gervase

The advantage of removing (or at least, humans actively moderating) comments is that it pushes discussion back to face-to-face (or at least, more direct and personal) channels and restricts the anonymity of commentary. This has a few benefits, namely:

* Self-moderating: Such conversations require a certain level of decorum, since these are presumably people you interact with every day. The likelihood of calling your desk mate a Nazi, racist, race traitor, etc. to their face are astronomically smaller than when it's cloaked in anonymity, since there may be consequences to your commentary.

* Self-authenticating: It reduces the efficacy of message amplification, since the real world serves as an out-of-band identity authentication mechanism.

* Self-regulating: It's easier, cheaper, and less risky for the hosting site, since they no longer have any enforcement role to play in the discussion itself (beyond the original slant when presenting the information, e.g. by news organizations).

Of course, this doesn't address the problems of sites which are inherently designed to do one-to-many broadcasting and discussion, such as Youtube or Reddit. How would these sites look without comments at all, or with a very strict attestation/vouching system?

Although HN follows a similar model vis-à-vis discussion and broadcasting, the active HN moderation is pretty good, at least good enough to maintain a relatively high-quality discourse and removing very low-quality discussion. However, this is difficult to scale and relatively expensive.

Ultimately, someone has to make a judgement call whether there is a genuine contribution or not. Ideally, the committee can serve in this role, but there is a possibility that their views are biased or uninformed. This can be countered by the external validation offered by refereed publications.

Edit: I absolutely recommend the change suggested in the article. In contrast to many other programs, many Indian universities commonly do not support student travel costs for presenting research. A hard requirement for two conference papers means that poorly-paid Indian graduate students are either (A) limited to publishing in relatively-affordable but less prestigious local conferences, or (B) taking on significant personal expense to meet this requirement.

By lifting this requirement, students could publish exclusively in journals, for example, which do not have a presentation component. Allowing individual institutions to have more control over these requirements makes more sense, in my view.

For comparison, my US-based institution requires only a single publication (conference or journal) prior to graduation; this is meant to address the external validation problem mentioned above without discouraging students who want to work on extremely hard, extremely time-intensive projects that might produce fewer publications than "hot" topics could.

I feel like it's a little disingenuous to list unexercised stock and option grants as part of the overall compensation, since these are directly related to the future performance of the company itself (as led by the listed CEO, presumably). I would have liked to see the option to differentiate between total compensation more granularly, including by exercised grants.

I understand that that "2.3 billion" number makes for shocking value and therefore a great headline, supporting the narrative that they're looking to construct, but the way the raw data is presented actively obfuscates readers from exploring the data and forming their own interpretations.

When I see a dataset with a 4 million percent increase YOY, I would probably classify that as an outlier, not as the representative value I report for the whole dataset.

Edit: That's not to say their narrative is wrong (that is, CEOs may absolutely be overpaid), just that the way they presented it feels misleading to me.

It resonates with me, because I view ads as (intrinsically) mentally intrusive. I find seeing any ad, regardless of its relevance, infuriating; the advertiser is paying someone, not me, to place a thought or perception into my brain that I do not want there.

If I decide that I want to purchase a new jacket, for example because I'm traveling to a much colder climate, I want to be able to seek out (ideally unbiased) information about jackets and make my own decision.

Some of that might be in the form of advertising, but I will have made the decision to seek it out, rather than my plane ticket purchase being mined and then targeted with a clothing company ad.

I consider it to be equivalent to someone unexpectedly spooning food into my mouth, then arguing "Well, you have to eat anyway, why are you complaining?" It violates my sense of agency.

Perhaps I have a higher desire for agency than most?

HN intentionally flags and removes controversial comments and posts, with the intention to prevent trolling, flame wars, and other detrimental behavior patterns. This is considered a feature, not a bug [0].

This ensures that HN provides a semi-curated discussion weighted towards technical and scientific issues, and against geopolitical or socioeconomic topics, for example.

That isn't a statement that these topics shouldn't be discussed, just that they aren't necessarily appropriate for discussion here.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Another factor that no one has mentioned is that this approach seems to require invasive brain surgery. This is likely not a large risk for someone suffering from locked-in syndrome, but would be for someone who wants to improve their typing speed.

As such, most early use cases would be restricted to people with few alternatives, such as medical cases.

I wouldn't say this is a universal "ARM vs Intel" claim, just a specific heuristic for this company's products.

Synology's ARM line is generally underpowered compared to their Intel offerings, in terms of clock speed, memory capacity, and core count. They also tend to gate additional features (e.g. hardware-accelerated encryption) behind their Intel offerings.

edit: We're mostly talking Atoms / Celerons here, so not exactly screaming performance either way.

I wonder if these kinds of painful (from a business perspective) choices will act as a kind of forcing function on their whole privacy push, either by highlighting the hypocrisy if they continue mining customer data while preaching virtue, or alternatively, by really pushing them to put their money where their mouth is and creating a more truly private system.

