inflation level, your options are either: 1) Do nothing and end up with nothing 2) Do something and end up with more than nothing

I've lost count of total fed pledges at this point, something on the order of $8T? Say things drag on and that goes to $12T+? And say inflation takes off, is the fed really going to fight inflation? It can't.

You start seeing high double digit inflation while the fed is printing money and keeping rates at zero, and at some point you have to move your USTs into something. If you don't, you'll be left with nothing.

I realize this is incredibly hard to imagine given the current system, but things that can't go on forever wont'.

Sometimes the only winning move is not to play :-)

At some point it becomes irrational to keep holding USTs. I'm well aware it seems right now there aren't any other good options, but that can definitely change quickly.

Most gold proponents would say gold being money and not a "currency" is the whole point.

Really useful twitter as well: https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact

Last time they dropped it from 5.25% to 0, and still had to print ~$3.7T. With only 1.5% to cut and GDP 50% larger than it was back then, how much QE will they attempt this round?

(To be clear, I personally don't think the fed will be able to get themselves out of this one. I'm just stating most market participants think they can.)

I certainly agree w/ you that it will take a fatal failure to kill this meme, and I think that failure might be coming up.

Hong kong already giving out $1,200 to each resident: https://fortune.com/2020/02/26/hong-kong-economy-stimulus-ca...

The % of corporate debt rated BBB has also exploded. It is likely these companies should really be junk, but are kept alive by reluctant/agreeable rating agencies and historically low rates.

"At the same time, the lowest rated part of the investment-grade market has grown particularly quickly. Globally, BBB debt makes up over 50% of the market versus only 17% in 2001." - https://www.blackrock.com/institutions/en-us/insights/invest...

Agreed. I've also appreciated the quote of "Last time I checked the fed can't print a vaccine"

To me, I think the most critical thing to make note of is the extreme focus on what the fed and other central banks are going to do.

The fact that most people (rightly) assume that fed action is the most significant factor for the market should really give people pause.

Lastly, people should really consider what happens when fed action is no longer enough, and what happens then.

A couple of fun behind the scenes stories which I think at this point are past the statute of limitations.

Source: I was the Service Engineer on pipes for around a year or so.

1) When you went to the pipes landing page, there were a few demo pipes to show people what was possible. One of them combined search results from say ebay/craiglist/amazon to show prices for things.

One day I was looking through the source of these, and noticed there were affiliate ids in the ebay/amazon links. They all belonged to some early team member who had long since left.

I showed a couple people on the team, we all guessed at how much they were making from this, said good on em and went about our day. I still wonder how much they ended up making from it.

2) It was my first on-call, and all of a sudden the west coast pipes cluster just went bananas. After ~5 minutes, east coast started to go nuts and the west coast subsided.

Someone, despite numerous defensive measures, had found a way to create a pipe-bomb that would recursively call multiple versions of itself. Once the west coast load balancer failed over, one of these requests would hit the east coast and the 'virus' would jump over there. This flipped flopped back and forth until I figured out how to blacklist pipe ids (and eventually got a code fix).

Understanding the root cause of how our healthcare system developed is both crucial and completely lacking from most of these discussions.

It is a tale of federally mandated wage control and specialized tax breaks. A quick google will show many articles outlining how we got here.

Why is car insurance not tied to employers? In general how much better does car insurance work than health? Are the prices not much more straightforward and is it easy to shop around? If you are treated poorly by your car insurance company, can you easily tell all your friends and change companies?

This is the real problem here. Most folks have no choice and no skin in the game, which leads to all these crazy stories about zero pricing information and no ability to change companies.

If the tax breaks simply got removed, and people had to actually pay directly for their insurance and could switch companies, the vast majority of these problems would go away.

Can someone ask the author to google 'myspace' and 'yahoo'? Maybe 'sun' as well? """ Customers naturally gravitate to the platform with the largest network of customers (think Facebook). Or their success depends on having the most customer data (think Google). ... What this “post-Chicago” economics shows is that in such industries, firms that jump into an early lead can gain such an overwhelming advantage that new rivals find it nearly impossible to enter the market, while even experienced ones find it difficult to stay in the game. """

Anyone here will probably enjoy checking out commandlinefu: http://commandlinefu.com

Especially looking down the list of all time greats: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes

IBM currently at 380K according to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM

Also, specifically about minimum wage, raising it much more often than not has negative outcomes. There is clearly mixed research, but most studies including this meta-study make the case that at best there isn't much benefit, and more often than not it has a negative impact: http://www.nber.org/papers/w12663

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So given their current losses, I think we can agree that at their current revenue - costs the business model isn't sustainable.

