anonemouse145

The idiocy is so delicious, I need a bigger spoon.

Were going to back up crypto currency, with petroleum dollars. Because mah gold standard.

(Orson Welles clapping gif)

Article is bad. But random thought: Fake it 'til you make it is a prime driver of wage differences between men and women. Many women I personally know have refused promotions and job offers because they don't feel ready, then complain that unfit men get the job. As if it's a mystery what happened.

This also goes for young people. Sometimes getting in over your head and failing is a totally positive opportunity. Imagine if you could get hired somewhere above your level at Google for just one month, and how much you could learn there. Then you can take all that knowledge to your next job. Plus your resume says Google on it. For a lot of people fresh out of college, that would be a big plus.

Don't be stupid, arrogance isn't helpful when it's something crucial like health care or safety inspections or your own education. But if it's a chance to make a few more bucks at your job, default to always take the chance when it's offered. Fortune favors the bold, and such.

Counter: This is what incrementally leads to voodoo Perl scripts that only the one magician who wrote it can read. Sure all those tools are great individually. But nobody else knows what they are, so maintaining it is impossible.

In a trivial example like this, between two similar executions, I'd tend toward the C-like one for readability. Only use the language feature if it really saves a lot of lines or abstractions etc.

So java8 if I could rewrite 100 lines of code so that a whole function is just one lambda and nothing else, sure go for it. That's just a StackOverflow away for anyone. But I wouldn't toss in a lambda with a bunch of (insert new language feature) all on one line. I wouldn't expect another programmer to know all that yet.

You sound like a cigarette executive. "The real problem is we don't start em smoking before they leave the hospital. We could increase our profits 33% if every baby was exposed to nicotine before they leave the hospital."

Maybe not all people in society should be socially required to purchase an expensive good, thus causing demand to be infinite, meaning price can only skyrocket.

Given the number of Masters degrees working minimum wage or starting jobs now maybe we should admit we have a problem.

This happens all the time. The New York Times has become an incredibly biased source. New York City is an incredibly Democrat-leaning echo chamber (I don't care what party it is, I care that a major news source is biased). New York State at large isn't.

For anyone who thinks this isn't the case it isn't aware of the extent because the paper is paywalled so you can't see how had it is, page back to the debacle where the editorial staff were asking whether it was their job to question politicians' statements, or just "we report, you decide". A lot of people dropped their subscriptions because that's literally the only thing they were subscribing to the NYT for, and the editorial staff were announcing it didn't fit their profit model.

The only readers they have left, are ones who don't mind tuning in to get the DNC agenda for the day. More or less.

I got a free trial, and called to cancel it early (I had to call!), because it's just another tabloid. The only major news source I can stand to read anymore is maybe Reuters? I have to get my news from citizens who comb social media and investigate independently.

> Bitcoin isn't Fiat currency. > Bitcoin Cash doubles the number of coins in an instant, and future updates could do more, and the market value of each coin increases rather than halving.

Choose one.

Would they evict the lesbians who've been tossing Jews out of pride parades (which is no joke, it happened in my town)? Or do they evict the Jews?

Shouldn't they evict all Pride March leadership since Black Lives Matter have been stopping Pride parades due to allegations of systematic racism? Or do they evict BLM for stopping Pride parades?

Would they evict the professors of Evergreen who students claim are guilty of systematic oppression? Or do they evict the students who were patrolling campus with baseball bats?

Shouldn't they evict all white men, since all white men are guilty of participating in colonialism and patriarchy? Or do they evict all white men, since white men supposedly got Trump elected (something the statistics very much dispute- Trump made gains in several demographics)?

This is a very slippery slope in these times.

If the leaders of AirBnB were the white nationalists, and they were tossing out their opponents following white nationalist policy, everyone would say the white nationalists deserve harsh retribution.

The policy itself doesn't matter. The politics do. And yes, AurBnB has to play politics. I'd wager they saw a couple markets where they hope to keep a foothold for being "the good guys" instead of an illegal business in violation of various local ordinances on innkeeping.

> More than half of the employees at the Jersey City facility have decided to move to Linden, New Jersey

Fun fact if you haven't experienced it before. A company will close a facility, and say you can have the same job elsewhere usually requiring drastically different travel time. If you refuse you can't draw unemployment or get any benefits because you turned down the job.

It's not all roses.

In my experience this is not always a positive. I've seen several cases where a foreign born representative is offloading people from (country of origin) because dumb managers still think it's the height of the offshoring era and foreign = cheaper. Relatives and friends and anybody the rep knows from the old country get first in line, and they just lie or exaggerate experience. If they even need to.

I've watched those foreign people get hired even though they walked into the interview without even Googling the product or development environment specified in the ad. Not that this is new or exclusive, mind you.

Nevermind that nobody thought about onboarding these people, there's no documentation, and the resulting product takes a sharp nosedive as work is handed over. These foreign people were promised cheap, and that keeps the investors happy.

