mooxie

I think the dynamic pricing algo is on to us - I see $13.99 at Amazon and clicked on a Google Play Books link for $1.99 that then became $13.99 magically, same for Apple Books.

Agreed. While I really value HN's commitment to not becoming Reddit, the intersection of politics and tech (and their effects on our lives) is indisputable. If we can't talk about the government's use of technology as a tool of the state without it being considered a 'hot button' topic - especially considering the relevance that politics have always had to 'hackers' - then this is really just a site for discussions about technology fluff.

An enormous part of safe driving is maintaining a mental map of the vehicles around you and what your options are if you need to make sudden changes. If you are not able to react to changing conditions without being unsafe, you are driving unsafely already.

That's laughable. Any human who couldn't avoid a large, clearly-visible object in the middle of an empty, well-lit road should not be operating a vehicle.

That's not to say that there aren't many drivers who shouldn't be driving, so both can be true at once, but this is certainly not a bar against which to gauge autonomous driving.

Agreed. I work for a tiny startup where I wear multiple hats, and one of them is DevOps. I manage our cloud infra with Terraform, and anyone who's scaled cloud infrastructure out of the <10 head count company to a successful 500+ company knows how critical it can be to get a wrangle on the infrastructure early. It's basically now or never.

It used to take me days or even multiple sprints to complete large-scale infrastructure projects, largely because of having to repeatedly reference Terraform cloud provider docs for every step along the way.

Now I use Claude Code daily. I use an .md to describe what I want in as much detail as possible and with whatever idiosyncrasies or caveats I know are important from a career of doing this stuff, and then I go make coffee and come back to 99% working code (sometimes there are syntax errors due to provider / API updates).

I love learning, and I love coding. But I am hired to get things done, and to succeed (both personally and in my role, which is directly tied to our organization's security, compliance, and scalability) I can't spend two weeks on my pet projects for self-edification. I also have to worry about the million things that Claude CAN'T do for me yet, so whatever it can take off of my plate is priceless.

I say the same things to my non-tech friends: don't worry about it 'coming for your job' yet - just consider that your output and perceived worth as an employee could benefit greatly from it. If it comes down to two awesome people but one can produce even 2x the amount of work using AI, the choice is obvious.

In most cities at the airport I just walk outside and get an old fashioned taxi at the rank vs dealing with all the nonsense

Not the primary point of your post, but I am always evangelizing to my friends about this 'hack.' I can't believe that people are willing to walk half a mile and queue up in the rain/sun/snow to be driven by some random person who will probably make them listen to their demo tape, instead of just taking the myriad taxis that are sitting right there.

Takes probably 20-30 minutes off of my airport commute.

This is a far-right talking point that ignores the other concerns of progressives that are bundled up in the argument.

Progressives (in the US at least) generally support immigration with protections and fair wages. They also recognize, rightfully, that systems built for decades upon exploitative practices (low wages, no protections) if removed overnight will cause mass disruption of those systems.

Neither of these is in any way supportive of slavery, modern or otherwise. The first - suggesting that immigrants be treated civilly and paid a living wage - has been fought tooth and nail by 'free market' literalists. The second - that there will be disruptions in social and economic systems when an entire workforce is suddenly removed from the systems that it has propped up for decades - is common sense and historically founded.

You're conflating these things to try to justify a talking point that was just created three months ago.

They are consistently on the wrong side of Chesterton's fence. Many of them were completely blind to politics until 2016 and have suddenly entered the chat with no context or background on what they're talking about. They assume, ignorantly, that everything that they can't immediately understand is a needless barrier erected for no reason and without context.

This is a very intentional worldview organized, funded, and distributed by - shocker! - powerful people who find themselves constrained by the law.

The name is now finally NOT centered around one nation.

'Gulf of the Americas' would make more sense in that case. But that doesn't project the intended message from the new administration.

You can justify it however you want, but the intention was not to be inclusive and I think that's pretty clear. Unless talking about annexing Greenland and absorbing Canada are also just ways of making us one big happy family, I think the intention of the name is clear, regardless of how much sense one can force it to make after the fact.

I love (read: hate) the concept that people are inherently busier in an office. When I was full-time in office, lots of people spent a good portion of their day wandering about, having convos (one thing that I do miss), browsing snacks, playing ping-pong, browsing snacks again, going out to long lunches, etc. I 100% spend more time in front of a screen when wfh, and when I do step away it's to get other "life" things done instead of killing time in-office until the clock hits 5PM. I am also far more likely to work early or late, as I no longer feel that I have to clearly delineate my time between work and home.

