HN user
Frontend dev.
Personal: erictj@gmail.com Twitter: @etjossem
LessWrong can be reasonably characterized as a recruiting ground for pyramid schemes and/or a cult of personality. It is an attempt to reframe libertarianism as apolitical and as the only rational, correct course of action. Effective altruists are urged to donate to unaccountable AI research projects controlled by LW essayists.
For many reasons, I don't believe it's responsible to link people there.
Some starting points below, but please do your own research:
Thank you. Please read directly from the source instead of participating in anything to do with LessWrong.
I referred to "if the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link" but I get that this may apply in particular to "Washington Post: " etc.
Point about importance vs. endorsement is well taken; I would rather not give any publicity to this project without couching it in explicit criticism, but that's a personal choice.
I don't believe this was a good call. The title was accurate before, and the meaning of the submission has been substantively changed. Now it uses the title of the site - something we're explicitly asked not to do as part of the HN Guidelines.
As a reader, there's a real difference between deciding to upvote the original title (an observer's description of an inherently deceptive project) versus casting a vote on what it's been changed to (a brand name used to promote that project). I would absolutely upvote an article critical of The Spinner - while at the same time, I'd downvote a promotional submission.
OP did not intend to advertise The Spinner, they intended to expose it as a deceptive project without linking to third-party press coverage. The submission title absolutely matters.
If this changes your mind, please go with the original again.
In both the case of the phone and the Peloton, it allows someone who can't afford the item to pay for it on an installment basis. On an individual level that access to credit might be useful, but it's another form of leverage which is not always a great indicator.
In fact, if people are making use of that option unusually often, economists get worried. Prior to a recession, consumers often feel more confident (and take on more financial obligations) than they have the resources to keep up with.
Instead of $1,995 up front, it's $3,783 over 39 months due to a subscription contract bundled with the financing. This is a very clever way to claim "no interest" but actually charge 27% APR. There are absolutely customers who buy this but can't afford it.
Absolutely this. A bubble doesn't look like one until it pops, so you can't just say "everyone's buying $2000 spin bikes, everything must be fine." For starters, Peloton does a majority of its sales through Affirm and other consumer financing instruments, and books them as revenue. It's more accurate to say "everyone is buying $2000 spin bikes using 30% APR installment loans."
In the risks section, Peloton says that their revenue could decline due to changes in credit markets and decisions made by credit providers - a.k.a. if a bunch of people start to default on their expensive luxuries.
"In the future, we cannot be assured that third-party financing providers will continue to provide consumers with access to credit or that available credit limits will not be reduced. Such restrictions or reductions in the availability of consumer credit, or the loss of our relationship with our current financing partners, could have an adverse effect on our business, financial conditions, and operating results."
Murphy's law: "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong"
Muphry's law: "anything that can be mispelled, will be mispelled"
By "tech" is meant "the community." You can't get policy change without enough people getting involved and supporting that change. Do you want to fix this?
Join YIMBY Action. Support pro-housing candidates at the polls. Tell your friends.
They really buried the lede.
"Politics is an organizational problem, not a technological one."
If we could just build more houses by saying that we decree them into existence, we wouldn't have this problem. The author proposes some ways to bolster the pro-housing community and get tech voters involved in local politics (including joining https://yimbyaction.org/), and here we are still wondering whether we want to have lower rents or not.
"Let it get really bad so people notice" isn't even close to a solution. We all know there's a housing crisis; the solution depends on who you ask.
Some folks are going to say "let's have high affordable housing requirements in new projects." They may genuinely want lots of affordable units, or they may want to freeze housing supply and thus preserve the value of their single-family homes. Pro-tenant renter groups may not care about a "neighborhood character" argument, but they may care quite a bit about a "gentrification" argument, which is almost the same thing. Depending on what kind of YIMBY you ask, you could get someone who cares deeply about affordability, or someone who believes the market will fix everything.
All of this to say: this is a political problem about getting enough different groups with distinct interests to work together. Nobody gets a magic wand to deregulate everything, nor would it help.
If creating that coalition is something you care about, join the group the author recommended: https://yimbyaction.org/
For even more context here: they're part of a biotech incubator called 4Catalyzer. The other companies are also working on potentially life-changing products too, including cancer drugs and seizure detection.
Lots of possible roles, take a look!
