crygin

Agreed -- based on MS's statement they went through a fairly rigorous internal procedure (of course, they could be lying, but it seems fairly unlikely particularly given the regulatory attention MS generally has on it). I don't fully understand what people think they "should" have done to access the emails -- waste a court's time on a meaningless judgement?

This is a dangerous oversimplification of what "racist" (or any negative bias) means. There are many people who have no problem associating with individuals of [insert class here], but would be less likely to hire them, etc. Racism, like everything else, is a spectrum, and it's critical not to characterize it by its most extreme elements.

> It's pretty funny to see one person claim dominion and authority over another person's inner state.

Well, this is exactly my point -- that this happens regularly, and isn't even commented upon, in many posts on HN when the inner state is, to take an example, a woman discussing her feelings of exclusion or a racial/social minority discussion their feelings of oppression. They're regularly dismissed as being "too sensitive" or having "misinterpreted the situation". But in this post particularly, the vast majority of responses are people who are directly contradicting the (controlled experimental) evidence, and there's very little pushback from the community at large.

In a perfect world, I'd expect each and every person who responded in a noncritical way to this post to respond similarly to future posts (if they're still active on HN) in which they're not the discouraged party. But... I think we all know the odds of that happening.

Seriously. It's pretty funny to see a community that normally goes straight for the jugular on dismissing personal experience in favor of demands for data completely abandon that when it's /their/ personal experience being questioned (and, in this case, it's one of the few that we actually have great science on).

You're not a Platonist, are you?

Regardless, it would be plausible to imagine a character conceived of by an author, who has curious behaviors in early stories, the motivation for which is only revealed in a much later story. This would be an example of a process of "discovery" about a character, but this discovery is happening in the form of revelations in the text rather than by the act of the author.

If you wanted to make the analogy more precise, you could imagine a character created with peculiar traits, and the author later realizes a single explanation for those traits which they had not originally conceived, which they then write into a story. In these two cases, the effect on the reader might be identical, but in one essential information about the character was held back and in one it was developed later.

All of this is a little academic, though, since none of the information about Holmes & Watson in the post-1923 stories has a material effect on their characters, as ACD's estate attempted to argue.

> It gives me the impression that it's probably not worth reading

Would you be willing to expand on this impression? I've worked with a number of charities who have suffered various minor website attacks, and blocking Tor (only for non-activist sites, of course) is a common mitigatory technique.

Presumably, from your tone, you mean for something other than the egregious violations of the public trust that they were willing participants in?

This is incoherent. Is the ask the item being requested, or is it a demand? Neither of these are how it's used in the article, either.

Which mostly goes to show that it's not a word with a definition as we think of it -- it's a word that displays familiarity with the tech scene and is used as a social signal.

It's been my experience that those negative social phenomena are emergent with any sufficiently large group of people. You need structural components in place to prevent them, or you need to not grow.

You're right -- it's entirely possible that the fellow in the video has worked foodservice/retail/labor in the past, and learned absolutely nothing about hard work and the human experience from it.

There's certainly some ambiguity to it, but for the most part it's pretty easy to tell who's never had to work hard, particularly when they're interacting with people who do. In my opinion, it's one of the best reasons to go out to an interview lunch with a candidate -- to see how they behave towards the waitstaff.

They have skilled labor shortages at the prices they're willing to pay. Every time you hear an employer claim they can't find someone for a position, inquire about the salary they're offering.

> humans evolving to the point where you could not kill one by shooting it in the head with a bullet.

If there were billions of bullets flying around, and humans reproduced by the billions in a matter of hours with a generation-to-generation gap of minutes, this would happen in short order.

This is the ... third (maybe fourth?) article on this topic today to get up into the top few posts on HN before disappearing into oblivion. Some people really don't want to have a conversation about how young tech folks are being exploited.

Not least because governmental power does not derive from the ability to issue fiat currency; it derives from a legal (or socially accepted) monopoly on force. Failure of a sanctioned fiat currency could reduce governmental legitimacy, but law enforcement is the backbone of governmental power.

I'm unclear on why everyone seems to think that Bitcoin reduces governmental power. It makes all transactions public -- no more cash deals, hard-to-subpoena international wire transfers, etc. It makes the job of law enforcement much easier.

Because people behave irrationally as regards convictions, and this produces an undesirable class of essentially unemployable people who are thus incentivized to commit more crimes because they are unable to work. It's entirely appropriate for government to regulate to prevent the perpetuation of this socially undesirable phenomenon.

Can you clarify the definitions of those terms that you'd prefer to use, which exclude the products on a McDonald's hamburger?

The GP is not a "political slogan", it's a statement of fact. If you'd like to rebut, which seems fairly unlikely, please provide both evidence of sloganhood (slogan, of course, means something specific: in part, that the aforementioned phrase has been used verbatim as a form of promotion. Cite the promotion) and additionally an actual rebuttal to the GP.

