qsymmachus

The end result is Google is getting it wrong, we just have two layers of machine slop at work

Yep, but for ideological reasons they reversed it.

USPS purchased the usps.com domain a long time ago specifically so they could control it and prevent phishing. The decision to replace usps.gov with the .com domain came later, with the tenure of Trump appointee Louis DeJoy.

Right wingers believe that USPS should operate as a business, not a public service, so "rebranding" their website to be .com is definitely a part of that narrative.

I think we're getting ahead of ourselves as an industry if we think the ability to generate a convincing B- history essay from a prompt presages the enslavement of the human race

Oberlin native here. I've been going to Gibson's since I was a kid. You're getting an incomplete picture of this sad drama and the Gibson family does not deserve your sympathy.

I'll preface by saying that no one in this story comes out looking good – certainly not the shoplifters, who expected get out of jail free cards despite being thieves; nor the college, whose greatest fear is offending its fragile student body, with predictable results like this.

What you're not going to read in this article or others like it is that the Gibsons aren't heroes either. There are two important details I'd bring to your attention:

1. Allyn Gibson, the man who tackled the shoplifters, really is a confirmed racist. I know this both first hand (we are peers), and from his many social media posts in which he casually rags on immigrants and black people (expect he identifies them using the n-word). The judge in this case declared that evidence inadmissible, for some reason.

2. The Gibsons are not a put-down, working class family who were nearly bankrupted by this protest. They're one of the wealthiest families in town, and were millionaires before this all happened. Gibson's Bakery is a hobby business; they turn a modest profit selling some baked goods and beer. Their actual livelihood comes from rent – they're the second largest landowners after the college, and own most of the commercial and residential rental property in town. The idea that they were impacted by this protest in any consequential way is frankly laughable to anyone who knows anything about them and their business. Once again, the judge declared evidence of their wealth to be inadmissible in court.

This doesn't absolve the college of blame. But this isn't the black-and-white, "David vs Goliath" story the media is making it out to be. Unfortunately this story just fits too neatly into a national narrative about "woke" politics going too far, so you're not going to see any nuance from the media.

I see that STEM chauvinism is still alive and well on Hacker News.

Believe it or not, there are some skills you can pick up studying the humanities that will set you apart from your CS major peers. Being able to write and communicate clearly, for example, is pretty much a super power in most tech jobs.

No one is arguing that Airbnb is solely responsibly for rent increases. It's one of many contributing factors, including limited supply as you point out.

Contrary to your intuition on this question, Airbnb almost certainly a contributing factor to rent increases. There are studies on this: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3006832

> Insane that this is happening without federal coordination

Not surprising, because the feds are providing zero leadership right now. Just today, Trump told the governors on a conference call that they should "get their own ventilators". We should not expect competent and engaged leadership from this administration any time soon.

Why not 4x8 hours

That's a good point, but I think it would be a shame if wireless charging completely replaced wired, because it's much less efficient.

Something like 20-40% of input energy is wasted when using wireless charging versus a wire. If every existing phone switched to wireless charging, that would cause a non-trivial increase in total power usage.

David Graeber also pointed this out and came up with a rule of thumb: how much a job contributes to society is inversely proportional how much someone is paid to do it.

> Always in ear

What percentage of Airpods owners do you reckon _always_ have them inside their ears?

It doesn't exist because many people don't want it to exist, chiefly due to privacy concerns.

In the mid aughts the Consumers Union successfully lobbied against the creation of a 411 directory for cell numbers: https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2013...

You could think of this as a simple "he said she said", but what possible benefit does the whistleblower stand to gain from making this story up? Whereas the governor has a very obvious incentive to deny the whole thing happened.

They probably care more about bad publicity than fines, especially since they're already under public scrutiny for their treatment of warehouse workers.

It's very easy to write JS in a functional style, since as you point out, it already supports first-class functions, which is the most important building block.

To really go whole hog, try setting one constraint for yourself: only use immutable data. Make all your variables `const`s, and only use immutable data structures (Immutable.js is a useful library for this).

You'll discover that it's basically impossible to write code in the familiar imperative style – everything needs to be a pure function, that just takes an input and returns a consistent output, without mutating state. This really is the "secret sauce" of FP.