gmisra

GMail doesn't really "leak" information about e-mail addresses, it just displays any public information tied to that address's Google Plus profile.

Once upon a time, Google dedicated a massive amount of resources to launch a social network to compete with Facebook, Google Plus. When G+ launched, one of the "features" was linking your GMail account with your G+ account. G+ didn't really take off (obviously), but all Google employees were "strongly encouraged" to join, and the account you're looking at ([email protected]) belongs to former Google engineer, who does have a public G+ profile. If you go to plus.google.com and search for that e-mail address, it will bring up their profile page. If you know any GMail addresses that don't have public G+ profiles, you can verify their information isn't leaked.

Aside: G+ was the reason why Google Reader was killed #NeverForget

For those interested in other "legitimate" UFO sightings, I'd recommend "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record" by Leslie Kean [1]. The author is an investigative journalist who sets out to interview observers of relatively well-documented UFO encounters, and ends up speaking mostly with military pilots from around the world. It's a good read, and is even-handed and well written, especially considering the genre.

In the book, two things stood out to me. First, there are a quite a few UFO sightings that are corroborated by non-human sensor data (mostly radar and video). Second, the narrative paints a picture where US government officials are much more secretive than any other nation, by far. Within that context, the releases of the last few weeks are even more surprising.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in a modern, not-too-X-files-like take on UFO phenomena.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8287034-ufos

Partially off topic: does anybody know of a hosted solution that turns a pdf into an html page, and hosts the output html (optionally, also hosts the pdf, with a downloadable link).

Price hacking is the new growth hacking, these drivers are truly disrupting a regulatory regime that limits their freedom.

Thanks for the response! Some follow-up questions

1. Does your market analysis differentiate between intra-city and inter-city move? It feels like the service is much more valuable for people moving inter-city.

2. Is there a better source for the "planned future mobility" data? I would expect rent.com to have a strong editorial bias around the perception that the rental market is healthy and renters are competing with each other. I would not expect the same kind of bias in census data.

3. I would love to see the census data's mobility over time cohorted by age group. Is that something you guys have done, and can share?

What do you think about the fact that, in general, the percentage of Americans who move is on the decline?

> In the mid-1960s, about 20 percent of the population moved in any given year, according to the United States Census Bureau. By 1990, it was approaching 15 percent. Today it’s closer to 10 percent. The percentage that moves between states has fallen by nearly half since the early 1990s.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/21/opinion/how-to-get-americ...

Also, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/02/american-mobility-has...

Is anyone aware of an entity that attempts to objectively quantify the economic impact of an event like this (ransoms paid, data lost, labor hours lost, new security costs, etc)?

These voids change moving up the distance scale - while our star system is visibly not inside a void, there is evidence that the Milky Way is inside a galactic-scale void.

http://news.wisc.edu/celestial-boondocks-study-supports-the-...

https://www.universetoday.com/135954/largest-scales-milky-wa...

For reference, British Airways' parent company made a profit of €2.5 billion last year, and expects higher profits this year [0].

Without meaningful consequences at the top of the executive chain for sub-par IT/infrastructure quality, these kinds of incidents seem inevitable. But how do you hold people responsibly for "bad" software? We could adopt something akin to how PE licenses are required for civil engineering in the US. I suspect it is in the industry's best interest to address this need before a government entity decides to.

[0] http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-iag-results-idUKKBN1630MA

Many years ago I worked on the computer models used when developing the restoration plan. Happy to answers any questions.

From https://www.wired.com/2013/08/outbox/

"Part of the trick was that the service could automatically weed out junk mail, and when U.S. Postmaster General Pat Donahoe got wind of this, he wasn’t happy — at least according to Baehr."

"Donahoe summoned Outbox to his office, and Baehr made his pitch, arguing that the company was just a few smart guys with $2 million in financing who wanted to spend the next few years learning about Donahoe’s customers and even sending him data about what these customers needed. Donahoe responded by saying that the customers of U.S. Postal Service were not the general public. Its customers, he said, were a few hundred bulk mailers."

Anecdata from a popular coffee shop ~1 mile from Square HQ:

- Staff at the cafe are extremely frustrated, no real visibility into what's going on.

- Finding the status page was a struggle. Following @square and @sqsupport was insufficient, as both accounts have been publicly silent during the entire outage. The status page, hosted at the non-obvious issquareup.com, is only listed on the profile pages of those social accounts. I located the page and shared it with the cafe staff, which provided some context as to what was going on.

- But, the status page itself was not very useful to them. The information in it is moderately useful for a technical user, but most of Square's POS customers aren't technical? More importantly, most of the hands-on operators of these POS systems are even less technical.

- The only solution offered is to "switch to offline mode", but that only works if your square app hasn't already logged you out, which had happened long before reading about the solution. This behavior corroborated by twitter anecdotes and other comments in this thread.

- There is no other solution path presented.

- Without any other information to share, staff is describing the issue as a "nationwide Square server crash" to all customers.

- Some customers just left when faced with the outage (alternatives are cash or an on-site, fee-based ATM)

- All of this is happening while the staff is continuing to take orders, serve customers, deal with irate customers, and generally be positive and courteous.

- The only reason they retried the app just now is because I read the comment from the Square engineer on this thread announcing service restoration.

Whatever user model Square has of the day-to-day operators of their POS, it seems to be wildly miscalibrated, especially around how to handle incident communication.

Before getting too carried away, I'd suggest reading this piece [1], about the search for Randy Bilyeu, the missing treasure seeker mentioned int the NPR article. It provides lot more background and context, and is enjoyable as far as long form journalism goes.

