sideband

Alphabet wants drivers on their devices looking at ads instead of driving.

The author releases much of his findings as a KML. There is a free version with ~61,000 places listed here: https://mynorthkorea.blogspot.com/2021/01/accessdprk-2021-ma...

Would love to see this added to https://kmzview.com. I could (almost) stop using Google Earth for my clients.

> Sudden layoffs can also help maintain labor discipline, which a lot of business leaders felt was getting away from them.

We saw this theatre at my employer. A mandatory all-company meeting called with a few hours notice, lots of stern faces and vague ominous talk, followed by "you will be notified in the next moments if you are being made redundant".

They are a huge company whose name you would almost certainly recognize. We found out later that the total number of people let go was....5. That's how many people we hired in our group alone the previous month. It was just a show.

QGIS is fantastic and that team deserves a lot of praise for their work over the years. However, the article calls out using KML as a data source and unfortunately QGIS does not have the best support for KML. One of the reasons KML is still around despite it's faults is because a KML author can easily design a UI for their data in Google Earth, organizing data by folders with descriptions, including pre-defined views and image overlays among other things (a basic example here: https://kmzview.com/5qBGblENff4w0RkQf89J). Then, anybody who opens that KML in Google Earth gets that same UI. There are a lot of casual consumers of this type of data and this experience is powerful for them. I think QGIS could really broaden their appeal to this casual user base by supporting these well-loved KML features.

The current "tech" job interview process is engineered to select for people that are both competent and secretly insecure about their skills, and to do this with little or no false positives. Competent employees are, well, competent and secretly insecure employees tend to have a need to impress. Both of these traits works to employers benefit.

A large amount of false negatives, like candidates that would otherwise be great employees but maybe just suck at whiteboard coding, is considered acceptable by most employers because research shows the cost of bad hires is much much higher than missing out on many good hires. Employers know the current process is miserable and leaves a lot of good people behind.

I know the title sounds like a political piece, but it's not. The subheading is "A team of computer scientists sifted through records of unusual Web traffic in search of answers. A set of cryptic data has inspired a years-long argument over its meaning."

You could say that Google Fiber was a response to Comcast's announcement of its intent to acquire NBC in December 2009.

Google makes no money if they can't show ads to people, and at the time Comcast and friends controlled Google's access to a majority of US audiences that Google's customers (advertisers) wanted their ads in front of. Advertising in the US was more than half of Google's revenue then. Comcast had the only network nationally capable of reliably delivering video and video ads, which was prioritized for growth within Google around then.

I think there was a real fear within Google about the leverage Comcast and other national ISP's had over them. TLS wasn't common, and advertisers weren't nearly as interested in mobile audiences in 2010: wireless data use was a fraction of what it is now. A well-capitalized Comcast without the regulatory restrictions of AT&T or Verizon could create existential trouble for Google if they really wanted to. Google Fiber could have been Google's way of showing they'd be willing to play hardball if it came to that. Any positive PR that came from it was a great bonus, but they almost certainly never made money from Google Fiber.

Amazon could only benefit from having multiple state and municipal governments in competition within any general metro area that they are seriously considering. I think it's a bit telling that Washington, D.C., Montgomery County in Maryland and "Northern Virginia" are all on the list, as well as both Newark and New York City.

It's called River Ranch Acres and on the map it's the area south of Highway 60/Hesperides Rd and east of Highway 630 E with the dirt roads throughout. The Triple Canopy Ranch to the west mostly surrounded by a canal (moat?) is not part of it. I believe there is a book titled "Redneck Riviera" written by a man who inherits some land there and attempts to take possession of it.

Southern Florida has several cities like this. A few have been somewhat successful:

https://www.google.com/maps/@26.9825804,-82.1857099,31160m/d... https://www.google.com/maps/@26.6300975,-81.9789861,24756m/d...

Others, not so much:

https://www.google.com/maps/@26.6204017,-81.6442622,17018m/d...

