Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | DaveMebs's comments login

They didn’t pull out in WA, they just stopped offering really cheap plans that were easy to cancel. They continued to offer higher-end LTC Insurance.


Which is a little silly as people canceling LTC insurance early is just about the closest thing to free money you’ll find in the insurance industry.


It isn’t. The costs associated with setting up the policy take a while to recover.


If the manager doesn't support a reasonable amount of vacation time, then there are almost certainly other issues. It is hard for me to fathom the intersection of "good manager" and "doesn't support vacation time" not being NULL. If someone is in this situation, they should vote with their feet - the manager clearly doesn't have their best interests at heart, and this will impact them on multiple dimensions.


You think it is highly unlikely that Facebook/Meta is selling granular user data?


Yes, it's incredibly unlikely. So unlikely that it's basically impossible.

They explicitly and unambiguously deny doing it; if that was incorrect, there would be a huge regulatory and public backlash. (Think of what happened with the Cambridge Analytica case, despite Facebook's hands being pretty clean on that). No disgruntled ex-employees blew the whistle on this but did on other issue), which suggests it probably didn't happen.

Selling ads is very profitable. Selling data directly risks that business for little gain. In addition to the backlash when that data selling were revealed, it risks somebody else using the data sold by Meta to outcompete them on ad targeting.


>They explicitly and unambiguously deny doing it; if that was incorrect, there would be a huge regulatory and public backlash.

Companies typically don't admit to the public when they're engaged in unethical practices. Purdue Pharma is a good example.


Then you say nothing on the subject, or say something that's technically true but ambiguous and easy to misunderstand.


> it risks somebody else using the data sold by Meta to outcompete them on ad targeting

Bingo. They're unlikely to be selling the data because those data are their secret sauce. They are as economically incentivized to build sociopathic models on you as they are to keep your data out of anyone else's hands.


Even economically, it seems unlikely they would. The data is their moat and it's what they can use to target people with ads. Selling it seems counterproductive.


Git was developed as an OSS clone of BitKeeper (which was originally provided freely to Linux kernel developers under the agreement that they not develop a clone).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper


> Git was developed as an OSS clone of BitKeeper

Git was not developed as a clone of BitKeeper, it has a very different design (snapshot-based content-addressed filesystem, versus the SCCS "weave"). If anything, git was a (much faster) clone of Monotone, minus the heavy cryptography focus which made Monotone so slow.


Requirements: Live streaming uses Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) technology. HLS requires an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with Safari on iOS 7.0 or later, a Mac with Safari 6.0.5 or later on OS X v10.8.5 or later, or a PC with Microsoft Edge on Windows 10. Streaming via Apple TV requires an Apple TV (2nd or 3rd generation) with software 6.2 or later or an Apple TV (4th generation).


I don't see taxes listed as a line item in the comparison, which is a huge factor. WA State does not have income tax.


80% of hops in America come from the Yakima Valley, which is in Eastern Washington. They even have a large hop festival every year. I think this presence influences the beer scene dramatically.


If you can establish self-sustaining societies on multiple planets you eliminate humanity's greatest threat - the fact that Earth is a single point of failure.


If you can establish self-sustaining societies on the bottom of the ocean, you can be resilient to almost all of humanities great threats. It's technology that could also be used elsewhere in the solar system once it works well, opens up much more space for human habitation, and is also a much easier problem to solve.


Compared to deep ocean, space is easy. The rocketry is tricky, but you don't need to build foot-thick steel walls and, if something goes wrong, you can go outside.

Unless you are talking about bottom as in 10 metres down. That won't protect you in case something goes seriously wrong.


Good point. But the argument against it is that its still on planet earth. Still within the single point of failure that the parent mentioned.


Never really bought that argument. So Hypothetically even if earth did get hit by another dinosaur killer or worse, wouldn't it still be easier to live here than on mars? at least the temperatures would be survivable and there is air and water here, much more so than Mars

Saying that the thread is about SpaceX and Mars and all I can say is "GO SPACEX!"


I think the idea is that Mars is just a stepping stone, and soon we'll be setting out for Alpha Centauri, Procyon, Tau Ceti, Vulcan, Betazed, Tattooine, and so on.

Hell, Zuckerburg, Yuri Milner, and Steven Hawking are already planning it:

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/yuri-miln...


More like a stepping stone to Saturn's moons and the asteroids. Once we get used - and capable - of living without a planet, there is little reason to bother with deep gravity wells.