I think the biggest factor will be if they can convince the US population (their core demographic / market) that privacy matters. If it does, then it will be worth it to their bottom line - if not, they may have to capitulate to market forces and return to squeezing as much data as they can from their users.

The next few years could be very interesting from a privacy standpoint.

I think this might be a side effect of the Keybase UI, not the service itself. If you interact with the APIs directly and look at the JSON, you can see that at a high level the proofs are a dict, with each service as the key, and the value is an array aggregating several proofs. You could therefore potentially have several Twitter proofs associated with different accounts ("nametags") that could then be presented all together if someone wanted to tie all those accounts to your identity.

I only skimmed TFA, so I'm not sure what the process would be like for actually validating those proofs, but the backend datastore seems like it wouldn't have a problem, at least.

> Netflix, Comcast, Amazon Prime and other video streaming service charge you the same as the DVD rental, but force you to watch the entire video within 48 hours from 1st starting it.

I haven't encountered this behavior in Netflix; under what circumstances are you experiencing it?

EDIT: A cursory search informed me that this seems to apply to viewing streaming movies which have been downloaded to a device and watched while offline. The expiration timer is reset when the viewing device has a WAN connection. I guess this is a mechanism to discourage hoarding a large number of movies, then cancelling your subscription? Not sure.

I found this article to be surprisingly nuanced, at least compared to the pre-conceived notions I expected. In general, I veer more towards the "free speech" end of the spectrum, and this article helped to paint a picture of what it's actually like on the ground.

With that being said, I think there is still a bit of naïveté in terms of their self-perception, but that's to be expected with practically anyone in any job. At a high level, these teams seem to serve as a sort of "immune system" for the platform, protecting against the indirect, implied threat of high-handed governmental regulation.

It seems like they're trying to thread the needle between "We're just a platform, anyone can say anything." and "Users of our site can only say things that the company itself would say." That process will naturally be guided not only by concrete policies, but shifting social norms, the teams' evolving experience and composition, the individual members' prejudices and biases, and so on.

Therefore, it's not surprising that this might produce "false positives" when the viewpoint spectrum of these teams doesn't align with the spectrums of certain subgroups of their users. The best they can really do (without abdicating responsibility and letting it percolate up to a higher level, like gov't) is try to ensure their filter spectrum is as closely aligned to their (desired?) userbase's as possible.

In general, an interesting article, and worth the read.

> an AI to make a judicial verdict?

There is some discussion towards this direction: https://www.wired.com/story/can-ai-be-fair-judge-court-eston...

That is exactly what the parent was saying. They would not consider a financial product that bypasses the major payment processors (Visa/MC) unless it has similar customer protections built in.

I took the parent question to be asking about where the (personal privacy) line falls:

- Can an employer search a personal laptop (BYOD)?

- What about a personal Dropbox account? Personal emails? What if they are only in the cloud, and not on the device?

- Do these answers change if there are logs showing these services were accessed with a company device during work hours?

- Could they look in his personal laptop bag if they suspected he had a USB drive with the information inside?

These are generally very locality-specific and dependent on the various employment agreements, codes of conduct, etc. that the employee signed, so in general it's not very informative to speculate on where those lines are drawn.

However, I do think these are useful questions that any employee should be able to answer for themselves about their own current employer, if only so that they're cognizant of their rights.

The way I see it, most existing financial transactions are trust-based. Many cryptocurrencies aim to be trustless. I see this as a compromise, with the visibility and implementability of cryptocurrencies, while still being trust-backed.

This way, if there is a problem with a transaction, or the currency, etc. there is someone left holding the bag, which is a better fit with the existing legal infrastructures that are already in place.

I'm actually pretty surprised that this is coming from a corporation, and not a national government. SWIFT can be an absolute bear, and providing a programmable currency interface à la Stripe, but with lower fees and the full backing of a government could be a killer app for international trade facilitation.

This happens to me constantly. I was going through 3-5 cables per year before I switched to inductive charging.

The way this (anonymity) is handled in the Estonian system is that votes can be validated out-of-band for 30 minutes after they were cast, then they're locked. Additionally, a voter can overwrite their previous vote at any time during the vote period, so they could always prove their first vote, and then overwrite it privately later.

There are several other major problems with their system [0], but I think they should at least get credit for their approach.

0: https://www.aaspring.com/ccs2014/ivoting-paper.pdf

It seems to leverage the DMA features of Thunderbolt to dump the data, so if no sensitive data is in memory, then it wouldn't be leakable.

Fpr the same reason, note that if the computer was booted and locked, it would be affected.

My wife and I are both STEM PhDs, and she left research after our first child was born; we could be a case study for this article.

For us, it was because her field (immunology) was simply less lucrative than mine (computer science). Given the differences in gender distributions between both fields, and the pay gap between fields, I think simplifying this as STEM collectively isn't sufficiently granular. I wonder what the rates are for "left CS after child" vs "left biology after child", and how they compare.

