funkysquid's comments

"Helping people directly can be a noble thing. Forcing other people to do it with great inefficiency? Not so much."

Just because scaling a process results in inefficiencies doesn't mean there's no need to scale it. If you feel like you personally can help every person directly, please do, disrupt taxes! But until you, we're not tearing down the system that works (however inefficiently).

"donating $1.25 million is a lot more than speech"

It's somewhat easy to argue that someone should not face professional repercussions for their support of a candidate. It's harder to argue that they should be able to donate 463x what a typical person might (assuming a generous $2.7k not using Super PACs).

That's infuriating - is there some way we can contact the app review team to complain about their "final" decision?

This really sucks - just bought a copy of his MacOS app through his website to try and help compensate. At this point I'm starting to avoid buying software through the Mac App Store unless it's not available anywhere else. Even if it's slightly easier to make a purchase initially, you risk the headache of situations like this where you can't even migrate your license.

That's what I thought as well, but watching some other videos on their site, they say the boost happens in "the last second" https://youtu.be/xYYTuZCjZcE?t=2m34s. Any sign of thrust before landing really isn't visible in that video either. So unless they've never actually fired it successfully and we just don't know what it looks like, it's possible that it's just so close to touchdown that we can't distinguish the thrust from the landing.

I'm assuming that decelerating by 13mph over < 1s is still quite a bit better than by 15mph instantly? But I really don't know.

I've gotten that exact error - good to know what was going on :P

I'm sure this is not the intended use case, but considering the trouble I've had trying to use UPS/Fedex/USPS to print shipping labels for my personal use (many of the websites suck), it'd be great to see a desktop app that used this API to find the lowest cost service, print you a label for it, and track your shipment.

True - although I feel like every other job that deals with high stress situations finds other ways to give people that training. Also you can always drop out.

This is fascinating - I wonder what sort of information they're able (and interested) to communicate to each other - food? locations? types of food? captivity? That could become an awkward conversation...

Yeah, you're pretty much stuck. Come to think of it, there's no reason you should be. Asking someone to commit to something like military service before trying the (degrading) training is total BS. If they think letting people leave in the middle would loose them too many recruits, they might actually have to start training people humanely.

I'm not sure gitmo qualifies as humanitarian aid.

I don't think they should have said anything at all in this case, beyond their condolences.

1. Autopilot didn't cause the accident, but they're sort of making it sound like it did by bringing it up

2. If people are arguing that autopilot contributed by making the driver feel like they didn't need to pay as much attention, the only way to defend against that is to blame the driver - why would you do that?

3. It's sort of invading the privacy of someone who recently died by detailing the crash, making it about Tesla. I don't believe other car companies would issue a PR release if one of their cars got in a crash, even with accident avoidance features on?

It somehow manages to feel self serving and make Tesla look bad at the same time.

"He couldn't hold down a job and regularly missed appointments."

I think this is part of the problem - right now in society, if you can't be on time and hold down a job, you'll go hungry and have no place to live. Basic income removes that harsh penalty, and lets people live regardless of whether they can make an appointment.

Are you saying that people commit crimes because they have too much time on their hands?

I'm not sure how you get from, "this is a difficult problem that won't be solved soon", to, "throwing money at this problem is pointless". It seems like the best way to solve problems is not to give up, but to keep the people who are trying to fix it well funded.

Does he just want a more dourer PR campaign? I suppose "We probably won't cure cancer, but, I guess this is better than nothing" would be more realistic.

Agreed. I'd also say if people are using them to discriminate on race, they shouldn't allow the hosts to see profile pictures of prospective renters.

Interesting idea, but it feels a bit like "how to use the stock market instead of a bank account". The author mentions fluctuations but seems to think bank fees would be more of an issue - but bank fees could be like $100 at most, where bitcoins could fluctuate all your cash by any percentage at all.

Good question - Elon tweeted this https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/728459808270000128 - sounds like they could end up with a backlog ;)

"but when we dug into the data we found that the votes for Pinboard look dramatically different from the votes for the other startups."

Examining the data, we found that there were oddly more votes cast for Pinboard than the other contestants, which smelled fishy so they were disqualified. Seriously, don't ask for people to vote for things and then ignore the results. Just don't ask them to vote in the first place.

Yeah, I feel like going and redesigning parts of the system that are usually other peoples' area would result in some interpersonal problems at the least.

I'm sure the dev ops people will be happy I converted our automation from Chef to Puppet, you're welcome!