This is definitely an issue with lots of subjective and anecdotal evidence on all sides, but I know for a fact that a lot of my coworkers were killing 3-4h/day in the office just doing...whatever.

But if someone has access to your account information in such a way that they can make purchases in your name isn't that a you, or your bank, problem? Couldn't that same person just spend the money elsewhere?

I'm just trying to understand the scenario here: you are caught up in a fraud, and unknowingly you give the fraudster access to information that they are able to leverage to make fraudulent purchases in your name and the 'win' here is that they can't spend it on crypto?

It seems like there are multiple points at which to address this problem prior to how they're spending your money.

Edit: I guess a lot of the comments are talking about the scam being that you are scammed into purchasing crypto somehow, a different scenario than someone having control of your account. Still though: people have been successfully swindling over the phone for a century. Having someone buy Monero instead of a wire transfer is just procedural.

I feel very fortunate to have been around for this part of internet culture. Chat was so different at the time; this part especially stuck out to me:

Our MC Skat Kat posted from the persona of this fictional MC Skat Kat, regularly referring to Paula Abdul as his girlfriend. Everyone simply accepted this.

You would see the same essentially-anonymous users every day, and there were users with known-unlikely stories - this is before catfishing as a concept was part of the lexicon - but they were just accepted. Did I think that I was talking, at 13, to Demi Moore about Bruce Willis's latest movie? No, I did not. But someone got online every night to just shoot the shit and pretend to be Demi Moore, and they were just one of the gang. No one believed them but no one tried to prove them wrong, either, because they were otherwise a good citizen. It was surreal, but at the time human interaction in real-time over the internet with strangers WAS surreal, in itself. No one could prove or disprove anything without a lot of work, so people just tended to shrug at wild claims.

I know that newer generations are all experiencing their own forms of social-media-ingrouping that they will feel just as nostalgic for, but it truly was a unique time.

Pre-pandemic I started commuting by train and even though it was nearly the same time spent, my attitude and outlook was worlds better than when I was driving in heavy traffic every day.

There are multiple workable solutions, and unfortunately most US cities aren't heavily invested in any of them. My city has very limited rail lines and it was only happenstance that my work was close enough to a stop for it to be a reasonable way to get to the office. Literal millions of other people in the metro area don't have that option.

You should only use ChatGPT for things that you are able to review it's work.

This keeps being my argument when people at work daydream about time and cost savings by offloading non-critical business functions to AI. I say, "Great, so it can produce 1000x more work than a person. But then what army of people are we planning to use to check those outputs?"

I'm super-impressed with the current crop of language models for their ability to so accurately simulate correctness, but their inability to understand what they don't know - because, in fact, they don't 'know' any of it in the sense that we do - makes them like very productive but completely untrustworthy employees. A junior dev who monopolizes his mentor's time through inconsistent performance is not a good hire.

Agreed - the issue is the false dichotomy implied by suggesting that commuting itself is the answer. I think that it would be much more honest to opine that DESPITE the tolls on our health and time, in-office work provided a social and personal structure that had its benefits, and that many people struggle to replicate those structures in their newly-isolated personal lives.

It's not like commuting is hard-coded into our DNA. Over the past 60ish years commuting slowly changed a lot of things about modern life, and taking it away suddenly revealed a lot of those. But that doesn't mean that commuting is, itself, the answer to our social or motivational desires.

I like sitting down and solving problems with code, getting a brief and build something cool.

It's a huge problem in tech that companies traditionally try to force engineers into management positions to allow their careers to keep growing. I have had more shitty managers who were just Individual Contributors who were told they needed to manage to succeed past a certain point.

I tried telling myself that it's a childish and idealistic way of thinking and that it's all a part of career progression regardless of where you work at

The above, however, is no longer true. I work in a smallish tech company (~250ppl) that has gone through a major shift in the past few years to support the career advancement of Individual Contributors; the message being, "You don't need to be a shitty manager if you'd rather be a kick-ass engineer, and we will still provide paths for promotion and advancement."

As other comments have noted, it sounds like maybe your company is just not at a stage of their development that can support pure engineering career paths past a certain point. You do NOT have to be an unhappy manager to succeed in tech. And frankly during a time of economic contraction I feel safer as a valued IC than as a manager whose role could always be 'absorbed' by someone else's position during layoffs.

Maybe not the average, but millions of people commute to a city like Atlanta every day. From the middle of Forsyth County in GA, where there are many exurbs of Atlanta that feed workers into the city, the drive is slated to be 1-2 hours over 44 miles to downtown as we speak even now. And nothing is 'wrong,' currently - this is not some outlier.

