The behavior and displays in these ideological flamewars have gotten so much worse over the last year, and the pace of that change seems to be accelerating.
There seems to be a demographic shift happening on HN, away from rational and genuinely interested technologists and business people, and toward college kids who haven't done anything and don't know anything, trying to sound smart and then throwing a temper tantrum whenever anything political comes up.
How a community in aggregate behaves when certain topics are brought up is more than just an isolated event, it's a litmus test for what kind of community it is and the kind of people it is attracting. I think I'm done participating entirely.
I'm referring to the kind of vilification that would cause brand damage for Tesla, so consumer-facing vilification.
Consumer-facing vilification in US media isn't really about what the person has done or what kind of person they are, it's more about what form of caricature can be depicted of them based on racial, gendered, and political stereotypes.
Denholm doesn't fit into a category of race, gender, and political affiliation that easily lends itself to a villainous caricature, and to the contrary does fit into such a category that would make it broadly unacceptable to consumers for a media company to create a villainous caricature of her. In other words, if a media company attempted to do so, it would damage the media company's consumer brand instead of Tesla's. This creates a disincentive protecting Tesla from attacks from media companies (all of which have a great financial interest in oil and legacy automakers, and very little financial interest in Tesla).
This is an increasingly common consideration for organizations responding to or seeking to preempt PR issues, especially for publicly traded companies with consumer brands, and other frequent targets of the media companies (such as police departments, private health insurance companies, and educational institutions).
I always thought distributed systems weren’t necessarily decentralized systems. Is my understanding of the terminology wrong?
For example a system that uses distributed algorithms for performance improvements, or a system that is distributed by design and necessity to retain the benefits of redundancy, could be considered both centralized and distributed.
Another musical pet peeve of mine is when, usually during the intro, a song doubles the number of bars for a sequence, basically repeating itself for no good reason.
My ear is ready for the song to kick in, but at that moment it just repeats the previous 8 bars. Every time I think “really, we need to do this 8 more times? Can’t we just get on with it?”
It’s like the musical equivalent of waiting in line.
Your comment post-edit is pretty much the reason I read HN.
This model of geopolitics as an ungoverned society of nations is something I’ve never considered.
Then, the natural tendency of people within governed societies to analyze geopolitics as if governed social dynamics applied to it could clearly lead to some disastrous conclusions.
It also illuminates the tension between people who greatly value our military, and people who are just frustrated with it and casually declare from their bedrooms and TV studios that we should cut spending in half because it’s all such a waste. As if nations are nice people, and as if a weapon provides no value unless it is used.
Both groups mostly want the same things: a safe place to live, explore, work, have friends and family, and enjoy their lives. They just have a different model for how they understand geopolitics and the state that it’s in.
Lately I’ve noticed an increase in politically-motivated downvotes on HN. I think that’s really unfortunate. This was probably comment of the year for me.
Looks interesting. Can you go into some detail on what your workflow is like? Is your dev environment pure Linux then, able to install everything in aptitude, etc?
I'm not aware of any paid news sources that fit my needs, maybe you can recommend some.
I agree that headlines are bad, which is why I discount them almost entirely, as I mentioned in my original comment.
I'm not sure why you don't think it makes sense for me to trust my own independent research over everyday news sources. I think it makes a lot of sense.
I never said anything about comments. HN is the only place I read them, and I'm not treating them like they're a news source. It's just an online conversation happening among people in tech.
I haven't expressed an opinion about this Guardian article, or the root commenter's assessment of it. But if the numbers are higher in the private sector, that would suggest top UK universities have a bullying rate below that of the general population and comparable populations, which would suggest that those institutions do not have a bullying problem.
It looks like the root commenter is saying that the Guardian article is suggesting the opposite, and based on those statistics, the Guardian article is wrong. The root commenter is additionally claiming that this is consistent with a pattern they've noticed of The Guardian writing skewed articles to fit a narrative of institutional injustices.
As an experiment, I read the body of this article and did a bit of research, and I would agree with the root commenter. Within the opening paragraph, I'm already losing confidence in the article:
> "Hundreds of academics have been accused of bullying students and colleagues in the past five years, prompting concerns that a culture of harassment and intimidation is thriving in Britain’s leading universities."
