lasfter

> I believe people have the right to create life

This is the crux of my disagreement with you, and you haven't really presented an argument for your position.

> if no one is ever justified to bring others into being then all life is the product of injustice

This is exactly what I'm saying. I've said why I believe it's unjust, and you agree with the core of my reasoning; that unborn children can't consent to their birth. If you have an argument for why that doesn't make procreation a moral harm then I'm all ears.

Can you guarantee the children won't suffer? If not, then again you're unilaterally deciding the risk is justified.

> they'll also be free to decide if life is something they want to personally continue living or not

Really? It's okay to force people into existence because they are free to commit suicide?

It seems like you could justify anything with this line of reasoning. "Why are you mad at me? If you don't like it, just kill yourself."

No, they mean that the children did not consent to birth. It is selfish to have children whatever your motivation, because at some level you unilaterally decide that the suffering they will inevitably feel throughout their life is justified.

Why does continuing the species matter? What is the inherent good in that? As it stands you're just presenting an argument from nature.

If I can sign a binding contract that regulates how my data will be used for as long as I have this software then I'm happy to use most products.

Your examples don't capture what is happening here. Fig is freely downloadable, with implicit terms of use. They can say whatever they want in HN comments, but that has no bearing on what the software will actually do. If I buy a compiler, I get explicit terms of use. If I use an open-source compiler, I know what I'm using and I can change it if it's doing something sketchy, or roll back if it updates in some way I don't like. I wouldn't use a proprietary compiler I didn't pay for. Image editors too. And you can bet I wouldn't let either of those use the network (why do they need to?)

Moreover, the potential harm of my code or my images being leaked is much smaller than every keystroke into the terminal being leaked. Not even saying anything about Fig requiring access to other aspects of your machine too. So even if Fig did have a binding contract I'd be wary, because if the app gets exploited the consequences could be devastating.

I detest that it has become normalized to grant tech companies access to personal data with only limp promises that it won't be misused.

If you give Fig permissions to look at what you are typing into the terminal, you should be prepared for them to look at what you are typing into the terminal and use it how it best serves them. They're asking for more permissions than that of course.

Imagine giving FedEx a copy of your house keys "just so they can guarantee safe delivery" without any legal recourse if the delivery people decided to help themselves to the contents of your fridge, or make photocopies of your documents.

> We will never sell data. That just isn't the business we want to build

These are just words from strangers on the internet. You're offering a free and auto-updating app. You don't give me a contract guaranteeing anything. Most terms of use/privacy policies have a clause stating it can be updated without notice and when you do have actual policies on your site I'm sure they will be similar.

At any point you can decide that actually, you do want to share my data, or share access to it through one of your products. Maybe you won't call it "selling" (the same way Zuckerberg can tell Congress that Facebook doesn't sell anyone's data).

Maybe you don't decide to share my data, but Fig gets acquired and the new management decides to. Maybe an attacker gains access to the data and shares it. Maybe an attacker compromises an update, turning all Fig instances into keyloggers, and paired with the required email addresses uses it to compromise other data.

These are beautiful! And I second the other comment asking how it works. A good candidate for a blog post if you're looking for a more appreciative audience than your coworkers.

I don't tell lies about bad papers, only give some peremptory praise so that reviewers don't have ammunition to kill my submission. E.g. if a paper makes a false contribution X and a true contribution Y, I only mention Y. If I were to say "So-and-so claimed X but actually that's false" I would have to prove it, and unless it's a big enough issue to warrant its own paper, I don't want to prove it. Any ways, without having the raw data, source code etc for the experiments, there is no way for me to prove that X is false (I'm not a mathematician). Then the reviews will ask why I believe X is not true when peer-review accepted it. Suddenly all of my contributions are out the window, and all anybody cares about is X.

The situation is even worse when the paper claiming X underwent artifact review, where reviewers actually DID look at the raw data and source code but simply lacked the attention or expertise to recognize errors.

I'm not taking bribes, I'm paying a toll.

Cooking results seems like outright cheating to me.

I suppose it depends on how you define nice? If you cheat at some point people will catch on, even if you don't face any real consequences. So if you want prestige within your community then cheating isn't the way to go.

If you want to look impressive to non-experts and get lots of grant money/opportunities, I'd go for lots of straightforward publications in top-tier venues. Star findings will come under greater scrutiny.

The issue is that the authors of bad papers still participate in the peer-review process. If they are the only expert reviewers and you do not pay proper respect to their work, they will squash your submission. To avoid this, papers can propagate mistakes for a long time.

