HN user
Sean Caroll has a great podcast, mindscape [0]. One of the recent episode featured Kip Thorne as a guest and had some great discussions about Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar [1]. It's a very informative and entertaining podcast, I recommend it.
[0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/epis...
I am surprised that on opting out of ad tracking in Android, they found that the opt-out flag was set to true, but the size of the tracking payload shot up i.e. more attributes being tracked. Not sure what to make of it? Is it possible its a legal thing that once you opt-out of ads, it enables less risk for the company and therefore more tracking, perhaps?
I have been using Pass [0] with passff [1] and been pretty happy about it. Simple and offline password management where passwords live in gpg encrypted files. Additional features I like are tracking changes with git, bash completion and copying passwords to clipboard for few seconds temporarily, and a few very useful extensions.
[0] https://www.passwordstore.org/ [1] https://github.com/passff/passff#readme
Fun fact: Air India is a state owned airline that has been bailed out with tax payer money multiple times. Attempts to sell/privatize the airline has failed too so far.
The problem with this argument - I care about issue X, company C is known to disregard/exploit users with X and so I assume all employees of company C are complicit while I give a free pass to the users who remain ignorant and simply don't care no matter how many times these issues surface.
And where do you stop? Are all doctors working for big pharma related to opioid crisis complicit? what about people working for firms related to the financial crisis? engineers working for any company that suffered data breaches due to lax data security? what about engineers working for companies that haven't suffered data breaches yet but might have lax security? scientists working to certain biotech firms related to GM? engineers working for car manufacturers that cheated emission norms? engineers working for telecom/internet service providers that cheat users by throttling/net neutrality etc. etc. etc.
I have been using OsmAnd~ [0] lately and have been pretty happy with it as an alternative. Uses open street maps, works offline, pretty good and configurable app.
Edit: ...2GW in 2015 and is about 20GW in 2018...
Typo, and HN doesn't allow me to update it now. Anyway, my point was that in the past 4 years we achieved 20GW and we expect to achieve 80GW in the next 4 years.
I don't buy the fact that in the Internet age, you have to be some reporter to write against the government policies.
We don't need reporters anymore because we have the internet? :)
I won't engage further. You're free to believe what you want, but here's what I would like to say - You can interpret the current situation however you want, but others might disagree. And, anyone that disagrees with you or criticizes the govt, isn't necessarily the opposition or the enemy. - The govt is not a victim of opposition's hate, opposition and press are free to and supposed to criticize the govt, and they always have.
How about freedom of press as an example (World Press Freedom Index)
2018: 138
2017: 136
2016: 133
A good rule to follow, formulate an opinion after you gain enough facts to argue the other side, else you'll keep seeing only what you want to see.
Care to also publish rankings of the country over the years in freedom of press, law and order, mob violence, transparency, economic growth, journalists/writers murdered, appointments/shortages of RTI commissioners, RTI rejection rate, lack of lokayuktas, appointments/shortages of judiciary by govt etc. (or just look it up for yourself)
There have also been tremendous investments from the government in green tech, like solar.
The goal setup was a 100GW of solar capacity by 2022. It was about 2KW in 2015 and is about 20KW in 2018. We are most definitely not going to achieve the goal, perhaps not even get close. Lofty goal, sound familiar? I am sorry, I take lofty goals and promises of the Govt. with a pinch of salt until I see some actual implementation.
Ghost in the wires by Kevin Mitnick.
OK, let's consider your view point. Perhaps England had lions a few thousand years ago, they went extinct and perhaps some other predator took its place or may be it didn't, maybe the predator that was above it (if there was one) in the food chain went extinct too. But, yeah human life went on.
Now, here's where I disagree. The effects of extinction perhaps seem more pronounced with some species, rather than others. For instance, take coral reefs and how these could trigger a cascade of events affecting a bunch of species like small fish all the way up to human industry and life. Same with say bees, where they potentially can affect agriculture and humans in a huge way considering they are instrumental for pollination.
I suppose people don't like the idea of incurring the cost of efforts to prevent a species from extinction when they think its simply a moral thing to do, but in reality I suppose everything from climate change to saving endangered species is all just an effort towards self preservation for humans, perhaps simply branded differently.
We don't owe anyone anything. I agree. But, no one owes anything to us either. If you think about it, we really aren't doing it for other species, are we? A few among us are being cautious to foresee something that could affect us.
Sure, we can call it save the planet and feel important but say if the ecology balance is broken down, food chains are broken up, its humans who get adversely affected, with perhaps lot of other species but there are going to be lots of species that will do just fine, some will perhaps even thrive. In other words, life goes on, without humans, no one cares.
Disclaimer: Few ideas borrowed generously from George Carlin's take on save the planet. Funny but wise, I think.
That is a very reductionist view. You can ignore lots of factors and make up a simple equation with the only ones that help your case. Europe has better quality of life now. Europe has fewer endangered species and didn't care about the environment back then but progressed. Hence, if we don't care about endangered species, life everywhere in the world will be better. Well, among lot of other things Europe didn't care about things like human rights either back then, should we stop caring about that too? This is the equivalent of picking and choosing words in an article and making up your own sentences.
Surely there are things like latitudinal gradients of biodiversity, historical context of the same European countries colonizing and stealing wealth from all these other countries not too long ago. And, of course there's also the fact that European quality of life is perhaps better now, in 2018, move the needle back or forth by like few hundred years (that's a microsecond in scale of ecology) and see how things change.
The answer is simple, the rate of change is too rapid for any species to evolve soon enough or cope.
