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alex_smarton Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

If you can't see a problem in making a broad stroke judgment on the culture of a billion people on the basis of a single documentary, I am not sure that I can have a conversation with you. Have a good day.

alex_smarton Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

Good luck trying to control how people use language. I was just saying that it was already a common enough usage that you should be aware of it, even if you disagree with that usage.

alex_smarton Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

Did you read my justification for saying that it is also an ethnic identity. It was literally the next sentence.

alex_smarton Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

>They don't need to customize their headlines to modify the reaction of the people you are referencing

Why not? Doesn't media regularly customize their headlines to avoid stating factually true things that would propagate negative stereotypes against minorities and other protected groups?

I think most responsible media organizations do avoid putting headlines like "Muslim man stabs three in church in Nice". Even if they do mention the religion, it is usually called "Islamic terrorism", and they have also invested quite some significant effort into emphasizing that most of regular Islamic people do not in fact have anything to do with Islamic terrorism.

As far as I can tell, media companies certainly seem to be aware of the effect their headlines can have on propagating negative stereotypes and good editorial judgement usually involves an attempt to avoid doing that as much as possible.

alex_smarton Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

This is a comment from this thread itself:

"I think it's covered in the Dark Basin episode of Darknet Diaries, but India apparently has a reputation for especially aggressive private investigators, who were historically used to dig up dirt on families before committing to marriage pacts, but in the modern era are used regularly for PR and corporate blackmail. Apparently this practice is ingrained enough into the culture that digging up dirt on people by any means necessary is widely accepted, and not even illegal in most contexts."

Please tell me more about how India can ever be used purely as a location.

alex_smarton Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

"Indian" is not just an national identity but also an ethnic one. A person of Indian origin born in America or the UK is still very easily identifiable and is identified by their Indian identity.

The usage of the word "racism" to include xenophobia is common enough in a casual context that I cannot believe that you are simply not aware of that usage. By choosing to argue over the semantics of the word racism over usage you probably already are familiar with, you are diverting attention from what really matters here: that said racism or xenophobia exists and negatively affects real human beings.

alex_smarton Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

Yes

alex_smarton Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

Granted I haven't read the article yet, but I read some of the comments here and definitely did think of racism.

alex_smarton Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes?

That came out different than I had intended.

Of course people use double-sharp keys. And like you said, it is usually done in cases where it is the simpler notation to describe what is happening musically.

Simplicity is beautiful and construction of the major key in E-flat is decidedly simpler than in D-sharp.

alex_smarton Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes?

Sorry, I had made a mistake. Wanting to create a major key starting with D# would end up looking like D# E# F## G# A# B# C##. The ugliness is even more stark.

- two double sharp keys - F## to refer to G, C## to refer to D, B# to refer to C

Yikes.

alex_smarton Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes?

The distinctions between D-sharp and E-flat only make sense in the context of a key.

For instance, you construct a major key in E-flat and not D-sharp for the practical need to represent the scale nicely on the staff - so each tone in the scale should have a unique place in the staff.

You can construct the E-flat major scale with just three flat tones (Eb F G Ab Bb C D), whereas you would need four sharp and two double-sharp(!) tones if you started with D# (D# E# F## G# A# B# C##). And having to use F## and C## to refer to G and D tones is just ugly.

(I had made a mistake in the earlier version of this comment.)

alex_smarton From novice to master, and back again (2013)

What I meant was that using dd to take format/backup disks is just way too dangerous for human beings. The prospect of losing your precious data even once in your lifetime is too expensive a cost for the questionable benefit of feeling cool about doing backups by running a command on the terminal. Just use a gui tool for writing to physical disks. The additional visual feedback that a gui can provide is absolutely essential for human beings performing such a dangerous operation.

alex_smarton From novice to master, and back again (2013)

I think that using dd is a character flaw.

alex_smarton TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

>TikTok is the biggest honeypot and information dragnet by a foreign nation in our (USA) history by a huge margin. That's the only "against" that I need to say we need to shut down TikTok in America.