Like many, I've casually followed the story over the years, but in the 5280 article, the reporter interviews Fenn in the context of the manhunt. To me, Fenn comes off as someone whose obsession with his own eccentric idea of a "game" overrides the very real life-and-death situations created as a result of that game.

The NPR article is surprisingly blase considering the dangers involved.

[1] http://www.5280.com/news/magazine/2016/07/how-one-colorado-m...

Does anybody know what happens when an add-on augmented e-mail is opened outside of Gmail (or, presumably, Inbox)?

There is a huge difference between:

Google is enhancing e-mail in a way that makes e-mail better for everybody.

and

Google is migrating GMail to be another walled garden collaborative workflow tool that happens to have a very good e-mail client build in.

FYI to S3 customers, per the SLA, most of us are eligible for a 10% credit for this billing period. But the burden is on the customer to provide incident logs and file a support ticket requesting said credit (it must be really challenging to programmatically identify outage coverage across customers /s)

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/sla/

I'm also a big fan of this approach, especially for sharing data responsibilities with non-technical colleagues. If you work in nodejs, the node-google-spreadsheet library is pretty good: https://www.npmjs.com/package/google-spreadsheet

If app-fication of ride hailing is what you want, it's worth mentioning that in the SF bay area, Flywheel has done an excellent job of making a feature-rich app and network [0]. Personally, I have found it to be an excellent service, the things that matter the most to me are availability of rides, timeliness of driver dispatch and arrival, and communication with drivers (when necessary).

[0] http://www.flywheel.com/passenger-app

And, all of the underlying data is available on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/SIZZLE/2016electionmemes

...and all of the underlying data is available on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/SIZZLE/2016electionmemes

FTA:

  links are stored in a file
    - compact storage
    - no database required
    - easy backup: simply copy the datastore file

If Mike is still here in the comments, can you talk a little bit about versioning support? Is this something that's on the roadmap at all, or something that Homebrew has a strong opinion about?

In general, it's a very useful (and pleasant to use!) tool - except for when trying to manage different versions of the same dependency on the same system. Since this is such a big deviation from most package managers, and feels intentional, I'd like to understand why, and whether there is a "homebrew way" of approaching multi-version management.

Thanks again for all of your hard work!

One of the early on-line responses was "maybe we can figure out how to 3D print these cases". It turns out that an Epi-pen is just a plastic safety housing around a normal syringe.

Some discussions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4y5481/cost_of_epipen...

https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/4y7f26/epipen_f...

Can you elaborate? What driving maneuvers do you expect these vehicles to be able to perform? Where is that feature set documented?

Trying to be both a platform and a community are goals which are often in conflict, especially in terms of operations. Communities really need things like trust, reputation, moderation, rules, and enforcement. These are things that are hard to enforce programmatically, and often require a lot of customization.

e.g. reddit started as a platform for communities, but the success of /r/all made it more a community of communities, at which point some of the more extreme communities became a liability and had to be censored. In contrast, imgur appears to have managed the separation between the two quite well.

It is still unclear what twitter wants to be.

> "Supervised by humans in the drivers seat"

Ah, borrowing from the Musk marketing playbook, just say "self-driving" often enough, and enough uninformed people who have never seen contemporary luxury assisted-driving features will be impressed. Calling out Autopilot as "souped-up cruise control" is a nice touch.

> For now, Uber’s test cars travel with safety drivers, as common sense and the law dictate. These professionally trained engineers sit with their fingertips on the wheel, ready to take control if the car encounters an unexpected obstacle. A co-pilot, in the front passenger seat, takes notes on a laptop.

That doesn't seem very scalable. How many cars are in this so-called "fleet"?

Is there anybody working on autonomous vehicle tech that believes there's any substance here, or is it just adverjournalism?

A lot of commenters concerned about Bloomberg's potential editorial bias in running this piece, but it is interesting that it comes just a few days after they published "End of an Era as China’s Love Affair With U.S. Real Estate Fades"

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-26/end-of-an...

Maybe the prevalent mental model regarding models is wrong? The real elephant in the room is the idea that "all models" are similar, and therefore occupy the same space regarding interpretability, forecasting, and other uses. Models are designed to solve specific problems, usually within specific scopes. Confusion, misinterpretation, and error occur when consumers of models don't understand (or simply ignore) the limitations of these models.

Whenever I sit down to build a new model, or work with a new-to-me model, I start with questions like:

- What questions was this model built to answer? Be careful when asking other questions, and know the limitations of those answers.

- If it's been in use for a while, how effective has it been? How is that efficacy measured? A highly accurate decomposition of historical behavior may involve a lot of post-fact knowledge that has no predictive power, so be careful interpreting cross-use results.

- What are the ranges and distributions of the input variables? What are their boundary conditions? This is not always applicable to all variables, especially unstructured data, but when it is applicable, it is usually straightforward.

- What are the ranges of the model outputs? Do they have any boundary conditions? Do boundary effects impact the situations in which the model can be applied? For example, when working with a binned variable, often bins 0 and n include less homogenous data than the rest of the bins.

- How is model accuracy calculated? This is usually far less objective than model constructors are willing to admit to. How does your error vary along different dimensions? Which dimensional error do you look at more closely, and why?

In my experience, the best way to reason about models is to work with a lot of different models, and to be honest about their flaws. That learning generally happens more efficiently, and more broadly, in the real world than in the classroom. With the recent rise in popularity of applied models, we have lots of inexperience modelers out there, so these growing pains are to be expected.

If the goal of Airbnb's investors/BoD was to grow a viable business, this would be a reasonable question - but their job is to increase the value of their (and their LPs') existing investment as much as possible, usually within a fixed time window.

For employees in the tech sector, this misalignment of incentives is one of the ugliest lessons to learn.