Hacker News Reader

gottamon Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him

What is the tension about exactly? That they don't align with their own personal political views?

gottamon General questions about the Airbnb Community Commitment

if someone is turning you down on airbnb based upon some arbitrary discriminatory factors, do you think you'd really want to stay with a person like that to begin with?

gottamon Microsoft, I Forgive You

No matter who wrote this post, what it says, or what the people here say in the comments this will always read as viral marketing as if people are paid to praise microsoft.

It's a consequence of the fact I'm now wired to expect it, because these companies have big budgets and actually do spend their money on astroturfing.

gottamon “Your monitor is too old to view this content.”

just an assumption here but I'm going to guess it doesnt apply for all netflix content, just the content where the owner is unnecessarily strict about where they view it

gottamon Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore

its better to have two major players then just one even bigger player.

gottamon Ebay posts every character a user types into the password box

How would you even validate the password server-side if you're salting it at the client level?

gottamon UK votes to leave EU

its knee jerk reactions to the extremist left politics

the internet and the media has taken away a lot of the moderates

gottamon Image Hosting on Reddit

If I remember google video was superior in video quality and looser limitations, it was a place where you could commonly find full documentaries while youtube still had a 11 minute video limit. It was actually google acquiring youtube that caused youtube to loosen their limitations and go for HD. I doubt they bought it for any technical reasons, google's infrastructure was already superior.

gottamon Image Hosting on Reddit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Videos

They did make their own version of youtube at one point, apparently it wasn't enough and they wanted the userbase too.

gottamon Microsoft stops Google being used for Cortana searches

I'm rooting for a competitor that isn't bing. If Microsoft gets any significant market share it could mean yet another monopoly under their belt. They can't even compete directly without having to lock out their competitors.

gottamon Announcing SQL Server on Linux

So basically SQL server on linux is supported until the project isn't fun to work on anymore which then it will be left to rot and eventually support dropped entirely.

gottamon Tim Sweeney: Microsoft wants to monopolise games development on PC

Well, that's not entirely true. A decade ago Microsoft was a big player in PC gaming. Microsoft game studios made some big sellers like age of empires, mechwarrior, freelancer, etc, but was dismantled after their xbox initiative took off.

gottamon Tim Sweeney: Microsoft wants to monopolise games development on PC

There's no problem just as long as things stay that way. Microsoft's PC gaming innovations of the last decade is nothing but half-assed attempts of trying to lock users into their own store front and milk them like they do on their Xbox platform. People are afraid that they'll eventually succeed, this is partially why their main competitors like Steam and GoG have made strides towards supporting Linux, as the day may come where Microsoft will more aggressively try to block out their competitors from their platform.

gottamon Pull request acceptance of women versus men

Given that from this article's stats it even admits there are 15 times more male self-identified programmers then women on github, a 4% difference in pull requests accepted is tiny.

The data is just convenient for anyone with a political agenda to make big claims. If the paper wanted to be genuine they could have gone further - what was rejected? Was there a valid reason? etc

gottamon How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

They will however lose exposure and upvotes on places like HN, which means their overall traffic will drop and they'll lose money like that instead.

gottamon How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

They're very shortsighted. I only ever get to wired.com through things like links from HN so I'm not going to pay them money or disable my adblocker for the reasons they even list in their own article.

This means since I can't view their articles, I definitely won't be upvoting them on places like HN since I can't read them, and I'm sure others are in the same boat.

They could have done this in so many other ways, but they chose the way that was openly hostile to their viewers. Good luck declaring war on your own readerbase, wired.

gottamon How Microsoft Plans to Beat Google and Facebook to the Next Tech Breakthrough

The biggest thing I can think of that MS research delivered in the last few years is the kinect. They hinged a lot upon that being the next thing in gaming, but what is it now really? Their competitors aren't exactly in a rush to copy it... because once again, its a gimmick for a niche market.

Now just look at VR on the other hand... there's many big companies investing in that and there's a lot of hype around it. Heck even Facebook is on board and Microsoft is nowhere to be seen. There's yet another technological revolution that they're missing out on.

gottamon How Microsoft Plans to Beat Google and Facebook to the Next Tech Breakthrough

Microsoft's independent innovations of the last decade are the kind the average person doesn't really want or need. They're making a skype translator... fantastic... but the market for that is still pretty niche.