> wouldn't it still be easier to live here than on mars?

Maybe. What if it's an artificial plague? What if any other number of catastrophic events cause the collapse of the civilization here?

Having multiple settlements elsewhere is insurance.

And, while Mars is one interesting place, there are other rocks we could easily settle and mine for resources. I don't think Mars should be the first we tackle (I'd go for the Moon first) but I'm perfectly fine with humans spreading all over the solar system.


The current big threats to humanity are climate change and nuclear war. They are threats we create for ourselves, by relentlessly expanding the economy and inventions of new technologies. Ironically our solution to it is to further expand our technology and economy into other planets.


Elon is addressing climate change via SolarCity and Tesla.


Indeed, new human colonies on other planets will not be immune to our existing problems.


> the fact that Earth is a single point of failure.

Ah but once Earth is no longer the single point of failure then the Sun becomes the single point of failure :)

I'm very excited about all things space and I hope SpaceX pulls it off


We humans are bound to earth by our very own evolution, finely tuned for this environment. We are children of the earth and children we will remain.


If you take the Ballard Connector to MSFT it is not that bad. 45-60 minutes depending on traffic. With the new 520 work on the Eastside, the carpool lanes are speeding things up dramatically and I expect it's closer to 45 most days (I'm in Phinney currently, and I'm usually at 45-50 minutes on the last stop).


But if the DRM solution is implemented through JS code in the browser, it is trivial to pirate. I know DRM is always broken, etc., but at the same time it is hard to take an argument at face value that discounts the security differences between these approaches.

JS is trivial for anyone moderately skilled to crack - you're sending content in the clear from the browser through the stack.

DRM solutions enabled by EME can be much more robust and difficult to crack.

Similar to other commentators, I struggle with the issue, but just saying "put it in JS" is not a very compelling argument. The current EME approach of a publically defined API that any DRM solution can plug into feels like a pretty reasonable compromise here.


>it is trivial to pirate.

As long as it isn't trivial for the casual user, I wouldn't call it much of an issue. As I said, dedicated pirates will find a way regardless, even if comes down to screen capturing. That's how people are pirating Netflix content at the moment. Of course, this does lead to some level of quality loss, since you're doing a lossy re-encode of a lossy source.

On that note, if we consider "wannabe pirates must re-encode the video to share it around" as a decent video content protection goal, then you can definitely do that with HTML5 video and some JS without resorting to any kind of EME trickery.

Anyway, at the end of the day, it is definitely true that JS content protection schemes will be inherently weaker compared to black box DRM plugin solutions enabled by EME. But why on Earth should we compromise the very nature of Open Web to enable this rather than make Big Media compromise on their platform control addiction to have their content on the Open Web? And if they're unwilling to do that, then well, they can stick to their Flash and Silverlight all they want in my opinion. EME doesn't make any promises about cross-platform compatibility anyway, so better stick with the two devils we know than switch to a system comprised of several unknown demons.


JS DRM is not DRM, full stop. The entire point is the black box. Without that you are always one greasemonkey script away from having a full-stream ripper for the casual user.

Yes, there is always the analog loophole, so ultimately all DRM is a best effort, but any JS implementation is at best 1% of current DRM implementations, it is no better than clear key encryption regardless of what obfuscation you put around it.

I really don't understand the point of the hand-wringing over EME. Before EME the only option for DRM was full-blown plugins, EME is much better for the open web than the dictatorship of Flash or Silverlight. As far as I can tell, technical activists are hoping to somehow put pressure on big content by refusing EME, but having spent the last 8 years building a streaming company, I can tell the EFF and everyone else that their advocacy has exactly zero weight with any content rightsholders. Big content will never capitulate to the abstract desires of the free software crowd because they hold the nuts. You either play ball with their demands or you don't get the content. Yes piracy will never go away, but it's illegal, so they will just continue playing whackamole for anything that approaches a good UX and pushing their DRM agenda on the rest of the industry.

Opposing EME is just a pointless skirmish over an implementation detail which overall is a huge net win for open web standards. Being absolutist about it just means everyone is going to have some shitty plugin, and they will have some shitty plugin because people want the studio content.

And as stupid and pointless as DRM is in the grand scheme of things, there is no principle I can think of that forbid people from building it. The Right Thing™ is that studios should be free to build DRM, and people should be free to hack it, there shouldn't be legal protections on either side. But for the free software community to refuse to make any integration points with DRM is just cutting off ones nose to spite ones face.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: