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jamesfe

Re:The new silent majority: People who don't tweet on Tuesday March 08, 2022 @01:57PM (#30604394)
This exactly. I once tried the twitter game, I thought it was important to have a big following or say clever things, whatever.

I was lightly burned by a tweet (of my own authoring) once, and I thought "I make $XYZ per year, twitter pays me nothing, this joke tweet caused me a lot of stress, the odds that being on twitter will get me cancelled will cost me $XYZ are non-zero and I don't control them"

Then I deleted all my tweets and my twitter account (8 years ago) and life has been really nice without it!

What you really want is NROL-11 which inadvertently revealed the classified location of the payload: https://gizmodo.com/decoding-hidden-messages-in-those-geeky-...
Re:Making the dislike count private across YouTube on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @03:49PM (#29180552)
TL;DR "People watch fewer videos if they see more dislikes which means we make less ad revenue, the result of this A/B test is we will continue to optimize for ad rev"
Is it? How do they bill you without knowing how much data you transferred? How do they debug what went wrong with your connection without logs?

This stuff is barely scratching the surface of the data those companies collect and maintain, likely for long periods of time, just to analyze and improve customer experience.

Re:A different kind of keyboard on Thursday September 23, 2021 @02:27PM (#28633126)
I'm not sure I understand - it took me 28 keystrokes to type 13 characters. The value must come from somewhere, where is it?
Re:When did writing in major newspapers become so bad? on Monday March 08, 2021 @12:35PM (#26388686)
The author makes one mention of New York Times, the target of his confusion, but only in the very last sentence. Maybe he's the bad writer?

Cherry-picking ten bad sentences from tens of thousands written per day seems like a long-tail metric or anecdotal at best.

Re:Baking with machine learning (2020) on Friday January 29, 2021 @06:26PM (#25964209)
You are right, but she is a GCP ML advocate, so her job is to distill this stuff down into blog posts or 45 minute talk tracks.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account on Thursday December 03, 2020 @05:15PM (#25295951)
I'd pay. But mostly, I'd pay to know the customer service would respond to me. Customer service at Google is like trying to cancel Verizon service - endless transfers.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account on Thursday December 03, 2020 @05:12PM (#25295911)
What's another good email provider?

I am starting to feel really nervous about storing my life in Google. It's not that I wouldn't pay for these things...it's just that I worry one day I'll lose access and fall into the pit of "trying to get Google to help a single human regain access" that sounds horrible.

Re:AWS pre-announces public container image registry on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @12:48AM (#24976761)
Sure, but say your engineers cost you $100/hr, and every hour beyond 2,000hrs per year they work, they become more unhappy.

I think it's worth spending the 8 hours/yr/site, supposing you have relatively few sites. Plus, your engineers for 1hr/month will never achieve the same SLAs that AMZN will.

For smallish numbers of sites, it seems like the AMZN solution is fine. For bigger ones, there is always enterprise pricing :-)

Re:My platonic ideal for how engineering hiring should work on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @03:29PM (#24841432)
"X is Broken" is the new "Uber for X"
Re:My platonic ideal for how engineering hiring should work on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @03:14PM (#24841274)
"If you’ve ever been on either end of the table, you’re probably mad at the state of hiring, too. Whether you have given it a lot of thought or whether you just feel it deep down, something about the whole process feels off."

This feels like a really big assumption. Is it true? Is there data to back this?

I've felt annoyed at individual interviewers, or a process at a given company but I've in general felt like I got more of a fair shake in the tech world than other industries I've worked in.

Re:A tool that increased my typing speed on Monday October 12, 2020 @05:53PM (#24759875)
The author proposes that we're somehow blocked from success because we can't type fast enough. Is that true? I don't agree; in fact, I'd rather be concise and communicate well than vomit more words onto the screen.

Additionally, beyond Dvorak, is there a better way to increase typing speed than spending what must be hours and hours building a bespoke solution for each one of your machines? And what is the cost of the inevitable tsunami of errors you make in the learning process? Are these neural pathways more valuable than say, learning a new language or practicing a different skill?

Re:Notre-Dame came closer to collapsing than people knew on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @10:09AM (#20459647)
Then it must have been the police that broke into the Dior and luxury stores on the Champs Elysees and looted them...or that set fire to buildings. Or it was police that spray painted "the gilet jaunes will win" on the Arc de Triumph.

This behavior forced the city to endure blockades every Saturday and holiday for months. Small businesses near the riot areas were closed and had their windows shattered or spray painted by protestors. Ordinary citizens and their kids couldn't do errands and in some cases leave their apartments for on one out of two days off a week for months on end.

The protests were violent. Who started it you can debate, but against tons of news articles, photos and videos of people fighting hand to hand, getting gassed or throwing cobblestones, lighting buildings on fire...you don't really have much of a factual foundation to say Paris didn't suffer months of violent protests before the ND fire.