There's also this curious region which started as a land scam but ended up becoming a somewhat lawless area now ruled by a hunting club:

https://www.google.com/maps/@27.7771326,-81.3102668,7540m/da...

The place is dangerous and violent but remote, and authorities keep their distance. It feels strange to think that a place like this exists an hours drive from Disney World.

I could never understand what Google wanted with Boston Dynamics. It seemed like a huge risk to their brand:

Google, 2001: "Don't be evil."

Google, 2013: "We make military robots."

I agree. As much as I really wanted to use gRPC on Go for a current project, this bug ultimately scared me away: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/issues/1043

Big kudos to everyone working on it (most of which are Google engineers, some very senior) but I can't help wonder what other issues might be lurking if that one went unnoticed for so long.

I also moved from the the Bay Area to Oviedo, FL not long ago (fun fact about our little town: Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp, grew up here). I agree with everything on your list, and I'll add one more item:

9) Greater thought diversity and tolerance for opposing viewpoints.

When I lived in the Bay Area it seemed that too many people I interacted with were of similar backgrounds: very educated, high income and similar political and social values. While I loved my years there, at times I felt like I was in a cultural bubble insulated from the real world. Worse, I saw people professionally shunned for expressing opinions that fell outside the mainstream. People here in the Orlando area are all types and they seem to love to discuss their differences and even try to learn from them. I can't begin to imagine someone suffering professionally only for their opinions here. It's very refreshing.

I have not lived in enough places to guess if this is a Florida vs California thing, or an Orlando area vs Bay Area thing, or a Bay Area vs everywhere else thing, but I think it's certainly a positive difference.

I'm of the unpopular opinion that climate change has the potential to be a net positive for humanity over the long term:

+ Protecting coastal (and some inland) populations against higher water levels will be huge infrastructure projects that will allow us to re-imagine cities, many of which are even now burdened by very ancient designs and infrastructure. This will be a great use of resources that will put people to work on grand and civically engaging projects. Work to be proud of.

+ New coastal land will be created and deserts will slowly re-green, encouraging populations to migrate to and develop areas previously thought worthless. With that we'll have an opportunity to build thoughtful, efficient cities and the infrastructure to connect them from the ground up. Imagine the wealth and opportunities, economic and political, that would be created developing Greenland, Antarctica, or the Sahara.

+ Total potential agricultural output of the world will increase drastically, possibly making food cheaper for all.

+ Human civilization will be forced to recognize that we exist at the mercy of a bountiful Earth, which might make some of those other celestial bodies a bit more appealing.

Of course some obvious consequences will be painful, but I think change isn't automatically bad, and that the best of humanity always comes through during periods of non-violent adversity. A slow but certain and predictable warming of the Earth's climate is just that.

> We are the largest private company in Florida

Huh? The largest private company in Florida does $32 billion/year in revenue and has 186k employees. You can't be that big.

Verizon's costs to deploy FiOS, which is the same underlying tech as Google Fiber, between 2004 and 2010 in some MSA's approached a billion in capital alone. They ended up spending $23 billion in total capital, and only in places where they already had data centers every few miles, conduit, fiber, poles, field cabinets, franchise agreements, a local workforce, a large customer base, storefronts, etc. And that only includes new equipment and construction, not recurring operational costs. $23 billion is more than Google's entire capital budget for the past 2.5 years.

This is almost certainly the result of somebody at Google finally asking serious questions about the total cost, or at least being asked to cut a particularly large check for the first time.

There's some sort of Stockholm syndrome prevalent among too many Bay Area residents that compels them to accept the lower quality of life. I lived there for several years until recently, and it was a surreal experience to hear others discuss the sacrifices they were making just to have a roof over their family's head, to provide a half-decent education for their children. And these were well-payed folks at the brand-name companies! Those that took a tech job straight out of college and had never lived anywhere else seemed the worst affected. Not enough realized that they deserved more then they were getting back from the Bay Area.

Serious question, not trolling: Why do many HackerNewsen seem to feel that global warming is a bad thing? For all we know, the changes brought on by a warmer climate may be great for humanity as a whole.