This is no slightly against those workers. I've taught these workers and one guy had his head in his hands saying, "Oh my God, the legal liability we're being exposed to here" upon learning of deep design flaws that cheaper labor was somehow going to magically fix.

More workers is not necessarily better- in any sense. It's just more workers. In a capitalist system, that's not necessarily good for anybody except management.

Sort of. There are some rules. Note that this varies by state as well, federal law is probably nonexistent.

An old state law which for all I know was repealed ages ago or whatever was that an item couldn't be marked as on sale for half the year or more. You couldn't say it was 40% off for 300 days out of 365, that sort of thing. The easy workaround was to make it 40% off for three months, then have it on no sale at all but mark the sale price as the original price for the next three months, and switch back and forth whenever you want. So long as the item wasn't always marked "on sale" you were fine.

I don't think the US has ever had real evidence based tests like that, except in major class action suit which have largely ceased to exist thanks to mandatory arbitration clauses.

Walmart often sells not-quite-same models of things.

One, they often sell main items at below cost, because they make their money on accessories and groceries and whatnot before people check out. Computers and TVs are big ones. They will often take a big loss on a TV because they expect to sell DVDs and cables and such.

Two, I didn't click this product but often they will have a submodel of a popular brand. Like an imaginary Dell Laptop-XX-XD might normally be $599. Walmart sells a Dell Laptop-XX-SP where the RAM is soldered on and the network card is a Chinese knockoff and so on for $499. Same company, same-ish model, Walmart special.

This is dumb. Even if I admit a lot of these ads annoy me.

Back in the day Google would just lower the ranking of sites with banner ads. That sort of makes sense. They're a worse result, so show them lower. Fine. We should still decide this with traffic, but hey we can debate that.

To give Google/Chrome broad authorization to block people from seeing content that Google doesn't like scares the hell out of me, even if it's under a thoughtful banner.

Random made up example- what if next time Google picks a consumer advocacy group that says PayPal is a bad service, and blocks ads on sites that use PayPal? (Google offers Wallet)

I would grant them blocking ads that activate Android vibration- I consider that borderline malware. I grant pop-up ads, opening a new tab I didn't ask for is also arguably malware. I do not grant them blocking a wide variety of types of content just because marketers are abusing it. That's bad precedent. Rank them down, warn the user, heck put a "click to play Flash" lock on it. But don't take control away.

Google also hints at services that would let a website lock down when it detects ad blocking and force people to pay or otherwise engage to get access to the site. I think that's already one trojan horse. Google can stop you from trying to generate revenue off users, oh by the way we sell a new system where you can pay to get that back.

I don't like anything about this, even though I agree that screw those ads.

Fun fact: marketing toys as a cure for ADHD isn't new to this trend. It could be literally any stimulus. Yo-yo, etc.

Yes we do. What we don't do is the German- we don't say "halb sechs" (half to six, 5:30). We would say "half past five".

Many people are used to telling precise time from being insanely overworked all the time, so you need to say it is precisely 5:33 because 5:27 is a world of difference.

Do you really not see how bringing up gender neutral bathrooms at a hacker conference might be a little off topic and designed to offend?

Here's a hint: I've known lots of trans and nonconforming people who use whatever unisex bathroom they feel like when they're at an event like this, and nobody cared, because these communities accept lots of "non traditional" types. That's the whole point. Let your personal flag fly.

If you come back with "Oh but that's a micro aggression against trans people"... Welcome to the problem. Just punch me in the face, I'm a Nazi. QED.

I was thinking about making this my first con, and I didn't go because the first thing I saw looking for info was the code of conduct. That's now The Sign. Caring too much about your code of conduct, instead of just being welcoming as the con has always been from what I've heard, means far left politics are the order of the day.

Better form committees about inclusion and rape culture too, before people accuse you of being (insert buzzword)!

Hacker groups have always been the most welcomeling places I've ever experienced for people from "odd" walks of life, and paradoxically it's people fighting for inclusion who threaten that. You tell everyone this is a culture of toxic masculinity, and guess who are the only people left in it?

Hacker always was positive. It gained popularity to mean the people who played around with hardware to make home computers before the PC became a commercial product, or who found novel ways to play around with the phone system- like you could record and play back touch tone sounds on a tape recorder to make calls.

The negative connotation came from the bust of Kevin Mitnick and the American public's shameful lack of knowledge about computers, combined with 1984 style propaganda to scare the public.

Hacker or hacking always meant someone who approaches problems in novel ways. Cracker, like a safe cracker, is someone who breaks in for malicious reasons. The kids on 4chan who follow a guide to DDOS a website are script kiddies, by the way.

That's what these terms always meant, and we're starting to move back after an era of propaganda.

Lest anyone say this is oversimplified, from Ars:

"Republicans argue that the Federal Trade Commission should regulate ISPs' privacy practices instead of the FCC. But the resolution passed today eliminates the FCC's privacy rules without any immediate action to return jurisdiction to the FTC, which is prohibited from regulating common carriers such as ISPs and phone companies."

