30 karma · joined April 29, 2017
Technically, we are apes, you and me. Hominids, Great apes.
The degree of certainty we have about that and about core concepts of evolution is such that there's simply no room left for an honest discussion. If we look for places to explore alternative ideas, there're: sci-fi, comics and religion.
I get it, really. World's change quick, people don't. They have life, it hurts, they're sad. We're empathetic, we're sad too. We don't want to be sad, so we don't want them to be sad. See? Easy. Except the fact that it doesn't help anybody other than mild therapeutic effect. And is completely irrelevant to this thread.
If anybody cares to explain and expand what is that moral issue I'm missing here or how is it relevant, I'm all ears.
I feel like I've put much more effort in making that social interaction fruitful and got only lazy "I'm sorry for you" in return. Ouch.
Look, luddism is bad for everybody in a long term. We saw riots against Uber in some country where people turn cars upside down or burn them. It hurts their earnings and they feel it's unfair. And you may say it's immoral for Uber to do so. But what they did is simple. They identified multiple huge inefficiencies in that market: pricing, negotiation, checkout, reputation. Solved it and found a way to profit from it. And that will eventually happen at every corner where huge inefficiency exists due to mere lack of communication and price negotiation. And yes, prices in most cases will have to go down and become less disperse and some won't like it at all. But that's just competition reenabled by technology.
Is it immoral? I don't think so, because net effect is positive. Is that your right to scam tourist 10x more for airport-hotel trip or take 2x longer route just to earn a bit more? Technically yes, but who would indorse such behaviour? You don't like the price? Don't take that client. Platform is systemically lowering prices or violates existing regulations? Vote for better regulations, vote for enforcing those that already exist. Platform is fundamentally broken? Well, make a better one. Technically, it's not that hard, Uber is one of the most replicated business ideas at the moment.
And on that guy complaining that oh those competitors who are scraping their prices. So they're scraping each other and protecting their websites from being scraped by each other? So at the end they all have competitors information, but pumped lots of resources in scraping, protection and trying to serve content to both bots and clients? Wow, what a tragedy. What a horrible person would want it to stop. If that's it, they could just as simply pick up a phone and agree to share that data between them, because in the end outcome will be the same, minus resources wasted on arms race.
Or better, from the beginning make your data machine-friendly. Because eventually, they'll do that. Eventually somebody like Google or Amazon or some other big company will find an incentive to make them gradually and willingly share and structure that data. And somebody will find a way and resources to integrate that data into reusable knowledge graphs and somewhere along the way create a positive feedback loop. And somebody will profit from that huge. Consumers will surely benefit, that somebody will, data-donor companies that adapt will do.
And don't forget there's some progress in ML, automated decision making and all that. I personally as a customer would love to have best prices, objective products comparison with zero interaction with multiple whacky small vendors websites. I'd better have smth like Siri do that for me.
One way or another, it's happening. Small businesses have little to say here if anything. My unpopular opinion was to recognise that process, do something to stop wasting resources on war between scrapers and anti-scrapers and hopefully avoid appearance of another single monopolist from solving the problem if we don't. Because if we don't we'll just have another few years of HN headlines about how bad that X unicorn company is to somebody.
Now what's wrong with that?
Make an API, put your site behind CDN. Couldn't be more simple. And there's more they could do.
> - There are sometimes actual reasons beyond wanting "shaky profits" for wanting to limit what site users can do, including development resources to built features and APIs, as well as the actual cost of the computations.
Already answered that.
> - And I have no idea where your assertion about "dirty tricks" comes from. I'm having trouble finding anything "dirty" in trying to detect people abusing the system, and temporarily blocking their access.
There was an attempt to make a startup to compare prices in local stores, that caused an outrage among shop owners. They too claimed they were "abused". If you dive into how all those standards like html, http and etc were designed in a first place, you'd find that they were made with an idea that data is expected to be easily digestible by machines. Fighting it is futile and postpones us from having nicer things.
You could just export your prices in some CSV form on regular basis if making a proper API is too hard and redirect incoming scraping traffic to some README page instead of fighting a battle you can't possibly win? That's of course only valid if that business doesn't mostly rely on depriving customers and competitors from information about prices. In that case you have my compassion, but it's clear that pro-community-social-bla-bla-bla rhetoric is nothing more that a disguise. That I understand, but oppose.
Or should I finally respond to that lame remark about neighborhood you're trying to push? Meh.
You assumed that people who don't want their data being scraped are the nice guys and people who want to use that data are the baddies. Nope, my point was that it's the other way around and if you're truly concerned with community wellbeing you actually have to be on my side of this argument.
I support every point in your response expect that I don't get your motivation to fight for folks who either don't understand how internet works or consciously use dirty tricks to block information access just to protect their shaky profits.
Look it up, my first comment in this thread was about making it illegal because I think everybody would benefit from making it so. If you publish your data and it's accessible by browser and not copyrighted, we shouldn't make it hard to collect that data for automated processing.
Yes, and they extract that benefit because in the process they add a value to that information for end-user.
> Am I missing some other fundamental right that applies here?
Yes. When it's not prohibited by law, it's allowed.
After that I'll contact you in this thread and share the results if you're interested. I don't expect your or mine opinion changed, but I guess it'll be stupid not to test.
idk exact reasoning, but it seems like they've decided to maximise design focus on primary user experience from device sacrificing almost nothing.
> Logitech managed to build a significantly more comfortable mouse
Can you please prove it by a link? I had to build a specific PC for a work-related project about a year ago, wasn't a pleasure.