For e.g. lets consider hunting or poaching, if a species has a population of a few thousands, and even if we kill a handful a day, we will wipe out every one of the species in a few months. And, sure, you might argue a species I never knew existed went extinct, why do I care? Well, simply because the at the this high rate of change, this is equivalent to simply eliminating a species from the ecology overnight, and that has consequences in food chains, ecological balances and frankly, consequences that we can't completely foresee.
Correct me if I am wrong here, but since you invoke a corporation example, protecting endangered species is like anti-trust laws. One species/company has dominance, power and greed, but we make laws to level the playing field for the currently weaker/smaller species/companies, which in turn benefits all ecology/consumers/markets better.
Its about 10PM here. I got back from work 3-4 hours ago and my phone just beeped and I could read the email with simply a flick of a finger and saw that it was a work related email though I was having dinner at that time. Now, though I am at home that's running on a thread at the background in my head since then.
This is perhaps just one use case but it's hardly surprising that people now want to go back to way it was before. I still use my smart phone because it makes my life a lot more convenient in many other ways but I definitely understand if someone would find it compelling enough to stop using a smart phone.
But, it does make me think, if I just want to connect to the internet, play music/podcasts, click a pic once a while etc. do I really need a device that's GPS enabled, bluetooth enabled, has NFC, accelorometers, face recognition, multicore processors etc. and costs a fortune ;)
Doesn't have to be knocked out. India developed Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) because access to GPS is not guaranteed in hostile situations when its controlled by one country, as it happened to the Indian military in 1999 during the Kargil war when it was dependent on GPS and was denied access.
Freedom of speech, like all freedoms, requires discipline and comes with costs. Sometimes those costs are tragically high, but freedom is worth it ...
I suppose its a good way to test one's position for consistency for such subjects. Apply the same argument of freedom/regulation to subjects like free speech, guns, privacy laws, drugs, throw in any other issue that's close to you etc.
A few years ago, I had this idea of paying a small amount to charity every time I hit snooze on my alarm clock. I forked into an android alarm app, started working on it (but never completed it). My rationale then was that if I feel lazy and would prefer to sleep in further, I would penalize myself but in a way that would benefit someone else.
I suppose its perhaps how they marketed the feature. We have parking assist feature in many cars, there's a reason its not auto-park instead. If it really was a feature to help attentive drivers avoid accidents, it probably would have been called a driving-assist tech and not auto-pilot.
The medical clinic I was volunteering at...
This is off topic. How can one get into that line of work/volunteering? Any particular organizations? Any particular skills ? How can one get started with this kind of work/volunteering?
I agree taxes are not hidden charges, but it does sound a little deceitful to me that doordash bundles taxes with their service fee as one line item on their checkout page.
And, I don't share the same sympathy for the doordash drivers. I was already charged a delivery fee and a service fee separately, why is it still my responsibility to make sure the drivers get paid enough and not doordash's. Besides, the idea of tip for me is that I pay extra if I am happy with the service, and now I am expected to mindlessly pre-pay a tip before knowing if the service is going to be good or not. A reason why I prefer ubereatz, its a rating system but after the delivery.
The problem I have with doordash is that though they say the delivery fee is $x, there are a lot of hidden charges. You are actually paying a lot more than that, a markup on food items + a delivery fee + 8% service fee + taxes + 15% tip (optional but selected by default) + a small order fee (if your order is less than a predefined min order value)
For instance, there's a a particular dish served at a local restaurant that I like, and I recently noticed that it is $11.99 at the restaurant but in doordash it's priced $13.99, delivery fee of $4.99, service fees of $1.88 and optional but pre-selected tip of $3.81. And, of course taxes in addition to this. At this point in some cases, its perhaps more economical to take an uber/lyft to the restaurant and back.
I've seen Indian IT workers with CVs 3 times the size of mine and glowing recommendations from past employers, and most of them failed fucking fizzbuzz. After you deal with a dozen people like that, you just start to subconsciously dismiss Indian candidates because chances are, they're gonna be another one of those.
A model based on a training set of 12, surely encompasses all biases accurately of a population of 10s of millions.
Indian IT Outsourcing Industry ⊆ Indian IT Industry
India is a huge country with a huge population and a rapidly growing economy and a domestic market. Even if it was true a decade or two ago, should we still keep assuming that anything that affects the Indian IT industry is caused solely by the outsourcing industry.
Surely HN can stop having the same conversation every time anything regarding India and IT comes up. A claim like - All engineers/engineering effort/R&D in country X is obviously substandard based on my anecdotal evidence - followed by a discussion treating it as a valid argument.
Why do you think people will live cheaply if they join the community now? They pay the same taxes as you, and people engage in the community just as much as you for how ever long they choose to live there (perhaps 15 years to come and make it an even better neighborhood than it is now).
Isn't "intelligent life" just a function of time of "life"? I am reading the book "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness" currently and the book makes the case that intelligence and/or consciousness has evolved separately in mammals (humans) and cephalopods.
The more I look at diversity and evolution of life on Earth, it seems like "intelligent life" as we know it is just a inevitable consequence of evolution, given enough time, perhaps.
On a slightly related topic, India has a vast and rich set of languages and millions of people that speak/read/write these languages. With daily newspapers, tabloids, literature etc, I presume there is a (potential) huge corpus of rich data for each language too. And, I just read yesterday that India just surpassed US to become the second biggest mobile phone market. Then why is there not more of NLP work/products on Indian languages? There's a market for it, a huge market, isn't it?
I would guess manufacturing
What does being "in charge of the world" mean anyway?