> For one thing, we don’t have access to all the data
In the US, we do have access to all the data [1]. They're required to report every incident with an injury or any amount of property damage, and it's all available for download as CSV.
> For another, it at best shows that Waymo is safer than average.
No, it shows that Waymo is 6 to 12x safer than average.
You probably haven't noticed it before because when it's done well, it's a subtle and pleasant effect that can be used to draw your attention to particular elements on the page.
This site is intentionally doing it very poorly to make a point. Really, the takeaway should be don't do things poorly. But that's kind of obvious.
It's always awful. This site is exagerated in degree, but in kind it's merely on the scale of awful.
Computers should not waste my time. Even if eyes are 10ms faster than the awful fade, if a million people see it, that's almost three hours of human life down the drain.
And when scrolling fast, or far, it's not uncommon to have it waste a second of human time. A million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".
It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time.
The web is already slow. No need to deliberately spend effort to make it even slower.
"It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time."
And this is what people have become way, WAY too tolerant of. The deliberate theft of customers' time. While this is obviously a very minor example, there are lots and lots of others that aren't.
I’m a fast scroller and skimmer. Info scroll down and the text is not there I’ll just assume that the site is shot and close it. Ain’t nobody got 200ms to wait for a god damn fade in when there’s an infinite amount of sites out there to discover.
> million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".
This is the wrong conclusion. The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero - much different from stealing 1 day from 38 people or 1 hour from 912.
It doesn't matter whether useful economic work can be accomplished with savings of one second per person. Directly inflicting frustration one second at a time is still a bad thing.
And obviously, those seconds can add up to meaningful time wasted even on an individual basis.
> The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero
First of all, I said one million people, not 38 million people.
But second (no pun intended), this waste of human life doesn't just aggregate across people, but also for multiple offenders one any one particular victim.
A second on this website, a second on that site, a 10 second "loading" animation screen on a blog. It adds up. It adds up to all individual users actually wasting their life and productivity.
Your implication that it's fine to willfully waste a second from a million people is either not understanding what "a million people" means, or a borderline psychopathic disregard for other people.
You can also throw your trash on the ground, because really, is the city measurably worse off just because of you throwing just two candy wrappers in the park once a day? If someone accidentally drops trash, or makes a slow website because they don't have skill or time to make it faster, then that's a completely different matter.
I don't have a strong opinion either way on the effect, but I do have to say that I always find it amusing how fatalistic HN can sometimes be over the most minor cosmetic inconveniences, couching them as "wasting (large amounts of) humanity's time" and "disrespecting people" as if we're talking about something far more serious than little animations on a webpage.
I mean, you might not like it, and that's fair and understandable, but is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.
I mean, like the other commenter I would just close the page instead of enduring it.
But yes, in fact if this page succeeds then it's wasting human life on things as productive as spam phone calls. People have solved the latter by simply not answering for unknown numbers.
Not sure what you mean by "fatalistic". To the point where I'm not sure that's the word you mean. It's fatalistic as in fate. Maybe you mean morbid?
Standing in line at the DMV is also all "counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all"? But even at the DMV it's (hopefully) not done maliciously.
> cosmetic inconveniences
Sometimes things suck. That's not remotely as frustrating as knowing that someone went out of their way to make your life worse.
> is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.
If we capped all laptop CPUs to 600MHz, would it really be that big of a deal? Maybe they did it because of the acoustic preference of not needing to spin the fans as much, and therefore you are not allowed faster CPUs?
They didn't go out of their way to make your life worse. They went out of their way to design something they thought you would like, but you didn't like it.
Yes, if you make things only slightly worse it's better than if you make them a lot worse. But neither is quite as good as not deliberately making things worse.
The Walmart greeter also isn't paying for the bulk of their healthcare expenses because Walmart provides subsidized health insurance to all employees who work at least 30 hours per week. All US employers with at least 50 employees are required to do so under the ACA. If the greeter worked fewer than 30 hr/wk, they wouldn't get insurance through Walmart, but they would likely qualify for an ACA subsidy that covered close to the entire cost of a health insurance plan on the marketplace.
The statement, "The US spends ~$14,570 per person on healthcare. Japan spends ~$5,790" is about the average amount that the country as a whole is spending per person on healthcare, not what any given individual is paying. Per-capita GDP (i.e. the average economic output per person) is the most relevant comparison.
They're entertainment, yes, but really not the same. I'll look for a specific game to play, I'll look for a specific movie to watch, and I won't play a game when I want to watch a movie.