When Google released maps/street view, or apple announced the iphone, those were the kinds of things that built excitement because they were big ideas, and it was the kind of future we wanted to live in. Microsoft doesn't really do that, and from this article they still don't get it.

gottamon Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

There has been no society in history that has ever truly had an answer for people born into privilege, except ours. We're in the information age, and its possible for people to learn highly technical skills through a bunch of free internet content, and apply it with very little to no starting capital. Sometimes its luck, other times its just a really good idea.

gottamon Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

Rich people network and want their kids to be successful, what a shocking revelation, so different from us poor people.

Chances are if they're slacking off in university then they're going to slack off at work too, which means whatever they're not doing will need someone to be hired to do it anyway.

gottamon Twitter’s Policy Reboot: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

> You're probably not a woman in the tech field on the internet, then.

Can you be sure? You may have just invalidated my own experiences as a woman. Am I obligated to now tell you my gender so you know for sure if you're being misogynist or not? But I guess its okay because I'm an anonymous stranger on the internet and you didn't know I was a woman to give me special treatment? It's a lot to think about.

> Stuff like women should simply be treated equally.

Yes. Women are "stuff".

gottamon Twitter’s Policy Reboot: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

That is a problem, but that's not one that's solvable through human intervention or policy updates since its more a spam issue then simply harassment.

Services all the time like email have to work to combat spam, this is no different.

gottamon Twitter’s Policy Reboot: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

> instead of simply some USENET servers used by some college kids and bored sysadmins, there isn't really a distinction between "threats on the internet" and "threats" any more.

The biggest thing that changed is instead of using anonymous handles, people got into the habit of using their personal information. From the link you included, that woman has what I assume is her name, her photo, her city, and her personal website - most of which is likely a gateway for googling more information. On her actual profile, her latest retweet is millennials mansplaining or something, one could say she's basically baiting a group of people she disagrees with, and further down she's calling Ricky Gervais a "whiny baby" (where does that fit under twitters rules?)

If I was spewing that kind of crap about people with my own name beside it, I guess I'd be worried about people finding where I live and harassing me too. It's mind boggling why people do this to themselves.

> It honestly sounds to me like you're approaching this from first principles / intuition, instead of any data (or analyses of data, which exist) about how internet harassment actually works.

It's why I asked. Maybe it's just that I think of the internet the same way I did 15 years ago where nobody online ever needs to know your name, age, sex, height, opinions, political affiliations, favorite food, etc unless you make it so, and when you want to start over with a clean slate, you can just remake internet accounts rather than having some dumb crap you said 10 years ago stick with you forever on google.

gottamon Twitter’s Policy Reboot: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I find that hard to believe. Trolls who make threats on the internet (and not simply having differing opinions) typically make up a very small minority so they should be manageable by a small ban list (and if they aren't - what kind of stuff are you spewing out that makes so many people waste their time getting angry with you?)

It sounds more to me like even after getting banned, the minority of trolls can just make new accounts and resume their harassment, so the solution here isn't human intervention but a technical solution to disincentivize trolls from making new accounts.

gottamon Twitter’s Policy Reboot: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I don't understand about the scope of this problem, maybe someone can tell me but is it really that big of a deal? What horrible things are being typed out that can't possibly be ignored or dealt with in other ways?

gottamon Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

It's because they DO look through people's files for their own purposes. Example:

https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/

> a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings.

I'm pretty certain they didn't get permission to look at their users movie collections or DVR recordings, they were just flagged for high usage and they went right in to see what those users were storing. For any form of data collection they do, it's a guarantee they're analyzing the outliers... in fact they're practically bragging about the fact they do.

gottamon Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

The more baffling thing is they went as far as to prevent you from blacklisting the telemetry servers via hosts file. The data SO important to them they put that amount of effort into obtaining it.

The only reason I can think of that doesn't resort to tin foil hat theories is to prevent a rise of "windows 10 privacy enhancement" software.

gottamon Seventy years after Adolf Hitler’s death, how Germans see him is changing

The site loads about ~30 scripts in the HEAD tag before it's allowed to render the body, its disgusting.