With that being said, it's likely that there are also systemic/structural differences as well; research (and academia in particular) is notorious for poor work-life balance (prior to tenure). Social undercurrents of expectation towards primary caregivers would certainly have some influence as well.

I know it shifts the narrative slightly, but I would also be interested to see the effects of PhDs on birthrates, broken down by field, gender, and country of birth. It seems to me that it would be negatively correlated, but I don't have the data to back up that observation.

The scalability problem is fortunately amenable to piecemeal solutions. Some research teams will focus on validation (i.e. novel proof of ____ approaches), others will focus on block propagation, some on bootstrapping (like the OP), novel hash structures for transaction aggregation, etc.

It would be difficult to come out with a new approach that simultaneously advanced the state of the art in every possible scalability dimension. Each individual approach might give a 2-10X improvement on that particular aspect, but it also means that the "bottleneck" keeps shifting, and trending towards scalability.

Source: I'm an academic blockchain researcher.

You may be confused about the point of the parent; this is not a comparison between H1-B or nothing, it's a comparison between H1-B and permanent residency / citizenship.

Specifically, the structure of H1 visas limit the prospects of highly-skilled employees to a subset of all possible domestic employers, since not all employers in the US have the financial means and/or legal expertise to sponsor visas.

If, rather than forcing recently-graduated PhD students (to take one example) to consider only companies that sponsor visas, we could allow them to apply and receive their I-140s with a high probability and at a low cost. Under this system:

- they can take more time to search for jobs and prepare for interviews

- they can afford to negotiate more aggressively with offers, since they won't be expelled from the country if they reject the first offer that comes their way

- they can switch companies, or start their own companies, with no external restrictions beyond the obvious financial ones

In general, their prospects as employees would be greatly expanded, and their base of negotiation with employers on the whole would improve.

Hope this makes sense.

Edit: The above reasoning may not apply to employees from countries with reciprocity agreements with the US who do not wish to give up their permanent residency in their home countries (if those countries' reciprocity agreements would require that). I'm not aware of any that are like this, however.

From an outsider's perspective, it seems like an obvious hypothesis that increased happiness is negatively correlated with depression.

My question is, is this work assessing whether an existing, confirmed hypothesis (e.g. happiness counters depression) holds true for a different population, or is it assessing whether this hypothesis holds true at all [0]?

The paper appears to focus entirely on ASD subjects, so this delineation was not clear to me, at least on an initial skim of the paper.

Also, I feel like a more detailed treatment of hedonic and eudaimonic happiness from the perspective of ASD would have been beneficial in providing a better context to the reader. Maybe this is well-known in the domain?

[0] and happens to focus on this population for access, funding, or other ancillary reasons

For reference, 300PB (the amount referenced in the article) using the same pricing would cost $25M. Still might be a reasonable one-time cost for migration for a large corporation, though, even disregarding the "bulk" rates they'd see at that scale.

According to their research manifesto, they seem to only be interested (at least, at the moment) in blockchain-related research. I feel that there is quite a lot of promising research questions in distributed technologies more generally, so hopefully they will consider expanding their scope over time, perhaps as more funding becomes available.

In the absence of on-the-job experience/growth for less-experienced developers, it forces them back into more academic training programs. I personally think this is likely to lead to exacerbated "degree inflation", where MS degrees will be the new minimum expectation for these new "entry-level" (read, Tier 2+) jobs.

Previously, they made a hard push to make sure that their science was "applied" science, but that's softened a bit in their pitches lately [0].

The current iteration has a 4-axis evaluation metric [1], where the value of a given project is measured by the area of the polygon.

So, you can make theoretical advances that don't go into products, but it's better for you if they do.

[0]: Disclaimer: I've been recruited by Google's research arm, but haven't worked there.

[1]: https://ai.google/research/philosophy/

I've worked in a similar system to what you described, with the top-most PI contributing essentially zero to publications directly. However, their fundraising efforts were singlehandedly paying the stipends/salary of 40+ researchers under them. I felt like it was totally fair to include them in the authors list, given that the research wouldn't have been possible without their efforts.

I doubt the parent academic had O(1000) first author publications, nor is that mentioned in the article.

Everyone is focusing on the Maginot Line metaphor, and possible historical inaccuracies in what the author wrote. However, the important word from the title is not "Maginot", it's "Digital".

In reading the author's assessments of a wide range of topics, including free speech, digital militarization, and more, I found that there was actually quite a lot of valuable takeaways from their perspective, even for the reader that doesn't agree with 100% of the content.

However, if you are finding yourself roadblocked by the comparison to the Maginot Line, I encourage you to disregard this portion of the text and skip past it; the loss of the metaphor is not fatal to the rest of the content.

I think the article was written in such a way as to trigger the Barnum effect [0], since most people think of themselves as "smart".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

> Another reason for their lack of specificity could be the absence of South Asian data in their datasets.

In 2016, there was a 100:1 ratio for Europeans vs East Asians in their datasets. I don't know how it was for South Asians, and I imagine it's probably somewhat better now, but I think this is likely a big factor.