Love anything that can accomplish the same goal with less material. I originally thought he was going to store the mechanical energy from turning it on and off, similar to those cranked flashlight. Rf makes way more sense!
Of course no one is happy about cuts to vital services like the library. But people are also unhappy with a 3% minimum city income tax and a $5 billion budget shortfall.
NYC has a ton of people at the top of their fields in a really dense setting. I wonder what city services cause such a big shortfall! On paper it should be easier to finance NYC than any other big city, so I wonder where the money goes.
Or an I incorrect and the city is poorer than I think? Perhaps Long Island sucks more incomes away from the city than I thought?
Everything in NYC is expensive. We spend almost $40,000 per year on each public school student. Construction is hugely expensive. The Department of Corrections has 1.4 corrections officers for every person incarcerated.
Simple solution, imprison less people. NYC prisons are notorious for overcrowding for decades now [1] [2].
It's shocking for me as a German that this seems to have been a consistent fact of life that's just accepted by everyone and nothing is being done - no new prisons are built to offer more space for prisoners, and nothing is being done to reduce the amount of people heading towards prison.
NYC average daily jail population has been decreasing almost continuously for the last 30 years. Conditions at Riker's Island are much more to do with the problems between the civilian oversight function and the COs unions than they are to do with an actual excess of inmates with respect to cells etc.
Surely there are other cuts with less impact. I suspect many more users would rather they redirect the ample Private Foundation funds for "NYPL LIVE" stage events (December: "Lesbian Poetic Traditions") to staying open on Sundays.
But Library management wants to host cool friends AND generate angry voters.
I see this pattern often in government budget showdowns; the tiniest cuts produce outsized service impacts.
Firstly; that would be a Federal problem, not something that the City can do anything about. Secondly; even if they were illegal immigrants (which is undetermined at this point; most of them claim asylum and have had no determination made for their case) they would still have had the right to shelter under City law.
I'm saying that the arrival of a large number of people, who are legally unable to work, and who have no support system from families, and whom the City is legally obliged to house is a problem.
We lost net 10 of them costing hundreds of millions of dollars already.
Short term rentals were basically banned outright.
Not very many vacant real estate holdings, and how are you going to prove that they were sufficiently vacant -- going to roust them all at night?
City needs to actually get its act together to become more efficient.
Good thing that libraries also provide digital information services, including digital book rentals and digital records and academic publication searches.
As well as facilities to access those services if you do not have an adequate computer, internet connection, or subscription access to these resources at home.
That's me! I'm helping our partners at OpenCV. They really need our support, I hope you can also help with a minimum donation, they are planning really cool things for OpenCV 5, and you can help them reach that goal.
Software Engineer at Boldvoice here, also learning Mandarin. I've been told my Chinese accent is awful due in large part to misuse of tones and overemphasizing articles like 了. We'd love to build something for all languages but are focusing on just users learning english right now.
Youglish is a great tool and we often hear users reference using it. It's nice to have so many examples available for a given piece of text.
What I think makes BoldVoice significantly better is the ability to get feedback on your specific utterances and have the app highlight what elements of a word might make it harder for a native English speaker to understand you. If you go the route of only using youtube/references, you're left in this gradient descent process where you're just guessing mouth movements until you get something that sounds like the reference.
AWS is the backbone of the internet, amazon warehouses are some of the most efficient in the world, lowering costs for everyone. People subscribe to prime in droves because of the value they get from it. Even if you zoom in to smaller assets, amazon has huge impact. Twitch brings a lot of people joy, same with kindle and even Alexa a few years ago.
"Selling stuff using the internet" probably makes you feel smart/superior but it infantilizes the company's contributions to the rest of us.
But Bezos didn't invent any of that stuff. As the other commenter said, he executed best on 'put a store on the internet' and made a bunch of money doing that. He then used that money to either acquire other businesses, like Twitch, or hire other people to invent more things, like AWS. That's the whole point of what OP's comment. Bezos took something completely reasonable for a single person to do, 'put a store on the internet' better than anyone else in the mid-90s, and used that as an entry point to reaping benefits from the ideas and the labor of hundreds of thousands of other people over decades.