Many people that I know make this kind of drive in the Atlanta area, and that's not due to them all being in particular industries either. 1-2 hours to get across the city and into the suburbs/exurbs is a fact of life, and millions do it.

I have never had cancer of any kind in my family tree, and I had a precancerous polyp found at 38yo.

You should get a colonoscopy. If you are at low risk and look totally healthy after, they'll tell you that you don't need another for a good while and you'll get the benefit of not (often) getting something that you don't think you need and, as a bonus, not die of treatable cancer.

As someone who lives in the south but has done a lot of traveling both inside and outside of the US, rednecks (or redneck-equivalents) are absolutely everywhere. It's a lot more of a class/rural thing than a regional thing, and certainly in the US 'redneck culture' has become mainstream basically anywhere that is not a major urban center.

Also I'm not convinced on the idea that it is unlikely to elicit change. My current employer takes exit interviews very seriously when they lose good people, and tries to fix the situation before losing more.

Like you said, if it is handled professionally - that is, you have valid concerns/criticisms that you are able to quantify and address in a constructive manner - it can be very useful for everyone involved.

I get that for every company that seems to care there are probably 10 that seem to not, but I always find this sort of stereotypical "work sucks and is a zero-sum game" attitude that is common on Reddit and HN a little saddening. Sure, your primary concern should be to take care of yourself, but this idea that everything with 'Inc.' after its name is full of layers of uncaring, heartless drones is frankly untrue. People think the same about IT/tech/dev, and it's not true there either. It does not have to be you vs them, even when you decide to leave.

I've done a lot of a relatively high-value item (motorcycles, cars) buying and selling on Facebook and Craigslist, and let me assure you: people didn't move to Facebook because Craigslist was a 'robust incumbent.'

As a seller, I am guaranteed to get 10-20 scam messages in the first 24h of my post on Craigslist; text, email, and phone. God forbid you were bold/stupid enough to put your real information in there. You have to use burners or congratulations, you've signed up for a lifetime of scam calls.

Facebook Marketplace has many faults, but it is relatively easy-to-use, has a wide audience, attracts more serious buyers in my experience, has low spam/scam volume, actually attempts to address scammers (albeit cumbersomely; this is still a differentiator from CL) and allows me to know something about who I am trying to make a deal with.

Marketplace is succeeding despite its faults precisely because the other options are generally such terrible experiences.

I've been upset by this myopic view since the very beginning. We are increasingly learning that viruses can have long-term effects on the body and mind, even prior to COVID. Agreed that we can't all walk around as 'bubble boys' out of fear of the unknown, but one should definitely avoid becoming infected with viruses where at all possible. That the initial symptoms are analogous to a flu for most people doesn't mean that's the end of the story.

HPV was 'just' genital warts, until we found out that it causes cancer. Other animal species have cancer-causing viruses as well. Or take Chicken Pox: basic kid's illness in the past (and yes, it was worth getting it when younger before a vaccine was available to avoid late-life illness) but if you've ever known anyone with a severe case of shingles you'll know that it's not 'just' a virus that causes itchy rashes in grade-schoolers. Shingles can ruin people's lives.

Assuming you won't have any long-term issues from exposure to a dangerous virus is just rolling dice.

Well the article notes that some amount of user demographic info is revealed simply by interacting with the post, regardless of the information provided by the respondent.

Secondly, this is almost like the email phishing paradox: to an educated user it seems like the number of people who respond with relevant information would be extremely low, but if the attempt costs you basically nothing and you get something useful 1% of the time, you're still winning.

"My perfect fall day is my memory of Aunt June when we lived in Connecticut in the 70s, before she passed away." In itself something like that doesn't seem useful, but there's a good amount of information in there if someone can correlate it with other details about your life.

Liberal Biden voter here: Totally. Everyone is absorbing media that spends 90% of its energy encouraging them to think that they're being attacked by the other half of the country. Both ends of the spectrum are encouraged to have a victim complex that makes them feel totally justified in their heinous behavior, because in their minds they're just defending themselves against the aggressor.

Last year(?) YouTube changed TOS to state (IIRC) that if you didn't explicitly mark your own videos as 'not for children' they would be included in search results that included content for young children. Then, if the video was found to violate TOS in the content, it could be removed or demonetized.

Creators like myself who may have cursing or other 'adult themes' would need to check a box saying that the content was not intended for children or risk TOS violation. Ergo many people self-imposed age restriction on their content.

So while people are looking at this in the lens of 'YouTube is censoring free thought!' it is entirely possible (maybe even likely) that the creator of the video chose to exclude children from their audience, and that YouTube's request for age verification is the consequence of that creator's choices.