Citing population sentiment is a common form of misdirection in journalism. "People are concerned that ...", "we're receiving emails that say ...", "people on twitter are ...", these are all just misdirection. There are billions of people in the world, there are people concerned about everything. Twitter has over 300 million active users, every point of view on every topic is being tweeted by everyone all the time.
Citations of unquantified population sentiment are factual in all cases and for all arguments and all narratives. Journalists do this to give support and credibility to their narrative (which is often skewed), and to make it appear that they aren't the drivers of that narrative (when they often are).
As an example, Wolf Blitzer can point to a scrolling list of tweets that are all unified in any point of view on any subject at any time, based purely on Twitter's broad demographic and volume of tweets. It doesn't actually mean anything at all, other than that Twitter still exists and people still communicate.
Wolf Blitzer pointing at that list will increase the prevalence of tweets reflecting that unified point of view. This Guardian article stating that their FOIA findings are "prompting concerns" is in itself what will prompt those concerns. "People are concerned" actually means "we are telling you to be concerned." It's all just misdirection and deception, there's no honest reason for a journalist to cite sentiment in this way.
A more honest writing of that opening paragraph would be something like: "Academics in UK universities have been the subject of complaints at a very low rate. I am trying to prompt concerns that a culture of harassment and intimidation is thriving in Britain’s leading universities."
Reading through the rest of the article, the bias in this case is quite blatant:
* 135 UK universities became: "top UK universities"
* A filed complaint became: conclusive proof of bullying
* 294 complaints at 135 universities over 5 years became: hundreds of presumably recent complaints at "top universities"
* Less than 1 complaint against an academic every 2 years per university became: "a culture of harassment and intimidation in Britain’s leading universities"
To me it seems that The Guardian told their journalists to leverage FOIA requests for news stories. So their journalists try to think of a FOIA request that might get dirt for a good story, then send in that FOIA request, and then when the FOIA is fulfilled they just write whatever story they were hoping to write when they originally thought up the FOIA request.
After reading the article, the headline itself actually appears to be an outright lie. It says "hundreds of complaints at top universities", but they only found 294 complaints in total from all UK universities. Unless every university in the UK is a "top UK university", the headline is a lie.
The Guardian also leads the article with a stock photo of people wearing academic regalia with their heads down and backs to the camera, which paints an image of guilty and shamed academics.
Relating this all back to how people consume news:
* Reading only the headline, and believing it, would've made me very misinformed
* Reading both the headline and the article, and believing them both, would've made me the most misinformed
* Reading both the headline and the article, believing none of it, and doing independent research to disconfirm all of it made me slightly more informed on this subject (if you can even call it that) than the average person, and took 20 minutes of my time
* The approach I detailed in my original comment, which would've been to read only the headline, recognize that in this case it bears no consequence for The Guardian whether any aspect of the headline is true or not, and therefore ignoring it completely, would've had a neutral effect on how informed I am, but would've only taken 1 second of my time
In this case I regret reading the article at all, and I think I would've been better off just reading the headline, recognizing that it can't be trusted, and ignoring it like I normally would.
There is still utility in headlines though, which is why I still read them. If the story is, for example, that someone won an election, or that a proposition passed, or that someone died, or that a hurricane is coming, or that a company was acquired, etc., then that will be stated in headlines and you can confirm almost immediately that it's factual.
The large majority of important news events are in that category.
From there, if the subject is important enough to me, I'll do independent research. That research usually won't involve reading news articles, because I've found them to be extremely inaccurate in almost all cases.
So "advocacy journalism" is basically a form of journalism wherein all the statements are technically factual, but the journalists intentionally and transparently ignore all other ethics and standards of journalism.
I understand why this will outcompete real journalism, but I don't see how it serves anyone.
It also saddens me that this practice has attained a degree of general acceptance that it's referred to as a "genre of journalism." I would refer to it as a more insidious and enduring form of propaganda.
> At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem.
I have a similar feeling about all articles from all sources (that I’m aware of) in journalism.