Give me his parents initial investment and put me back in the days he started Amazon and I would.
Wait, I take it back. I wouldn't be able to exploit people as much as he did because I have a conscience. But I'd still be wealthy enough to live a comfortable life.
Stop glorifying luck as hard work. He was lucky. Wealthy parents and lived in a time where shopping online was not big yet.
Plenty of people willing to invest in you right now if you can manage to come up with an idea and are willing to work at it as Jeff Bezos did.
Offering people jobs which they can freely accept, reject or negociate is not exploitation.
You can glorify luck as much as you want, but hard work is the best way to maximise your "luck surface area". I've known plenty of people with countless wasted opportunities because they weren't willing to do the (hard) work.
Even inside the US, that's a very small niche that's present mostly in a few places like in SV, Seattle and NY (I'm sure there are a few more, but you get my point).
The startup world is more about connections than hard work or competence. How many ridiculous startups get money because they have connections with VCs? How many very good ideas never get funding because they aren't in that circle? How many startup founders are 2, 3, 4 startups in and keep failing up? And those who can't bring those ideas to life because they work 2 jobs to sustain their families?
There's more than an order of magnitude of hard working people that will never even get a chance of becoming billionaires compared to the lucky few that were in the right place, at the right time, with access to resources and sometimes were even hard workers (this one is not required, despite the myth).
Meanwhile I've met many incompetent people that hardly work and are still successful business owners and millionaires because... they were already rich.
It's how the world works today. Maybe it'll always be like this, but I like to think we can change it.
> Offering people jobs which they can freely accept, reject or negociate is not exploitation.
Yes, it is if you're the only shop in town. If you can't leave the poverty treadmill because you can barely afford rent after working these ridiculously low salaries. I could go on.
I find it appalling how so many assume that people working in the Amazon warehouses are full of opportunities everywhere and they choose to work there, so they can't complain. I know we're mostly software engineers that are well paid but we could make an effort and put ourselves in their shoes for a second, couldn't we?
No, it's not black and white like your comment is claiming it is, and it never will be.
There's a big difference between choosing to pay the lowest amount possible without having people literally starve to death and a decent living wage. There's still a ton of exploitation that turns into profit for the few at the top, but they could at the very least treat people like... people.
If Bezos (or any other billionaire) chose to reduce their profits a few percent points, they'd already be able to provide a much better life for all of their employees. In my book, even putting the profit debate aside (exploitation of labor), that's exploitation in the moral sense too.
I live in a small town in Eastern Europe and I get contacted weekly by individual investors, firms and funds. In my turn, I mentor entrepreneurs and invest (angel, seed or later rounds) in ideas that could make a difference locally.
Throw away your scarcity mindset. It's outdated.
> the only shop in town
Feel free to open your own "shop in town" to offer employees another choice. Till then, 1 is much, much better than 0.
Plenty of shops in my town that sell stuff I can find cheaper on Amazon. Also plenty of employers too (which is the kind of "shop" I was talking about) that compete with Amazon on the employment market.
Pretending that people would be better with less employers in town and laughing at the suggestion that anybody can come in and steal away employees from Amazon if they are unhappy there - is the naive take.
You do realize you're on hackernews, a platform built by YCombinator right? You can apply with your startup just like anyone else and, if you're good enough, they'll invest half a million dollars.
Yeah, you're right, he was massively lucky too.
But even with that, does he deserve this much wealth for this?
Would he deserve this much money if executing that idea was incredibly hard?
Does someone deserve to make a small fortune every year pushing keys without breaking a sweat, while someone that scrubs his toilet is living check-to-check?
