sid-kap

The paper refers to CO2 as "carbonic acid gas". At this time, did they know that CO2 was also produced by burning fossil fuels? Or by respirating living things?

I wouldn't be surprised if the internal codename for the project was Oasis

Yes, they already do this

Uber's main (only?) advantage here is their ability to take advantage of a shared labor pool. By increasing the demand for driving + food delivery, it makes the Uber labor pool bigger and further increases the lock-in effect so Uber drivers don't want to open other apps.

Agreed. At the very least, when you pull up directions, every road that you have to turn on should have the street name should be visible (at least without too much zooming).

60k per year doing internships? I thought a typical tech internship paid $5-8k/month, which means at most $25k over the summer. (Maybe my number is for undergrads, and grad student interns get paid significantly more?)

It's not just the presence of alternatives to driving---they also directly discourage driving with narrow roads and slow speed limits.

The author's last name gives some credibility that they might be good with strings.

Yes, I think that's a good analogy. Tech is treated like a cool toy in the news, rather than as a corporate sector that has real consequences on everyone's lives. Tech should be covered differently than computer games. (Not making a value judgement about gaming, just saying it has less of an effect on society.)

I think you missed the point regarding whiplash. He's saying journalists should have been more skeptical about these companies all along, and should have dashed in some skepticism into their reporting throughout the last 10 years. Instead, they didn't pay attention to these things until recently, at which point everyone realized there are some things about Facebook and Google which seem questionable. So they waited too long to start looking at these companies critically, and when it became a salient topic and everyone started criticizing Google and Facebook all at once, they also had to jump onto the criticism bandwagon seemingly out of nowhere, causing the readers whiplash.

Does that argument make sense?

How does one email Jeff Bezos?

Is there any chance this will lead to being able to listen to old TAL episodes via RSS? It's kinda strange that TAL is buying a podcast player company but they don't want us to listen to their podcasts...

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Richard Stallman's essays on Facebook. That's the first place I saw this idea expressed. (He calls users of Facebook "useds".)

Spacemacs has excellent context menus. It was suprising how discoverable everything is!

LMAO, I think you're right. It's pushing commits like this every 30 mins

This is an extremely niche post, lol

Regardless of stream fusion, it will always be one pass in Haskell because of laziness.

Dropbox Paper is great but the Android app sucks

Is this implying that people use Google Images to find webpages? I thought the only point of Google Images was to find images to use in PowerPoints and school projects.

It's back up

Obligatory comment about how the Dow is a useless number.

Open Law Library (http://www.openlawlib.org/) seems to be trying to do something like what you're suggesting.

"transit hubs" may have been the wrong term to use... I think he's proposing these new rules anywhere within 1/4-1/2 mile of any transit stop with 15 min frequency or better. So it's probably a larger area than you think.

I'm fine with having to pay through the nose for a little privacy and a backyard, given the alternative.

One could argue that, despite high house prices in the Bay Area, homebuyers are actually drastically underpaying for their land!

If we upzoned all of, say, Berkeley, to 3 units per lot rather than the current 1 unit per lot, SFH prices would probably double. (This is because, even if the extra supply reduces home prices, say, from $1m to $700k, each lot will now have the potential to build 3 houses on it, making the lot's land value $2.1m. Of course, this isn't exactly correct—I did not account for construction costs—but you get the idea.).

So, in a unzoned/loosely zoned/"fair" world, you would pay a pretty dime for a SF house in a desirable city like Berkeley—a lot more than SF homebuyers pay today.

This is something people don't appreciate—SF zoning actually subsidizes SF homebuyers by artificially depressing the value of the land, and therefore not making buyers pay the full opportunity cost for underutilizing the land. (Here the opportunity cost is the 3+ houses that could be built on it instead.)

(Not trying to attack OP, who doesn't seem to live in, or want to live in, Berkeley anyway, just making a general point here.)

I think the conflict here is between democracy at different levels (street/neighborhood-level democracy vs. city-level vs, state-level). Not democracy vs. anarchy or authoritarianism.

This reminds me of the fact that in the early republic, the majority of American presidents and powerful statesmen were Freemasons. There was even a anti-elitist party, called the Antimasonic party, formed to counter the Masons' influence in politics.

Since I upgraded my google-chrome-stable version on my Linux machine to 60.0.3112.78, I've been getting a "Could not display composer" error where the composer should be on Messenger.com. If someone on the Messenger team sees this, could you please look into this issue? (I submitted this issue through feedback but didn't hear back from anyone.)

Does anyone know if the large tech companies that give free lunch, microkitchen food, etc. to their employees also give these benefits to their service workers (janitors, etc.)?

Which requires more energy—lowering the temperature by one degree using an AC or increasing the temperature by one degree using a heater?

I like the new Autoplay toggle. Autoplay is honestly the most annoying feature I've ever seen in a top-20 modern website. Anyone have theories as to why it received such amazing enough A/B-testing results that they decided to keep it?