Every time an article interests me enough to dig deeper into the subject, I find the original article was inaccurate and biased, and frequently misrepresents small but significant details to fit a narrative in a way that can’t have been a mistake.
The way I consume news these days isn’t the greatest, but it’s the best I can do: I only read headlines. If a claim in the headline would cause the source major legal issues if untrue, I mostly trust that the event occurred, but not necessarily how they say it did.
I ignore all other claims in headlines, and I don’t read the body of the article, because it’s usually just a thinly-veiled opinion piece by a non-expert, or worse, the dramatic prose of a journalist who seems to think their writing is the story.
If there’s an event in a headline that seems to have actually happened, and it’s relevant to my interests, I research it independently.
Everyone I've talked to in the industry views people with a Masters much less favorably than people with a Bachelors or PhD.
And from experience I can say there is a shockingly high number of people with Masters in Comp Sci churning through the hiring pool who can't write a single line of code or even valid HTML.
I don't know why this is, but I think a Masters is getting a negative reputation to the point that you might consider not listing it on your resume at all in certain cases.
Have you considered the possibility that a degree from a top university could influence an interviewer's report of the candidate's technical proficiency?
During one interview I had at Google, I stumbled when performing addition on base 64 numbers.
Since I don't have a degree, it seems likely that interviewer will write that I have a conceptual deficiency with numeric bases and mathematics.
If I had a degree from CMU and gave an identical performance, they might instead write that I was rusty with numeric bases.
There's also the fact that most of the interviewers have a degree, many from a top 10 university. Hiring people that match their own profile validates their own background which benefits their career, so a self-interested and rational interviewer should rightly tend to give more positive ratings to people with degrees, ideally from institutions similar to theirs.
I think this is relevant at every stage of the interview process. If you sound nervous and don't have a degree, they might think you have a mental disorder, whereas if you have a degree from CMU they might just think that you don't want to disappoint your family.
I feel disadvantaged at every stage of the interview process for not having a degree. I'm sure there's no moment where someone is consciously docking me points or arguing against me with specific reference to the lack of degree. But I do think it's heavily influencing how academic types perceive me, and what they write about me in their report.
The computer security industry for SMBs is like 95% theater and 5% actual practice.
Conducting that test produced something tangible for whoever made the purchasing decision: It clearly illustrated a need for the services rendered, did it in a way that offered job security to management by giving them license to assert the position over their subordinates, and established a metric by which to evaluate the security company's performance which can be easily, repeatably, and predictably improved over time.
It also checked a lot of boxes that will be useful in court if they ever need to prove that they weren't negligent on privacy and security, which is a form of insurance that has real measurable value when it comes to legal claims.
> I really hate this idea of the grand visionary. ... I listened to a bit of his Joe Regan interview and when Regan asked him how he has the time to do all of the things he does, there are smoke jokes about him being an alien, but not once did he say, "Well I have an amazing team of engineers" and credit all the thousands of people in his organizations that actually do the work.
I think Elon's active perpetuation of the myth is kind of a red herring.
Promoting Elon Musk as a grand visionary is how Tesla will maximize its brand value, and contribute to a self-sustaining lore around their founder 50 years from now. It's the same story for Apple and Steve Jobs, and thousands of other companies (tech and otherwise).
People aren't capable of idolizing 200 mechanical engineers. They are very capable of idolizing a single visionary. A story with 200 protagonists would be far less compelling, which is why most stories only have 1. If you want to be as competitive as possible, and you have a leader capable of exploiting that aspect of human nature, then that's what your company should do.
Permitting and perpetuating this kind of myth-making is practically part of Elon's fiduciary duty to his shareholders at this point. You can't fault him for doing it, because he has to.
I think what's really at issue is the aspect of human nature that it's exploiting.
I think it's closely tied to hierarchy and pecking order instincts observed in all mammals. We always need to be identifying and reacting to an alpha, and using that to inform our choices and behaviors so we can stay competitive on a biological level. The same instinct might also be what causes people to immediately perceive this as an issue of Elon's individual behavior, and makes them feel so strongly about it.
> Ya you can imagine any scenario you want. I can imagine a scenario where a homeless person's life is better than if he had a home. It's not hard to imagine. But if you had a choice, which would you choose?