Most of the time you dont just expose your internal api routes to the world. You need to write curated public facing routes that dont include certain schema or records. Takes time to write and maintain that different set of endpoints
Not really. Your HTML is, quite literally, a degenerate form of an API. The simplest way to offer a content API is to offer an alternative endpoint that serves the same stuff as your normal one, except without all the bullshit (er, beautifully design, interactive frontend).
Any issue with Reddit offering a API only to not maintain it, or uphold any sort of SLA uptime, or not worry about releasing breaking changes every week?
Having a public facing API is not trivial or cost free.
If they were to offer an API that's just HTML of the website (old.reddit.com specifically, not the new one) but without the cruft that makes for 90% of the markup of a human-facing page, and which exists only to hang styles and scripts off... why wouldn't they maintain it? It's literally the same as what the browser gets, but without the bullshit.
> or uphold any sort of SLA uptime
Do they uphold any sort of SLA uptime for the webpage itself?
The simplest API would be just the meat of the website, so it couldn't possibly be less reliable than the site itself.
> not worry about releasing breaking changes every week?
Reddit is a stable site. Like most social media platforms, they don't release breaking changes often (they do screw with DOM element ids and CSS classes all the time, but that is to make life harder for ad blockers, which is another topic). Sure, some things may move around, be added or removed - but this is webshit we're talking about. You can't truly rely on any API to have a stable, or well-defined structure[0] - so people are already used to treating schemas as open-ended[1] and keeping up with their changes.
> Having a public facing API is not trivial or cost free.
Sure. But I'm trying to establish a lower bound here, and it's clear that this is much lower costs and effort than maintaining the human-facing website itself. And I mean, remember the whole "semantic HTML" and "microformats" trends of yore? Or how HTML5 came to be, with all those tags like <em> and <section> and <article>? The whole point of that was to make HTML work as both rendering markup and machine-readable API.
Consider also that the alternative isn't no public API - it's scraping. So if your public API is somehow more expensive to serve or maintain than either the website itself, or a decluttered version of it, then you're doing something wrong.
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[0] - Don't get me started on the disaster that is Swagger/OpenAPI.
[1] - Something Clojure coding philosophy makes explicit: you pass around maps and arrays, you read and write the keys you know about, and stuff you don't recognize you ignore and pass without changing.
Don't mind the other commentor, spirited discussion is always welcome! I was thinking about this and even hacker news is a good example of how an html view can differ from data model. Hacker news doesn't show you the vote count of every comment despite having that data available. They chose to not even render it into the template so no scraper will ever have access to that information.
Look, if you have a webpage, you're already providing it. If your webpage is of any use to anybody, someone is likely consuming it by scrapping. So if your dedicated API is harder and/or more expensive to provide and maintain than the degenerate API of your webpage's HTML, you're doing something wrong.
I'm not trying to win an argument. I'm trying to point to an obvious reference point for cost/effort behind an API that's handling the same data and interactions the webpage does.
These are already written and fully functional, and Reddit has essentially been a non-moving target in terms of features since ~2016, when they added first-party image hosting.
Reddit actually has added a couple of features since then (e.g. polls), but they just didn't update the API to deal with those, so the API still remained completely stable.
Hey, awesome that you use Growthbook. They seem to be doing an amazing job on the data and analytics space tied to A/B testing and feature flagging.
Our perspective differs from Growthbook's in that we don't want to replace your analytics source of truth in any way. Product analytics has come a long way in the last few years with a lot of truly amazing players like Mixpanel, Amplitude, Looker or almost countless others.
Our core focus is developers and the developer experience.
What that means is that we're trying to avoid adding features and functionalities that would be directly competitive to analytics providers, and instead be better at integrating with those tools, so you can manage your flags in DevCycle and do your flag and experiment analysis directly in your team's source of truth.
At the moment what this means for our product roadmap is that we're working on things like a feature rich CLI, Typescript enhancements, automatic code cleanup, etc and we're hoping to continue to head down the road of developer experience as opposed to building non-developer tooling.