> Aren't you really going out there on a severely stretched limb to defend this mouse design?
I honestly don't understand the popular kind of critics that Apple receives. Those details and choices are what hooked me into their products. When I see somebody complains about no CD-ROM in laptop or that mouse charging thing or that monitor stand, it feels more like trolling.
I mean really, more comfortable mouse? Which one is that?
That's the easiest thing to do, yes. But you can bring it to apple care, they do battery replacement for smth like $35 I guess. And if it's factory problem they just replace it, afaik.
> Remember this was a wireless mouse at a time when wireless was definitely not the preferred choice
At the time it had regular batteries you could replace by yourself and we were talking about latest versions. But anyway, I don't see how it can be relevant.
That was the whole purpose of putting it in a bottom. The thing works several months on a single charge and it takes just a couple of hours to recharge. And it starts giving notification at least a day before battery's depleted.
It's not aesthetics over function mantra, but realisation that they can't be decoupled or developed by separate divisions.
That's what concerns me about Ive leaving. He and Jobs evidently had enough courage to ignore public opinion to make things the right way and in most cases it turned to be excellent decisions. With no successor I'm seriously afraid they'll eventually resort to safe decisions and become another Samsung/MS/Android/whatever..
I always find it disturbing. As every native Russian speaker, I tend to feel it perceive as beautiful and melodic. Just as any other Russian, Ukranian, Greek or whoever else. Sounds like a joke and not a good one. Makes me skip the whole title.
Why are they doing it? Does it really help anybody with immersion?
In a link from this quote: "You have expressed concern that corporations have ‘stolen’ talent from academia. Is this still an issue?" https://www.nature.com/news/ai-talent-grab-sparks-excitement... I can't find a word "stolen" or anything similar being used at all.
Seems like it was introduced by a journalist who wrote final article. And considering that, it's not hard to believe that this journalist may have some opinions on economics that are far from reality, that (probably unconsciously) triggered his word-twisting reflex.
There's always at least 1 post hanging in a top that is about "You don't really need X", which really says "If you're going to keep doing next 5 years what you've been doing last 5 years, don't bother", which as I suspect some read as "Relax, you don't need to bother about this tech, just memorise a few sentences to sound smart if asked about".
It's HN. There's something new? Cool! You managed to serve 1000s users per second from linode $20 node? Awesome! How? What tradeoffs you had to do and where? You have a good idea on how to better make choices about your tech and created some nice decision tree chart? Thank you. Hope it's on github, we'd like to collaborate.
I never said that such point of view don't have consequences. But there is a law and means to enforce it when discrimination is realised. And you can indeed define some reasonable limitations on a limit on speech. But as soon as you go after personal opinions, you do more harm than good.
By doing so, we steal from people a chance to make their own minds and actions. It's an important part of human experience for many. And when that freedom is threatened, they often resist as it were almost an existential threat to them.
We know for a fact now, that humans are evolutionary wired in favour of tribalism and prejudices and overcoming our own nature is a hard and delicate process. And slow, conflicts can last for hundreds and thousand of years. History says that even if you manage to keep them dormant using state force, it's not forever. State will eventually fail and people will continue on killing each other with same amount of enthusiasm if not more. Just have look at pogroms that took place the moment USSR collapsed in brand-new national states, an excellent illustration.
There must be a solution to those problems that relies on force as little as possible, otherwise it's not very sustainable. But instead I see justification of mob justice, thought policing and global censorship. The last one is especially infuriating. Tools that are required to implement such censorship should not exists and will certainly be exploited.
After all, people we disagree with are just regular people, not monsters. Likely, troubled, needing a group they can identify with, lost in rapidly changing world, unneeded, susceptible to human flaws we all have to a certain degree. And yet it's not uncommon to believe that it's a good idea to just dismiss and alienate them and at the same time somehow pretend to hold a higher moral ground. I like those opinions no more than you do. But I see hate, arrogance and cruelty just shapeshifting and nothing good coming out of it.
Well, that's what I strongly disagree with. You either oversimplify it for practical purpose (which exactly what I wanted to point out making this statement) or are simply wrong on a fundamental level. Distinction between data and code is artificial. It really helps us when we programs, but hurts when we think about security issues and that mindset in a way is an exploit itself.
If you look into security-related updates in any mature interpreted language, you'll see that 99% of them are related to data processing, not some restriction being forgotten. Think about good-old stack overflows errors, where your data suddenly becomes a code, or numerous exploits in simple text formats, xml parsers or PDF nightmare.
Real security problems have very little to do with the fact that malicious data was carried by some executable code, they do just find without it. In fact, having so heavily-tested VM that there are, makes daily usage of average computer user much safer that it would be without it.
> I don't live in the EU, and this is the exact sort of attack that I'm doing my best to protect myself against. I didn't mean that new hysteria about being tracked by ads and browsers. It's a toothless issue, that poses no significant threat and we as community could entirely fix it in less than a year, I just don't think anybody's capable really cares. After all, if we can have some GDRP joke and that makes people feel better, why even bother?
I was really pointing that your traffic is compromised at ISP level and if you were a person of any interest, analysis could be bought at black market, just as your SMS could be intercepted without you knowing. It's business.
Oh, and don't let me start about hardware level, which we trust, but as it turns out, should not.
> That's a larger pain than simply disallowing scripting, and does nothing about things like tracking. Unless you live don't live in EU, your data is guaranteed to be tracked, stored and if any value is found, it's being sold.