We can also agree that these aren't exactly great jobs, and that they provide no benefits.

I don't think your first scenario is likely, where the added costs from driver benefits are passed onto consumers and the business remains successful, given it already isn't successful. I think we can also agree that if uber were to do this they would indeed lose even more money.

So then we're left with your second scenario being most likely, that we add the benefits but that it turns out this simply isn't affordable at all, at which point the company goes under and all these jobs are lost.

At this point, do the drivers somehow find better jobs that they had been passing up this whole time, now that they are relieved of the burden of being forced to work for uber?

I'd contend that the drivers are better off having the option, and that destroying these jobs won't magically create other better jobs that the drivers can then flock to.

Yes. Labor laws in general reduce options for those who need them most. It prevents people from making decisions for themselves and is condescending in assuming individuals are incapable of deciding what is best for themselves.

I acknowledge most people will say this is callous and uncaring, and these people need our protections, but I think that argument ignores the economic reality that by imposing these laws they remove options for people.

It mostly boils down to the idea that we shouldn't ban voluntary actions in general. And doing so violates individuals basic rights to make decisions for themselves.

To be clear we should still have liability laws where an employer should be liable if their negligence causes injury etc.

"Uber losses expected to hit $3 billion in 2016 despite revenue growth" https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/21/uber-losses-expected-to-hi...

So Uber lost ~$3 billion in 2016, yet in 2017 they're supposed to start paying drivers more or providing more benefits? You know what happens to businesses that are losing money when they're required to start spending more money? They lose even more money. And the rate of loss has only been increasing for them, not decreasing.

If you want to impose more cost on them, it might help some drivers in the short run but in the long run it will kill jobs and likely kill the company, assuming the company doesn't already implode on its own.

We all need to remember no one is forcing anyone to be an uber driver. If we impose restrictions on a company that is already hemorrhaging money, it is absolutely going to kill jobs. If these people had a better alternative to uber they'd be doing it already, so when the uber jobs are gone they'll be forced to take even worse jobs.

If these folks really are being underpaid, another company can come in, pay them better, have better drive retention and satisfaction, and beat uber at their own game. Assuming that isn't happening, then drivers are in fact being paid the correct price, and any action to alter that price will lead to job options being reduced.

I think that is the ultimate elitist mindset, that these jobs are simply too wretched for anyone to do voluntarily. And for those poor souls that are being "forced" to do them, we should protect them from their terrible decisions by imposing extra costs. This makes people feel good by claiming to look out for those less fortunate, while ignoring the economic reality that it will reduce options and opportunities.

If only we could somehow prevent Uber from forcing people to drive for them, we could solve this problem once and for all...

I really just can't understand the mentality of "These people are too stupid to realize they're being taken advantage of, let's write opinion pieces to enlighten these poor simple minded masses to the errors of their ways."

It just feels so condescending and elitist to me to take this viewpoint.

If it really is a bum deal, people will figure it out and quit. Uber will either go out of business or work harder to retain drivers. Or if customers get too upset at always having a new driver they'll seek other options.

Oops. From other comments appears its Plaid https://plaid.com/

What do you use on the backend for auth storage? Yodlee?

I've been a PE@FB for 5.5 years now. Still enjoying every day.

I worked on data-infra for first 3 years as an individual contributor and ads for past 2 as a manager.

The thing I love most about PE is that it really allows for people to do their best work. During team selection you get a feel for what each team needs in terms of skills and can pick a team where your skills will be best utilized.

Also, we really believe in mobility and encourage folks to do a hackamonth after being on a team for a while. They can sit w/ a new team for a month, and after the month decide if they'd like to think about staying on the team or go back to their original team.

I guess those two are also pretty common w/ SWE. I think the most PE-specific element is that you're given a lot of latitude in the type of things you work on. You can choose to focus on reliability, scaling, performance, architecture, disaster readiness, monitoring, security, network, coding, whatever. There is a lot of flexibility to focus on skills you'd like to develop.

Do you know how expert flyer works under the hood? Always been curious about their credit model. Are they charging per query since they're paying per query to the GDS companies?