That would actually be what this is an appropriate venue for, not your contentless dismissal.

This is actually extremely interesting, and a potential use for BTC that hadn't occurred to me yet -- as a flexible retainer for legal representation. You can notionally store the information necessary to access a wallet in your head, and provide it to a cooperative attorney without the need to possess anything that can be physically taken from you.

Congratulations, you've discovered the bell curve (plus a healthy dose of physical attributes that provide you with positive advantages in our society). We congratulate you for being on the nice side of it.

As a minor counterpoint, if I'm helping someone build a company and I ever find out that they lied to me, I'm walking away. I suppose that's why I'm not in the startup scene anymore, though...

> If your webmail client does that, it's time to switch to a better one.

Academic users constitute an audience that's quite often bound to use a single, potentially-outdated webmail system. In our experience, academic/University users are utilizing what we consider "nonstandard" email systems with an order of magnitude more regularity than nonacademic users. You may wish to better understand the audience of the product before asserting that they should "switch".

And claiming something is not a security issue because you're trusting a client you don't control to behave well is naive at best, and apologist at worst. It's genuinely upsetting to hear coming from someone who classifies vulnerabilities.

Actually, given the events of the last few years, it's entirely possible to stop paying the mortgage on your house by pleading ignorance to the documents you signed.

More to the point -- regardless of the specifics of the law, the persistent desire of this forum to correlate legality to moral correctness is somewhat disturbing. What does it even mean to form an agreement with "Google"? Even assuming the historical basis of contract law, what constitutes "consideration" in an agreement like this?

Personally... I don't see any ethical reason to perform negotiations with organizations that have become as large and as disconnected as Google. I speak to employee after employee and they all speak of Google's commitment to privacy, to openness, to not doing evil; but the actions of Google at every turn display otherwise. A man can make an agreement with another man or perhaps even with an organization that is capable of coherent action, but Google is neither. No "agreement" with Google is valid if only because Google is not a collective that one can actually negotiate with, never mind that it's proven time and time again willing to discard agreements and promises in the name of profit.

Finally, the statement is often made that if one chooses not to consider Google as an entity with which one can negotiate, one should simply not utilize their resources. Why? Because we can't negotiate with a mountain, should we fail to mine the minerals therein? Google is a mound of computational power and data with no remaining hold on human morality or ethics -- anything we can retrieve from there is salvage. Take it and use for the betterment of humanity, because they certainly will not be doing so.

"However, in a work environment as demanding as the one at Google, it can be challenging to carve out the time to launch projects outside of an engineer’s “day job.”"

I.e., give up your 20% time or get stackranked/shuffled out of Google. So it's a benefit that exists on paper for recruiting purposes but which employees are strongly disincentivized from utilizing.

There's a terrible irony in this as the response to a post which explicitly states: "We all need jobs. We need to be employed. But at the cost of what? Our ethics? Our passions? Those that trust us?"

Essentially: conformal (angles are equal in different areas of the map -- this is the purpose of Mercator, for sailing), equal-area (regions of the same area are represented equally), contiguous (paths between regions do not leave the map, e.g. not a Goode homolosine, Dymaxion, etc). Pick two.

Both nutrition and pecuniary economics are far more complex then Soylent and Bitcoin allow for -- additionally, the history of both of these fields is seeded with innumerable failures to couch each of their fundamentals in terms of simple concepts (for nutrition: protien/fats/carbs, vitamins, micronutrents, and so on -- for economics, Smith, Marx, Keynes, Laffer, et cetera). The idea that either, as a phenomenological consequence of human interaction, has a simple solution is technically possible but foolhardy.

I don't deny that there may be a food that is easy to make but perfect for humans; or that there may be such a currency as well. But for any rational actor to believe it would require not only extraordinary evidence, but specific refutations of the previous failed attempts (rather, the theory would provide those refutations). Such a failure to both acknowledge and rebut historical failures in the same vein is strong evidence of crankism/crankitude/crankosity/I Can't Believe They're Not A Crank.

Somewhat ironically, the foodstuff I might be most inclined to believe would satisfy this requirement is exactly what "soylent" should be -- complete raw human. Om nom nom.

Like Uber doesn't? Obeying a dumb law might make your position more stable, but it eliminates the enormous potential return on choosing to behave outside the norm.

Laws are just incentive structures, and subject to the same risk analysis as everything else.

Your emotions are a physical process occurring in your brain, and you are not in control of them any more than you are in control of whether or not a bruise forms after you are struck.

There's absolutely no good reason to think that it should be possible to make money propping up us bags of decaying organic matter for as long as possible. The idea of making money providing healthcare is absurd -- like being able to deliver a letter anywhere for a fixed cost or basic defense of our borders, it's the proper role of a minimal viable government.