Personally, I'm always very careful to cite and praise work by "competing" researchers even when that work has well-known errors, because I know that those researchers will review my paper and if there aren't other experts on the review committee the paper won't make it. I wish I didn't have to, but my supervisor wants to get tenured and I want to finish grad school, and for that we need to publish papers.

Lots of science is completely inaccessible for non-experts as a result of this sort of politics. There is no guarantee that the work you hear praised/cited in papers is actually any good; it may have been inserted just to appease someone.

I thought that this was something specific to my field, but apparently not. Leaves me very jaded about the scientific community.

Powerpoint I'm guessing?

I'm usually of the same mind, but this is one scenario where individual action actually can help. For example, driving less won't significantly affect climate change even if most people do it, since the biggest contributors are industrial processes.

On the other hand, nearly all of the animal cruelty from factory farms stems from people buying meat from them. So if most people eat less meat, then factory farms actually will suffer.

100%. Lichess is an astounding achievement of FOSS and I wish it got more love in general. I can't think of any other open-source website with as much traffic and with as much complex functionality.

If you're curious about classical Iranian music, I highly recommend looking up Kayhon Kalhor. He is an extremely talented Kurdish musician (mainly playing the kamancheh, which is a sort of proto-violin) who often collaborates with Yo-Yo Ma. I particularly like Ascending Bird, in collaboration with the Brooklyn Rider. His duet performance of Morghe Sahar with Yo-Yo Ma is amazing too.

Hayedeh, Mohammad Shajarian and, more recently, his son Homayoun Shajarian are also amazing singers. Chera Rafti is very popular introduction to Homayoun.

Certainly not on the scale of Amazon.

Because some of the money also goes to Sally who genuinely needs help. I don't understand how you can be okay with people starving or working themselves to death to survive and provide for their families, just because others do things you disapprove of.

You're also ignoring the fact that someone who is eligible for this kind of social security and spends it all on booze is probably unwell and needs treatment for addiction and the conditions that cause it. In many cases, the cause of addiction is poverty itself.

This fear of being "scammed" by the Joes and Steves of the world is completely irrational. The government is taking a big chunk of your money anyways. What's being proposed is that instead of spending tax dollars on killing poor people abroad, you spend it on helping poor people at home, regardless of their work ethic.

You're absolutely right, unfettered capitalism is at the root of all this. I just wanted to point out that technology is not exempt, seeing as SV-style idealists seem to think technology will solve the world's problems.

The entire hardware industry is dependent on human or environmental exploitation to acquire materials for batteries and chips.

Cobalt and Tantalum are mined by child slaves in the Congo, smuggled to Rwanda and Zambia, then branded as "ethical". Rare earth refineries destroyed Baotou lake in China, rendering surrounding villages destitute, and threatened to contaminate the groundwater that sustains a huge portion of the Chinese population.

If you look into other materials that electronics depend on you'll see similar problems.

Electronics cause astronomical suffering.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-20/deadly-mi...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...

[3] https://www.newsweek.com/2015/02/13/where-apple-gets-tantalu...

[4] https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr62/3183/2016/en/

Instead we give that access to Palantir workers? How is that any better?

I highly recommend The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. Trees signal their neighbours of incoming dangers so they have to time to e.g. pump tannins into their leaves to deter animals that would munch on them.

This seems like a great approach! I'm glad you're aiming for something better, and I hope you're successful.

From the FAQ, under What's the hidden cost?: "[...] we do not sell your information."

From the privacy policy, under How We Use The Information We Collect: "To send [...] information about jobs and third party products and services in which we think you may be interested."

So you may not be selling my information, but you're definitely selling access to it.

Seems like the hidden cost is another source of spam email.

I wasn't always first world city folk, I've seen the horror and my family has been touched by it. I'd rather never see it again, though unfortunately news from my former home often makes it unavoidable.

If you need to see brutality to empathize with the brutalized, then go ahead and look at the gore. But I think most people are emotionally capable enough to realize that executions aren't pleasant experiences without photo evidence.

That's a fair take. I've seen plenty of this where I'm from, so I don't really have the stomach for more.

Distressing can be pretty subjective, and I was definitely not expecting to be THAT distressed. Figured other people might also be caught off guard.

The warning at the top of this article did not prepare me for the images, so I'll offer an additional one: the images are more disturbing than you think. Consider turning images off to read the content.

I still say "themselves" with singular "they", in western Canada

Lots of bioinformatics use cases too, getting frequencies of patterns in protein-protein interaction networks for example.