Homelessness is a financial hardship that actually will ruin your quality of life, which stands in stark contrast to being a homeowner. Whereas making 150k/yr in NYC instead of 2m/yr in SF just means you have plenty of space on hardwood, instead of too much space on marble. The relationship between wealth and quality of life is logarithmic.
That's not the question being asked. Obviously being an early employee at Instagram is better than having an above-average engineering job in NYC, and more money is better than less money.
The question is, do all of the events that unfold throughout the rest of his life after he moves to NYC sum to a better life than the events that would have unfolded if he had taken that job and stayed in SF?
It can't be known, we can only speculate on the probabilities.
If we know for certain that Instagram will be the success that it is, that means NYC and SF present two radically different sets of human relationships and life experiences spanning decades, but in NYC he will make a lot of money and in SF he will make an excessive amount of money.
When I consider the infinite variation and possibility contained within those unforeseeable human relationships and life experiences, and think about the impact those factors have on a person's quality of life, I don't think there's even a comparison to be made between that and the difference between making lots of money and making tons of money. The relationships and life experiences will be the dominating factors in these outcomes. Since they're both unknowable, the relative probabilities of either NYC or SF resulting in a better life lie somewhere close to 50:50, even if we know he would have been successful at Instagram in SF.
I actually do think it was an important choice, just not because of Instagram. He was tired of SF and the contemporary startup scene, and Instagram's success was still very unlikely at that point. Staying would have been a bad decision.
It’s not at all difficult to imagine a scenario where his life is better after turning down Instagram. I wouldn’t even say it’s unlikely.
Just name one important relationship he formed in NYC. Done. (Or any of the other infinite ways events could have unfolded more favorably in NYC than in a hypothetical SF)
An engineer in America is wealthy, and has lots of opportunity to see and experience new and interesting things. The idea that his life is almost assuredly worse just because he forwent one unlikely opportunity to become wealthy 50x over instead of just 5x over is silly.
Of all the choices he’s made and will make, I doubt that was a very important one.
> I'm sure I was projecting and it was just trying to avoid being eaten, but it seemed way more intelligent than other insects.
Really interesting, but I agree it's most likely just a projection.
Possibly due to the fact that mantises are the only insect (that I can think of at least) that indicates focus by turning its head toward something?
The power of human emotional projection is extremely strong. I had the misfortune of seeing domesticated dogs in great distress (to put it mildly) a few times when I was younger, and one thing I always remember is that while experiencing the distress, the dogs would still make that familiar panting facial expression that most people innately perceive as a dog "smiling" or expressing happiness/joy.
As a result I have a very different experience from most people when I observe the behavior of dogs. I haven't seen any behavior in dogs yet that are any indication to me that they're capable of experiencing happiness/joy.
I'm somewhat convinced that people's perception of the emotional spectrum of dogs in particular is almost entirely an optimistic human construct. Their behavior patterns and how they appear to experience things actually seems extremely narrow to me, roughly the same as most other animals. I think the one exception to that is that dogs are unique in their tendency to adapt those behaviors in a domestic environment as though dogs and humans were members of the same species.
> Adult females are known to eat their mating partners after sex.
Just thought they'd throw that one in before signing off! But I do suppose a writer would be remiss not to remind you of that fact given the opportunity.
And a fascinating comment (which I haven't confirmed yet) from a reader below the article:
> Sigh, females HAVE to eat the head of the male to remove the inhibition stopping him from climaxing.
>
> It doesn't happen AFTER sex, it is required for the sex to be successful in terms of conception.
I never knew that. This behavior has only ever been explained to me as some kind of vindictive or inexplicable act by the female mantis.
I wonder how the female mantis knows that this is a way to disinhibit the male's climax?? Nature can be so strange.
There seems to be a demographic shift happening on HN, away from rational and genuinely interested technologists and business people, and toward college kids who haven't done anything and don't know anything, trying to sound smart and then throwing a temper tantrum whenever anything political comes up.
How a community in aggregate behaves when certain topics are brought up is more than just an isolated event, it's a litmus test for what kind of community it is and the kind of people it is attracting. I think I'm done participating entirely.