No, they're not the same, but the amount of time people have for entertainment is generally fixed. In the old days, they spent it reading books or socializing or doing a hobby like playing music or painting. Then radios were invented and people spent some time doing that. Then movies were invented and people spent some of their time going to those. With each new type of entertainment, people spent less time per-capita on the previous forms of entertainment (generally; radio was probably a bit unique because it can be done simultaneously as other activities such as driving, but in the old days it was a family activity).
Video games are doing the same thing. You can't watch a movie (easily) if you're playing a video game.
Yes, and yet by the counts, Westerners watch more televised content than ever.
If anything the substitute has been TV. Gaming is big, sure, but that doesn't appear to crowd out time reserved for watching media. I expect that the marathoner gamer who plays for hours daily is a comparatively smaller demographic.
> I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens.
This is essentially what the Supreme Court said when they upheld Indiana's Voter ID law in 2008 [1]:
> The burdens that are relevant to the issue before us are those imposed on persons who are eligible to vote but do not possess a current photo identification that complies with the requirements of SEA 483. The fact that most voters already possess a valid driver’s license, or some other form of acceptable identification, would not save the statute under our reasoning in Harper, if the State required voters to pay a tax or a fee to obtain a new photo identification. But just as other States provide free voter registration cards, the photo identification cards issued by Indiana’s BMV are also free. For most voters who need them, the inconvenience of making a trip to the BMV, gathering the required documents, and posing for a photograph surely does not qualify as a substantial burden on the right to vote, or even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.
> Both evidence in the record and facts of which we may take judicial notice, however, indicate that a somewhat heavier burden may be placed on a limited number of persons. They include elderly persons born out-of-state, who may have difficulty obtaining a birth certificate; persons who because of economic or other personal limitations may find it difficult either to secure a copy of their birth certificate or to assemble the other required documentation to obtain a state-issued identification; homeless persons; and persons with a religious objection to being photographed. If we assume, as the evidence suggests, that some members of these classes were registered voters when SEA 483 was enacted, the new identification requirement may have imposed a special burden on their right to vote.
> The severity of that burden is, of course, mitigated by the fact that, if eligible, voters without photo identification may cast provisional ballots that will ultimately be counted. To do so, however, they must travel to the circuit court clerk’s office within 10 days to execute the required affidavit. It is unlikely that such a requirement would pose a constitutional problem unless it is wholly unjustified.
Yes, but I don't think most of those IDs qualify as "proof of citizenship."
Even a RealID compliant ID is not direct proof of citizenship.
Others in the comment chain have talked about localities with very few DMV officer per capita in some districts and appointment wait times of over a month. If we are going to require such a step to be eligible to vote, we need to hold states and municipalities to a high standard of providing an adequate level of service for all citizens.
2007 was 19 years ago. If you step back another 19 years, you'll find that the major tech companies of the era had huge defense contracts: IBM, HP, Oracle, SGI, Texas Instruments, etc. Not only that, the development of many technologies we take for granted today -- like integrated circuits, the Internet, even Postgres -- were directly funded by the DoD. Much of the growth of Silicon Valley in the early days was a direct consequence of working with the military.
Most people here have no cultural relationship to that era of 38 years back. You may as well talk about the bubonic plague that ravaged San Francisco in the early 1900's and how it changed the course of the city that eventually led to where it is today.
That location information is not available to apps or ad networks without user consent. The government can access it from the carrier with a warrant, but that's not what we're discussing here.
Carriers have also sold customer location data, no search warrant required. Though we can rest assured that the FCC has slapped the carriers' wrists with the utmost seriousness.
IP doesn't handle roaming very well. If you got routed onto the internet directly from your local cell tower, then your connections would drop whenever you switched to a different tower, which is somewhat suboptimal. Cell networks handle it at a lower level and route your traffic through a central location which serves as the origin of your IP traffic. Geolocate your IP while on cell data and you'll probably see something pretty far away from where you are. My phone's IP address at the moment is about 400 miles away from the actual phone.
No, it wasn't chosen at random -- it had to be a question that any reasonable person would immediately recognize as harmless, but where the old model would inject a bunch of safety caveats and the new model would not.
I assume that is the point of having a Greenpeace USA -- to shield Greenpeace International and other Greenpeace organizations from liability. And it seems to have mostly worked.
Looking at the history ( back in the 1970s )- it appears to be in part the reverse - when Greenpeace USA was created, the original greenpeace, based in Vancouver, had a quarter of a million debt - and there was a bit of a fight over it.
In the US, we do have access to all the data [1]. They're required to report every incident with an injury or any amount of property damage, and it's all available for download as CSV.
> For another, it at best shows that Waymo is safer than average.
No, it shows that Waymo is 6 to 12x safer than average.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde...
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