Re:The preachers getting rich from poor Americans on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @09:13AM (#20039706)
Can someone source the US Government directly funding the construction of churches?
True in that sense.

Also true that the two-tier system existed in one of the big tech giants and with it many of the same symptoms. It is interesting to see it again with Google, although I wonder if Amazon/Netflix/Amazon have a similar situation.

It seems really similar to an article from March of 1998 about Microsoft: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/30/business/equal-work-less-...
Re: Apple Supplier List – Top 200 [pdf] on Friday October 12, 2018 @08:46AM (#18201029)
Required seems strong. Is there a need for that?
In short, there is no objective way to value art, so galleries charge as much money as possible for the art.

The author of the article is somehow either confused or offended by this.

Re:Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains on Friday December 22, 2017 @03:56AM (#15986151)
I'm not sure why you feel the need to defend yourself. HN has a low opinion of the concept of selling user data, but in practice, there are plenty of ad-supported startups represented here.

Google is selling your data to marketers. Facebook is one giant data-collection/data-sales empire. In theory, the HN collective hates data selling, but in practice, they love the companies that are doing it and their products.

I find it ironic that I come here and see people worshipping the big adtech companies and their tech but then when someone posts a comment about not selling user data, a thousand tin-hat naysayers jump out of the woodwork to flog them to death.

It's OK. It's why I can read the NY Times and a thousand other online newspapers - FOR FREE. It's why I can go to Google and type in "why does my butt burn when I poop" and get an answer - FOR FREE. It's why I can use dozens of adtech and user-data-supported services - FOR FREE. I pay for those things with data about me, my habits, and my browsing history.

Re:A Guide to Pitching Funding and Launch Stories on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @01:45PM (#15800115)
Well, not everybody who dug for gold in the gold rush got rich, but those who sold shovels certainly did. Nice job.
It was probably different back then, but now you are paid for each pay period plus some hazard pay and additionally, you receive automatic timely promotions (on a schedule specific t each rank) up to a certain point (you cannot enter a POW camp a Captain and leave as a General for instance).

This is why Bowe Bergdahl is in a big pickle if he is found guilty: he will lose 5 years of pay and return to his original low rank (he is now a Sergeant, I think he was a Private 1st Cl or Specialist) as well as be discharged as something other than "honorable".

Re:Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O. on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @04:54AM (#14602077)
I may be simplistic or naïve, but if your business isn't profitable, that's what kills it. Travis or no Travis, it doesn't seem like Uber has found a way to cut a profit yet and at some point, profit becomes a requirement.
Re:Why Python Is Not My Favorite Language (2016) on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @11:25AM (#14595309)
Cool! I'll check it out.
Re:Why Python Is Not My Favorite Language (2016) on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @09:45AM (#14594529)
I like to use Python for quick, fast, flexible things.

I like to use Java and Go for things that require more structure and type checking.

I like to use Scala for functional programming.

I suppose we all have our preferences, but I'm glad the author uses the word "favorite" because there are great cases to be made for every technology out there.

Re:NSA OSS Technologies on Monday June 19, 2017 @04:20AM (#14585354)
I think you're right. It's sad to see many people are looking at these tools and performing a sort of "Allegory of the Cave" by extrapolating, then, the evils that can be done with these tools.

Something, mostly common sense, tells me that we will not find some smoking gun to a crime here in these OSS repos...if anyone wanted that, they can refer to any number of leaks.

Ultimately, I'm happy to see this stuff shared, happy to see others use it and happy to see the OSS community build on it.

Re:Collecting huge amounts of data with WhatsApp on Friday May 12, 2017 @07:31AM (#14323036)
Well, maybe. I don't want to discount this concept entirely because some info is being "leaked" if that is the right word, but...

Let's say one of your contacts chats a lot because it's a chatty person. They're online far more than another person. What if that other person only chats on the bus on the way to and from work at roughly the same time every day to tell their wife they're on the way home. This activity will overlap with the chatty person's activity all the time.

By your rationale, they are having a conversation, maybe cheating, and maybe having a work affair.

I think the more contacts a user that are active, the higher probability that your model predicts they are having a "conversation" with another user. You'll probably find that your thresholds are really hard to fine-tune: maybe we say A chats with B if abs(A.activeTime - B.activeTime) < threshold, but that threshold is going to be super hard to find* and even harder to validate.

Sure, there is some information here (the picture probably being the most concretely weird) but the fact that you can just go to the App and check a box for privacy means that this seems like not a huge issue.

Yes, WhatsApp made the software, but its your responsibility to apply your own privacy settings.

Re:A bigger problem than ISIS: The Mosul Dam is failing on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @08:27AM (#13262980)
I came here to note this. People bring this up every year or so - when I was in Iraq in 2006, this was an issue of the "any moment they could all die" sort but nobody seems to care enough to fix it since there isn't a firm timeline for the dam failure. Also, there's that whole war thing going on.

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