Obviously there are still troubling implications here, but if a creator chooses to age-restrict their own content that's not really YouTube's fault (though their poor review policies combined with a 'shoot first' approach to takedowns could definitely be seen as strong-arming creators into this paradigm).

My understanding from younger colleagues is that entry-level positions are much more competitive than they were when I was leaving college and entering the tech market 10 or 12 years ago. At that time, my experience was that if you knew Linux (at all) or Windows/Mac administration - and were otherwise a good interviewee - you essentially had your choice of jobs.

People entering the market now talk about it like it's a complete wasteland. Apparently entry-level 'learn-on-the-job' tech work is extremely competitive and difficult to access for new graduates these days. If you're already 'in' and have a network and experience it's still largely like the glory days, but getting to that level is supposedly much more difficult now.

(To be fair to any younger people reading this, my entry-level tech job was at $28k/yr and I worked restaurants and bars until I was able to move on, so it's not like I got a degree and someone threw $150k at me to intern. It took a lot of work, even in the glory days)

Well I didn't expect this to turn into a theological conservation, and I don't really have time at the moment for all of that, but I will say that there is a difference between innocently screwing up and asking for forgiveness and the idea of 'indulgences' where we essentially say, "We know we're going to screw up so good thing we have an 'out' and it's no big deal in the end." Saying that everyone screws up so it's not that bad sounds more like the latter to me.

If it's impossible to leave behind foolish or terrible things we've said or done, we're all doomed.

I don't know; I'm embarrassed by some things that I've said or done in the past, but I can acknowledge them without it destroying my perception of myself. Plus if you think small, family-based societies in the past had shorter social memories than we do today, I'd wager that you're dreadfully mistaken.

Most schools of thought around forgiveness, especially Christian ones, involve acknowledgement and atonement, not blaming our youth or social context or the fact that it was online. We may leave things behind, yes, but that does not mean that they didn't happen. Denial is not acceptance.

I keep seeing this argument everywhere (basically whenever anyone is criticized for a past Tweet or FB post), and it's really confounding to me. Perhaps it's that many of the people making this argument have grown up as part of the 'social media generation' and are therefore more apt to identify with this sort of thing? I grew up during the dial-up days and was always taught to be careful with what I did and said online, as far as it was attached to my name. Has that knowledge been lost?

And finally, norms have changed drastically over the last decade.

You're so right, but I'm not sure that it's in the way you think: in what other period of time, and in what other sphere of social life, have past actions not mattered?

You're presuming that he has 'grown and matured' and is therefore beyond reproach; did he offer any evidence that he has changed, or is the mere fact that his behavior is from 'several years ago' what makes you take up his cause? If I yelled racist and homophobic things at people ten years ago, does the passage of time alone make me 'innocent' in your eyes?

teenagers a decade ago I think it's foolish to hold historical figures to today's societal norms, and I think the same about any of us a decade ago.

We're not talking about a teenager saying something 'a decade ago;' this was only several years ago, and in a similar job. He is young, yes, but does that mean that his professional conduct does not matter? At all? Because a couple of years have passed? He didn't know that being hateful and shitty to people was bad then, because his cultural context was so different? I call bullshit on that.

The author of this pieces makes the same assertion about King: > decades-old tweets

Twitter has been around for 13 years. There are no 'decades-old' Tweets, period, that anyone has been attacked for, ever. It gives the impression that it is in the much more distant past than it really is.

I know that I'm pissing in the wind of the prevailing attitude that what's said online is somehow sacrosanct and should be free of criticism, but I find the conclusion that we can't judge people on their past ONLINE actions, specifically, very fucking strange and self-serving.

wisdom in Christ's words

If you want to be Christ-like, try not saying hateful things online AT ALL. I'm pretty sure Christ wouldn't have said, "Let he who is hateful be without reproach because it was funny at the time."

Which might be because we're getting it 2nd or 3rd hand, so we shouldn't necessarily jump to conclusions.

Yeah, as a Star Citizen backer (at an extremely modest level) I think that it just wasn't spelled out in the article. There was a LOT of hubub in the community when they added this new clause to the TOS, because you had to accept it to continue playing the alpha, which in turn meant that you could never get a refund.

Now I do agree that it would be very nice to see that the judge confirmed that the user actually went through with this agreement personally and that his acceptance was not just implied by the fact that the change was made a ways back in the release cycle.

You don't have to shout. With its multiple microphones Alexa is pretty good at hearing you over the music. There is also a remote with a built in mic in case you want to control it from a ways off or there is a ton of background noise.

Sadly you cannot change the wake word. 'Alexa' or 'Amazon' are the two available wake words.