As you can imagine, people in other countries are observing this development with great interest.

alex_smarton TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

> Often that content is filled with blatant lies which causes the engagement (to debunk/argue) in the first place. The cycle repeats, the user reacted and then it optimises to get even more such engagement, it shows even more such toxic content. There's really no functional dislike button, you'll keep on seeing shit that aims on riling you up.

While I cant't deny that that maybe something that could be happening, in my own experience, the more pernicious problem is the creation of filter bubbles where people only see and hear view points of those they already agree with and slowly get pushed into more and more extreme versions of their existing beliefs.

alex_smarton TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

If anything, the content on TikTok itself is far more inoccuous than what has been already allowed to run amok on other social media platforms. Can anybody honestly argue that the silly dance numbers and "funny" vines on TikTok are more dangerous than the toxic political propaganda on FB, Whatsapp and Youtube?

>I’m sorry but I just can’t believe that you’re being downvoted so much.

I can believe it just fine. It is very predictable behavior.

alex_smarton TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

As someone who has seen close family members with advanced college degrees turn into zombies consuming toxic right-wing propaganda on Whatsapp, Facebook and Youtube non-stop and my country's (India) whole political environment become incredibly toxic and polarized as a result, I have very little sympathy for the argument that TikTok with its little dance skits and stupid humor is exceptionally worse.

alex_smarton TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

And that significant difference is that TikTok is a Chinese company, not an American one. When you let go of the pretense, this is what all these articles and threads are all about.

alex_smarton Hispaniola's great divergence

Everybody deserves justice, but some people deserve justice more than others.

alex_smarton Mass and angular momentum, left ambiguous by Einstein, get defined

Could you not, at least theoretically, create two synchronized clocks and physically transport one of them to another location and then throw a beam of light from the location of the first clock and measure the time of arrival at the second clock? Am I missing something?

Edit: What I was missing was time dilation. Physically transporting the clocks would mean that they are no longer synchronized.

alex_smarton As TikTok grows, so does suspicion

>TikTok is the most successful espionage operation of the 21st century so far

More than FB and Google?

Press X to doubt.

alex_smarton As TikTok grows, so does suspicion

>The main fear is not that it is a foreign owned app - after all, most people in the countries all over the world are using foreign owned (US) apps - it is because it is the first non-US app used by US citizens which unnerves both the US government and US commentariat

As you can imagine, citizens from other countries are observing this development with great interest.

alex_smarton Tell HN: Razorpay a YC company shared donor data under a Section 91 order

https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/zoo_bear

This website shows 99 deleted tweets between 26th and 27th June.

alex_smarton I can’t believe that I can prove that it can sort

> Solution is even simpler:

Press X to doubt.

alex_smarton Vim 9.0

> People don't like Lua (or just simply prefer VimScript)

:shock:

alex_smarton Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

I think Mega also works on all platforms, but yes, amongst the major competitors (OneDrive and Google Drive), Dropbox is clearly the best.

alex_smarton Performance of coroutine-style lexers in Go

The lexer is entirely single-threaded, as in the original Rob Pike talk.

>I find the design to be elegant for sure, but I also don’t mind handwriting parsers in general.

But this is a hand-written parser! Just using function pointers to store the state instead of using an enum and switch statements.

alex_smarton Performance of coroutine-style lexers in Go

The funny thing is, the final version of the lexer from Rob Pike's talk did not involve any goroutines at all.

alex_smarton Performance of coroutine-style lexers in Go

You don't have to use a channel for coordination. Here is a lexer implementation (in C!) that very closely follows Rob Pike's talk and uses a ring buffer for coordination and is plenty fast.

https://github.com/lpereira/lwan/blob/master/src/lib/lwan-te...

If you watch the talk carefully, Rob Pike himself mentions this near the end of the talk.

alex_smarton The true cost of linked lists

I have seen highly successful proprietary trading firms implement their order books using linked lists (more like a linked list for each level of the order book, with the levels themselves arranged in a linked list). Obviously they use a custom allocator or an object pool to make sure that the cache performance isn't completely atrocious.