asciident

I'm pretty sure everyone except journalists have already moved on to using GAFAM.

I know someone who was denied a job as a luggage handler at an airline due to a failed background check (though not a credit check). But I think the credit checks may matter more for people hired in positions of power, where being in debt is something you can be blackmailed for. If there's no use of the credit check, then why do companies pay money and impose extra process?

I strongly disagree. Bad credit (sometimes even wrongly attributed) can block you from jobs, mobile plans, bank accounts, credit/debit cards, renting, etc. I'd rather be blocked from Facebook than be told I can't rent an apartment or be disqualified from a job.

That's a naive view of credit bureaus. There are value judgments in there throughout the stack. You can't get a job because you didn't pay off a medical debt. You can't get a mortgage because you don't have the right history of past debt (for example, if you're too young).

Like the credit bureaus? Seems like they've been doing this for decades already.

All it takes is your company execs or lawyers to be afraid of a stern letter, and ask you to cancel your project. If you're violating their robots.txt, you're probably violating their terms of service that's hidden somewhere. And your company doesn't want to risk having to pay hundreds of thousands to fight a court case. There's also venues besides courts for them to attack you, like contacting the publishers or hosting platforms for your derivative works. It's a chilling effect.

And I'm not making this up. This kind of stuff has happened to me many times.

This is not true. Maintenance is necessary for dirt lots in downtowns. I own a few parcels in the middle of dense cities. You have to deal with soil erosion, animals digging up soil which blows away, problems with trees (due to storms, pests, hanging into other properties), property line encroachment, and vandalism.

There is if you are doing it for work. For example, your company could get sued if you are found using that data and ignoring the ToS. If you are a public figure, you could get your name tarnished as doing something unethical or the media may call it "hacking". If you are rereleasing the data then you risk getting a takedown notice.

People have been saying this for decades. Both the idea that the academic publishing model is about to die (due to too many papers, low quality, broken peer review, etc.), and that we need to focus on reproducibility.

These ideas itself are valid but not nuanced. I could also argue that academic publishing as at its most successful ever with science advancing at an incredible pace even as complexity is so high, and I could argue that everyone is now thinking about reproducibility and it's baked into the academic process these days (for decades, having another lab reproduce your paper is critical to it being accepted by the community even after being accepted for publication).

Maybe an analogy I would use it if I were to say "software is so broken, the quality is getting worse over time, new programmers can't fizzbizz, security bugs everywhere, no one can even reliably make a heathcare website or computer game on time." Same argument that you're making.

Computer science theory papers are alphabetical as well.

Cool of you to do this, though I wonder if this will be more of a measure of community size. Smaller niche topic communities probably behave more like citation rings (you'd cite everyone else in the community frequently). It also seems like it'd penalize people working in a new area (like if you're the first person to use a method, you'd probably cite yourself a bunch).

Does anyone have a mirror? The link is down.

Nothing against the OP, but I don't know how in 2021, websites can't handle a few dozen visitors at once. Even a $5 digital ocean machine can handle thousands simultaneously without going down.

Simplifying the tax code will require removing special exemptions for certain interest groups. This is often rephrased as "raising the taxes on [group]" which gets a lot of pushback. For example, raising the taxes on teachers, native americans, certain small businesses, public servants, antarctica scientists, students at for-profits, etc. It's hard to fight against that message.

Unfortunately when I loaded it it had a major screen repaint about half a second during load. It would be more minimal if it didn't have that.

It's not black or white. You can have discussions with friends and family, in anonymous forums, in low-stakes social situations. Not at the workplace with sensitive colleagues, or in public on social media.

Is this mindset similar to the "Pence rule" of "never dine alone with a woman"? It seems like this could carry over to topics about race or politics. Basically, avoid potentially problematic situations that can be misinterpreted, regardless of your actual intent or beliefs?

Frauds, scams, and other forms of dishonesty have exploded. From phone scams, to unemployment fraud, and marketplace scams, to retail cheats. Many people are thinking with an adversarial and self-optimizing mindset. I think based on this trend, we'll soon see a call for centralized identity over privacy to curtail these.

And California's 11 billion is probably just a fraction of all the unemployment fraud across all the states as this has been a rampant problem. Then add on to that the small business loan fraud, and we're easily at 100+ billion levels across the country. These numbers will be more clear once the tax return filings and small business loan audits start happening.

The various stimulus packages have led to fraud at the scale never been seen before, and the cost of amounts more than the entire National Science Foundation budget (8.5 billion) and National Institutes of Health budget (42.5 billion).

This is very believable, because information in prison spreads instantly and everyone knows what everyone else is doing. One inmate figures out a way to make money, and sells this information for other favors, and soon it becomes "viral".

Speaking of fast, that web page loaded instantaneously for me. Gives me confidence in the product, despite being technically unrelated.

So I find NextDoor to simply have a different culture. If they saw the comments on Hacker News or Reddit, they would probably similarly call it toxic and that its users assumes the worst of others. When I read NextDoor posts, I put on my NextDoor glasses, and when I read Hacker News posts, I put on Hacker News glasses.

They have a different set of values, and are offended by different things. Calling out a person they find suspicious (who ends up not being suspicious) would get some eyerolling but not considered deeply offensive there, the same way that some antisocial behaviors here are not immediately banworthy.

You are my software twin. I'm using Winamp 2.95 this very moment, and Spacemonger 1.0 which still works fantastically. Both have slight crashes in rare edge cases now but perfectly usable day-to-day. You wouldn't perchance also be using an old version of UltraEdit before the heavy focus on subscriptions?

Isn't the premise already a problem? Even the mainstream conservative views did not result in retribution. Yet extremist liberal views would never be considered for retribution.

This looks great, plain-text is underrated. Do you use this yourself, and for how long?

Your format looks like a slightly more strict version of this one here: https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/

This is an ironic contrast as it appears next to the link on Hacker News about the 20-year anniversary of VideoLAN.

A volunteer non-profit project versus a commercial subscription-based project from one of the richest companies.

Software that lasts over 10 years should be celebrated. Software that is still just as relevant after 20 years is extraordinary. If VideoLAN were a startup, it'd be a unicorn.

VLC (and ffmpeg) are nearly singlehandedly keeping the world's media accessible. Otherwise, video would probably be a walled garden (subscribe to Adobe Cloud, share to Youtube, etc.).

That seems a bit unfair to jump to thinking about bots, as he noted he had a lot of engaged visitors that commented and sent him emails.

While the marketplace is more crowded, the number of markets has shrink. To continue your analogy, each marketplace vender used to be its own market, so you had a lot of options. Now there were really only 2-4 giant marketplaces, and vendors with a good location have made it really difficult to set up shop.

Keep in mind android they bought, then the leader of that project "resigned" for sexual harassment. So it's continuing but I doubt it'll be more than incremental improvements, as we've seen in the past 5 versions.

But I think Gmail and Maps were fairly innovative products when they came up. Both in terms of "wow I didn't think this would be possible before" and being viable businesses.

A lot of the money went to gangs in foreign countries. There were some stories of immoral rich people like the rapper who got over a million dollars and boasted about it, but I imagine most were dishonest poor people. The problem is this rewards a small pool of scammers, and the honest poor are left even further behind.

But it sounds like you want to believe it was money well spent, so I don't imagine this would convince you otherwise.

There was also a ton of fraud (some estimates were 1/3 of the money went to scammers and foreign people). They didn't have a good way to check if a business was an actual business or not. This resulted in entire neighborhoods of people getting 10K each by sharing the scam [2].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-24/small-bus...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-29/small-bus...