As far as bringing in some UK sources that were traditionally print, I'd probably go with The Guardian and the Telegraph - caveat, they do have a left- and right- leaning bent, respectively. There might be an AP feed you can get in addition to Reuters so people have more newswire options.
Looks great, and the only thing I could ask for is a way to request that more sources be added.
Considered Harmful Clickbait Considered Harmful (2019)
A few of my teammates at SendGrid have been following the situation, and we definitely feel for the engineers who are scrambling to fix the problem. It's never fun to get paged, especially when the trust of your customers on the line.
Some folks on the email thread were personally involved in handling major outages in the early days. We've had to learn a lot of hard lessons since then. Even when everything seems like it's going fine ("wow, we're growing so fast, good problems!"), scaling issues could be right around the corner.
Anyone with a large enough installation of Postgres could've had the wraparound issue we're seeing right now. That's why it's important to monitor for what could go wrong, detect these issues early, and provide customers with rapid communication so they can plan around it.
Sending our best wishes to the MailChimp engineering teams working on the problem right now. Good luck, you've got this!
This is a genuinely good take, and the downvotes are disappointing. We like to describe new efficiencies in productivity and information-seeking as "good for the consumer," because that's a highly positive effect.
But it's awful for any supplier who hasn't found a way to be better than the best yet - and that in turn can encourage unhealthy consolidation of large businesses at the expense of small ones.
Put another way: let's face it, some of Adam Smith's predictions about the risks of monopoly were right too.
... news at 10.
I agree with this. For many people who are learning Git for the first time, it's also their first experience with contributing code to a repository at all.
The last thing you want to do is turn them off entirely, or gatekeep the profession to exclude people who aren't good at reading dense documentation.
The best way to teach git is to get them comfortable with "Add, Commit, and Push" and then explain what's happening at each stage.
Ding ding ding.
This is the part that is upsetting to me, not the name of the feature. "Fully self-driving capability" suggests that it is one hundred percent self-driving (and therefore will not require a human to drive it). That part's a lie, and a dangerous one.
"Tesla is extremely clear that Autopilot requires the driver to be alert and have hands on the wheel. This reminder is made every single time Autopilot is engaged."
A reasonable person would not take this to mean that the car is driverless.
I do have a problem with some of their marketing material - which describes the car as having "Fully Self-Driving Capability." No, the Model S doesn't have the capability to drive itself fully right now, and it's unethical to lead consumers to believe it does.
But in my view, the name "autopilot" itself describes a device for pilots, providing a very similar level of partial assistance to Tesla's current feature. It is accurate. The problem arises when it's sold beyond its traditional meaning.
That's really cool - but just like driverless cars, it's the exception to the rule for what an autopilot system does.
Anyone who knows what an autopilot [1] is understands that it does not make an aircraft autonomous. It's an assistive device - a stabilizer for wings and pitch.
To call the Tesla Model S an "autonomous vehicle" simply because it has a feature called autopilot is disingenuous.
“This data is from the 1990s and is based on people’s subjective views of what would have happened if they did not use a gun.”
These are not hard stats, they’re self reports from people who had occasions where they felt safer carrying. Peak confirmation bias. Of course we can find 100k people whose guns made them feel safer once.
But that’s not the question we are trying to answer. We want to know if you are actually protected by owning a firearm. The evidence suggests it has quite the opposite effect.
I would like to see your sources.
I recommend looking at the data on this before leaping to the conclusion that guns are effective at protecting their owners from lethal injury.
In a Philadelphia-based study, "individuals in possession of a gun were 4.46 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession" and that grew to 5.45 times more likely if the assault victim had a chance to resist. [1]
Successful defensive gun use happens, but it's the exception to the rule: guns escalate conflict, especially when both parties have them.
Because most forms of entertainment do not dramatically increase the likelihood of death by suicide, homicide, and accidents all at once. If you can name something else that does so, for both the participant and those around them, I can promise you it's well-regulated.
The context is the British pharmacy "Boots" - think Walgreens. The parent commenter's argument is that our society at large does not want heroin and coke sold at the corner drugstore. They want these substances out of sight, out of mind.
It's all very well for us to imagine legalized drugs would be safer and more easy to regulate, but a majority of people disagree - so for the time being, they will continue being sold out of the boots of cars.