Sure its doublespeak to repeal the FCC side of things and promise FTC protection when you know the FTC has no jurisdiction. It's also ridiculous to say that eliminating an overreach by the FCC (debatable) would be a moral wrong when stood on its own.

Your daily reminder that this ruling was that an overreach of power was made by the FCC, not that Republicans are hungry for the blood of orphans.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2017/03/30/why-cong...

It's still completely worthwhile to have conversations about privacy and what the proper limits of power are for Congress and the FCC here, but we're so deep into 1984 that both sides of the political spectrum are screaming how WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR and your only choice is if you prefer to have always been at war with EASTASIA or OCEANIA.

I don't see a discussion of the actual technical definition. Only bad semantics.

Wikipedia, in brief: "In the end stages of planet formation, a planet will have "cleared the neighbourhood" of its own orbital zone, meaning it has become gravitationally dominant, and there are no other bodies of comparable size other than its satellites or those otherwise under its gravitational influence."

Note that this definition has to make an allowance for Earth, because our moon is "of comparable size" by some definitions, but it is also under Earth's influence. (Pluto and its moon co-orbit a point beyond the surface of Pluto so if Pluto is a planet why not Charon)

An interesting development for anyone who wants to take Nagel seriously is Mary and the colorblind room. Short version, a girl grows up in a black and white room (which is impossible in a lot of ways but just imagine) and that she is fed a database that lets her learn everything there is to know about the physical world of color (which is impossible but follow along) and then one day she exits the room and she sees a red rose. Nagel argued there's something about Mary's experience of color that she had in that moment, that she did not learn in the room.

Dennett is another strong opponent here. He says Mary would retort, aha but you have a limited imagination. I know everything about color, so nothing about that experience was new to me in any non trivial way whatsoever. Because Mary knows EVERYTHING about color. It's may be impossible for us to imagine someone being omniscient about color, and that spoils the whole argument.

Similarly, what if we knew every physical fact about bats. Dennett only needs to say, we have small imaginations. We have trouble imagining that what it is like to be a bat would be the sum of all physical facts about a bat. But we can't be sure of that. There is no logical certainty. Hence Nagel proved nothing.

Yes you end up saying "we're all robots/zombies/unconscious animals" this way, and there's actually nothing special about being human it's just a myth we tell ourselves. But aside from some people not finding that conclusion tasteful, there's nothing wrong with it.

As an investor in Exxon, I disagree that you should criticize a company when one ship leaks a little oil.

Read Heinlein's For Us The Living. Robots make all essential goods, and everyone has a minimum basic income. People only work to get extra income for nice things. That is a societal wide post scarcity society- no one who desires a basic living will ever lack anything they need.

But post scarcity happens all the time. It used to be the domain of nobles, who had easy access to basically anything they could desire. Now it belongs to middle to upper class first world residents, a growing class of people who can lean on mommy if they ever get in trouble and who generally are never more than an Amazon Prime delivery away from any good or service they need.

People will say oh but a feudal lord didn't have an iPhone it's all relative. And sure that's one argument, but I'm sure you can see the point being made.

You can work a lousy job, and play video games, eat pizza, and be basically happy. Or you can take on tens of thousands in student debt to work a much more stressful job, and wish you had enough time to play games, and stop eating pizza because it doesn't fit your lifestyle. A growing number of people can't rationalize the latter option. There's no need to endure that hardship, goods aren't that scarce. Hence, people bring up post scarcity.

It depends why people don't like tomatoes. If your problem is that your supermarket tomatoes seem kind of tasteless and with bad texture.... You're right. They are.

Get an heirloom or other flavor first tomato fresh out of the ground so all the aromatics of the earth haven't faded away yet, different experience entirely.

They also use the industrial solvent h2o!

The phrase "Toward a new..." is very nearly a sure sign of relativism at work. I don't know why so many quacks pick it. I guess they think they're revolutionizing the world.

This article pushes for an ethics and feelings based redistribution of programming effort. That's bad. Because resources remain finite, we won't lose less data, we can only shuffle around what we lose. What we need to make this decision, is not feelings or vague ethical codes. We need hard data, especially in an age of big data and machine learning where the detailed pieces involved in making a deep statistical analysis may well be out of the realm of human comprehension.

For example, this article targets the evil gender binary. If only we would think more carefully about our choices. Meanwhile, clinics are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to map rates of ovarian cancer to "demisexuals", or how a local rise in "non-binary asexuals" might affect rates of testicular cancer, and what should be done about funding for screenings.

We lose data because we come from an era where space was limited, and cycles were counted. Sure we made some dumb mistakes like 2 digit years, but 2 digit years still work in a broad array of cases so we still use them all over the place today. They are sometimes good to use, sometimes bad, sometimes they're superfluous and unused anyway.

By all means rethink what fields should be compressed or expanded based upon business needs. But do it based on data and business use cases, not on feelings and someone's personal bias- even if that person promises their ethics are better than the old ones.