A particularly ugly thing happens if the HN mods for some good or bad reason decide to ban an account: their contributions will be there forever, with no ability to append explanations to previous posts.
This will after May 25 be illegal for services offered in the EU, but I kind of think that the same courtesy should apply to non-europeans.
At a previous temporary job posting in northern Europe/Scandinavia I worked with some Japanese men and women (three individuals in total) - all fantastic people by the way, I still regard myself an active/actual friend of all of them - who all basically first went there as part of a student exchange program and then realized/thought they would be happier there than back in Japan and then made an explicit decision to stay and try to get jobs.
I discussed this topic in varying degrees with these people. The message was relatively uniform: they didn't think the Japanese work culture was healthy and what they had witnessed studying in Scandinavia encouraged them to stay there. After a while they made an explicit decision to try build their life there. They had been there for like 5-10 years already when I met them; two had families with young kids and one was still dating.
This kind of "escape" requires quite strong language skills though. And social skills.
Of course these individuals were preselected in various ways, like
1) attempting to go study abroad in a Scandinavian country (that in itself is a fairly extreme decision in Japan, I have been led to believe)
2) deciding to stay
3) getting a position in the multi-national company I was temporarily working at
So I'm definitely not saying all Japanese people feel this way. But still I feel it's relevant to note this kind of escape for Japanese people who feel they are not cut out for the traditional way of doing things.
For some reason the byte counter represents number of saved files when you do a "Save complete web page" in Chromium. It still displays like "4/53 B, 5 secs left". Weirdly sloppy.
The author of this piece really should know and understand the basic scientific concepts that are involved here. I suspect he may just be doing a dumb-it-down thing that goes a bit too far .
When i visited the Computer History Museum in MV a while ago there happened to be a live play session going on with the original hardware, with a bunch of excited people in this little room (the door had to be closed to create enough darkness to make that old screen visible).
I didn't get to play, but that was okay. Watching a bunch of (really polite) strangers huddled together, all excited about playing/watching this first graphical computer game was reward enough.
As I wrote, I don't have any solid proof for why they hired those people. I suppose the counter-case is that the FB partner program people could just have been very impressed with their negotiation counterparts? I am merely pointing out a direction for investigation here.
I was involved in one of the non-FB companies who pushed for this weirdo program.
If I were to guess the stats: I would guess FB got 99% of the traffic, even though wikipedia was the key thing of the marketing message, at least in the west.
The basic FB setup was to target key people in african and south-east asian operators and after a while of the usual kind of negotiation say: if you'll set us up with this zero-rating program in your company, we'll get you a cushy FB job + visa to the US.
It was an open joke in the business at the time. People in every part of the industry (including myself!) were scrambling to get an FB job offer. These were the kind of things we were discussing after drinks when meeting with mobile operator customers.
It got to the point where operators were restricting the people who were allowed to meet with FB.
I am not joking. I witnessed (on FB!) several people from these mobile operators who I had previously worked with later move to California for FB jobs.
Yes, I am aware that this is likely illegal under US law. No, I don't have proof.
Ok, humor me. What is the strongest plausible interpretation of:
"One that had a referrer as a thread on Hacker News kept insisting I couldn't be a real person, and wanting me to do basic math like 2+3 "before he would talk to me." It was gross."?
(I am not trolling. Disagreeing with your point of view is not the same thing as trolling.)
Basically, if I read dang correctly it is not possible to disagree, because a) she identified as being female, and b) said it was gross, c) it was mentioned in the context of abuse.
> One that had a referrer as a thread on Hacker News kept insisting I couldn't be a real person, and wanting me to do basic math like 2+3 "before he would talk to me." It was gross.
I'm sorry, but I literally laughed out loud reading that one. It was gross to have to do natural language processing plus arithmetics?
#metoo
I hate it when people force me to do arithmetics early in the morning. So gross!
Seriously though, what I do hate is when money-hungry people hijack worthwhile movements for their own monetary gain.
The manipulation in this case is that a naive user assumes there's a real person on the other end who has noticed them browsing the site and decided to take some time out of their day to initiate a conversation with them.
It's a classical sales tactics that builds on social pressure, here taken to a more dishonest level - the chat box was initiated by some code, in spite of what the text message implies.
"2018 began for me with an absolutely incredible 80th birthday celebration called Knuth80, held in the delightful city of Piteå in northern Sweden. ..."
So maybe he's just using that email-via-printouts thing as a ruse to avoid having to answer to emails from "important people" expediently? I would totally pull that move if I could.