htlion · HackerTrans

3 năm trướcdiscuss

You must be having noisy nights at home to enjoy 2 hours door to door travel by plane. The state of the train network is terrible so it should be used as a bad example. Trains are longer but for most people they are more comfortable physically and mentally : more space for your legs, your luggage and less hassle going to the station and passing controls. Night trains are not perfect, but with earplugs they can be pleasant.

htlion

3 năm trướcdiscuss

Singapore government definitely made smart moves and had a strong vision. But you can't omit that its geographical position gave it a tremendous advantage with regards to trade. It will be very hard to replicate elsewhere, others will have to find similar stable streams of income. On top of that, Singapore has access to a very large low-paid workforce in the neighboring countries, which eases offloading necessary but low-value activities.

htlion

4 năm trướcdiscuss

> I'll be surprised the day there's a positive article about crypto on HN.

I am annoyed by such arguments because crypto has now existed for quite a long time, and the positives are very limited if existent at the moment. Would you mind sharing positive events occurring thanks to crypto?

htlion

4 năm trướcdiscuss

I would even go further and say that the AI talking to an AI phenomenon will lead to AIs replacing APIs as we know them currently. We had to develop APIs to define how products can talk together. But in the near future, we may just need to fine-tune the latest AI model to handle that. We could even imagine training the model to speak HTTP or OpenREST.

Regarding society, I am worried about people consuming content generated by an AI just for them. We have seen how recommended content polarises political views, I can only see it becoming worse. Imagine Russian propaganda agencies powered by AI-generated content, they will just have to type: "A young black man mugging an old white lady" or whatever would be the most triggering.

> The few cases where humans interact will, like dialing 911, only be done on an emergency basis, .

To be honest, seeing the current trend of public services funding, I would rather put this service at the very top of the list of services that will be automated.

htlion

4 năm trướcdiscuss

AI will become the first publisher of contents on any platform that exists. Will it be texts, images, videos or any other interactions. No banning mechanisms will really help because any user will be able to copy-paste generated content. On top of that, the content will be generated specifically for you based on "what you like". I expect a backlash effect where people will feel like becoming cattle which is fed AI-generated content to which you can't relate. It will be even worse in the professional life where any admin related interaction will be handled by an AI, unless you are a VIP member for this particular situation. This will strengthen the split between non-VIP and VIP customers. As a consequence, I expect people to come back to localilty, be it associations, sports clubs or neighborhood related, because that will be the only place where they will be able to experience humanity.

htlion

4 năm trướcdiscuss

We need to compare the imported water from food and the exported water from food. Also, considering NM is a bit tricky. With 7 inhabitants /km2, NM is a very rural state, so it is expected that it would export its food. I would be very interested in the water balance for the US, knowing that we import a lot of soy for cattle.

htlion

4 năm trướcdiscuss

Residential is only 7% if you put the burden on the producer (agriculture) and not the consumer (people). Every time that such numbers are shared, most people quickly jumps to "farmers should pay more attention / switch cultures". Very rarely someone will talk about the impacts: a change of diet for consumers, most likely with less meat (though depends on the area). It is easy to assume that the water you consume only comes from the tap, but 1kg of beef meat costs 15,000 litres of water to produce [1]. Moreover, at a larger scale: "One third of this volume is for the beef cattle sector; another 19% for the dairy cattle sector." [1]. So instead of trying to find the scapegoat that supposedly consumes most of our water, we should all remember that we, meat eaters, are one of the main culprits here !

[1] https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...

htlion

4 năm trướcdiscuss

I wholefully agree, the problem with this kind of repos is that Python already makes most patterns trivial. So you either create a trivial example that does not bring value or you introduce unnecessary abstractions for the sake of them. I am always looking into these repos though because I am still interested in learning new Python tricks. One of the repos that I found interesting recently is https://github.com/dry-python/returns

htlion

4 năm trướcdiscuss

I completely agree, seeing bad behavior happening frequently on the streets, I just realized that governments just chose to ignore those and not enforce law. There are some extreme, like SF of course. But I feel like this is a tendency among many places around Europe. And this saddens me, when did society decide that laws are not to be applied?

htlion

4 năm trướcdiscuss

What about trading and wash sales? Would not that make the average very high? I have no numbers so I can't say more, but 140 transactions per month per user doesn't sound that high considering the above.

htlion

4 năm trướcdiscuss

I agree that the quality of life is currently better than it has even been. Though the future is looming because of climate change. Last year, a heat dome destroyed a tow in Canada, yet we are just at the beginning of the consequences. This year, we are seeing intense droughts in India as well as on the west coast. Scientists predicted that it would happen and it does, but this is just the start. We should be all on-board to prevent it and lower our fossil fuel consumption quickly to limit consequences. If you live in a rich country, just talk about energy sobriety around you and see how people react... > Today’s IPCC Working Group 1 Report is a code red for humanity. Sadly, even after the IPCC alarms, I have yet to see governments properly act. Young people know that, and they understand that their quality of life could be at its maximum at the moment, before decreasing due to climate change.

[0] https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/secretary-generals-statemen...

htlion

4 năm trướcdiscuss

As Bourdieu presents it, there are the economic, social and cultural capitals from your parents. I believe more and more that the social and cultural capitals can vary wildly even among seemingly privileged families. We can only gauge the economic capital from the outside after all. I saw it firsthand where rich parents educated their children way too softly, which made their children unable to cope with challenges of real life. Maybe Elon got the luck to be born in a family with very good capitals on all axes. It does not mean that he has no talent, just that his initialization may have been particularly good.

htlion

4 năm trướcdiscuss

> if people go to university and actually study and work hard to get a degree, it should be normal they don’t have to go through this bullshit.

There are many flaws in this argument: - what about people without degrees but skills, do they deserve such a job? - Is university free? If not, do poor people deserve such a job?

Finally, we are not talking about the average SE job. We are talking about the top 10% of the jobs where competition is fierce. People at this level, as in any domain, are willing to compete fiercely. Should the marathon been shortened to 10k so that people who can't train can compete?

htlion

4 năm trướcdiscuss

I have been through it recently, you are right about the time investment. Though the resources are massively available and they are good quality (to my surprise). Of course you need the motivation, but which kind of interviews does not mandate any motivation? Simply put the non-selective one where companies just need to fill a position with whoever can do the job. People's conditions to prepare will massively differ from one to another, but we can't blame Tech for that. With Tech you will know one thing: you will be assessed based on your interview performance. As always in such debates, we are creating straw-man like "the mother in Philly". How many of such moms were in high-paying jobs before? Are there more or less in tech than other areas? Has the situation improved or not? To the best of my knowledge, I can just say that standardised interviews try to address one aspect of it. It is up to society to do the rest.

> Who is more likely to enjoy abstract puzzles/quizzes?

Assuming someone doesn't, is programming a good fit? (genuinely asking)

htlion

4 năm trướcdiscuss

I would add the fact that the company is based in Antigua. So the overall picture is a very profitable company, in a domain which, as of now, mostly enables fraud at an insane energy cost, based in a tax haven. But somehow, this is for the greater good. With the challenges ahead, we, all of us, will have to decrease our consumption of most if not all resources. This can not be achieved by just pouring money from the penthouse of a skyscraper of a capital city.

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