nmrm

For people who do serious article writing, I imagine this might be considered as a "cheapening" their work. For instance, I imagine some editors also resent the notion that encyclopedia editing is somehow reducible to plugging facts into the right templates. Of course the bot's authors don't really believe they are creating articles as high-quality as good human-edited entries, but the emotional reaction on the part of other editors is at least something I can comprehend.

I'm not really in tune with Wikipedia, so this is mostly conjecture.

edit: reverted edit, added first sentence of 2nd paragraph.

> It's relevant to working for a private, for-profit business in the sense that the alternative is often doing an internship for a private company.

I still think there's a pretty significant ethical difference between not-for-profit research and a for-profit business. Even without the student-teacher relationship, unpaid internships in CS are pretty ethically dubious and uncommon.

To the extent that you're correct, you're just discrediting Rand as a true private sector authoritarian.

edit: I've read the book.

edit: Pretty sure not eating McDonald's every day is not an affront to capitalism. To assume that critics of McDonald's food are automatically calling for regulation/whatever, instead of just trying to educate people to help them act in their self-interest, is a caricature. Similarly, suggesting any critic of Google is automatically some sort of proto-communist is a ridiculous caricature.

Also, my position has been consistent. I'm editing so much because I feel the need to write very, VERY clearly for you, because you seem to misinterpret everything that's not extremely carefully stated. {edit: and upon additional review after posting, I realize that there's some tiny thing that you could misinterpret. So I go back an edit; mostly slight rewording}

E.g. the "apparent contradiction" you pointed out isn't at all -- it's a conspiracy theory that the article's author doesn't believe, which makes it a a rhetorical device. Please feel free to point out any others.

{edit: grammar. Also, yeah, triple posts! Is this better?}

{edit: also, I always stop editing after the first comment, but usually not before. The point of indicating edits to prevent diverging discussion and lack of context; as long as there's no reply, I don't see the annoying edit comments as necessary. Sorry if I offended you...}

The article is about power, not money. Also, there's no suggested course of action. In fact, a legitimate course of action could be "stop using Google's services so that if shit hits the fan, they don't have your data".

How could enlightened self-interest of consumers ever possibly be construed as an assault on liberty (or whatever-the-hell)?

It's really best never to think of those you disagree with in terms of flat caricatures.

Also, gress: I don't necessarily disagree with you. But there is a distinction.

>The article never stated that Page was building a private army. You did.

Oh come on. It's the entire damn point of the article. Without this running narrative, the article's just a list of Google's most successful products and its recent acquisitions. Despite your claim, the article isn't simply a list. And the editorializing is the only reason this article is on the front page of HN. Period.

I realize it's just a rhetorical device, but the article reads still like a conspiracy theory. The only thing this article does is, at best, lump critics of Google's privacy behavior in with conspiracy nuts.

And there's no reason to appeal to fantastical "what-if's" when there are real, demonstrable problems.

> Why can't it be both-and vs. either-or?

It can be (see below), and I think the notion that I somehow implied Google's new expansions cannot be problematic is mostly a fabrication of your indigence.

It's just that I think the narrative of the article is completely ridiculous and trivializes actual avenues for abuse.

What is Google doing to do with military technology? It has 3 options:

1. Use it to create technology which augments its other ventures.

2. Sell to US Govt or our allies.

3. Create a private army or sell to our enemies.

2 and 3 don't worry me for the same reason I don't worry about Boeing taking over the world; military tech is closely monitored and regulated. I don't have to know Page's motives to know that he knows that if he were try try 3, he'd probably end up in prison or dead.

I don't have to be omniscient to assume he probably wouldn't take that kind of risk. And hell, I don't even need to know anything about him to know that if he did, the US military would be able to easily unilaterally shut him down.

Scenario 1 worries me (despite what you've read into my previous comments), but it's really just an additional element of the privacy problem. And the author was too busy telling a cute story to focus on non-insane potential avenues of abuse.

TL;DR: Rhetoric matters, and the rhetoric of this article is unhelpful at best, and possibly harmful.

Similarly, militarization of police and decreased personal privacy expectations are probably not completely unrelated. And we don't have to focus on one to the exclusion of the other.

2. Actually, yes, Google is reading your emails. Even if you don't use gmail, they probably know who you are and who you talk with and what you talk about.

Eroding privacy is a real social problem. I'm not sure why you are so quick to trivialize.

3. Tech corporations may have great PR, but they are certainly aware of the fact that they externalize costs in the forms of e-waste dumping and horrible labor conditions. Just because you don't have to see this stuff doesn't mean it does not exist.

Right, and I think emphasizing nutty conspiracy theories distracts from the more important systemic and gradual, but perhaps less exciting, impact that Google actually has (e.g. on privacy.)

You don't need to resort to conspiracy in order to isolate real ways in which Google has having large -- arguably negative -- impacts on our everyday lives.

> On what basis do you doubt this?

Mostly motive. Google doesn't particularly stand to benefit from building a private army. But also, I used all my tin foil heating up potatoes.

As for all of the internet of things/robotics acquisitions and R&D... well, I'm not in the board room during these discussions, but I highly doubt that building robotic armies is on anyone's mind. More likely, Page et al. see this as a next major growth area and would like to stay ahead of the curve. Esp. the Boston Dynamics acquisition is probably less about military applications than general experience with complicated robots.

The author is the CEO of a payment processing company, so distracting from this is pretty much the exclusive reason the article even exists.

It's overblown hype. Kids should understand multiple algorithms for addition/subtraction/multiplication/division for the same reason that we teach CS undergrads multiple sorting algorithms.

The point isn't to be able to pound out a sorting algorithm on the spot, but that learning about sorting algorithms provides a good "prototype" of thinking about algorithms more generally. Ditto for mathematical operators.

The problem is that parents never really had a deep understanding of even basic arithmetic. It's a self-reproducing cycle, and the USA will continue to lag behind the rest of the developed world in mathematics if our primary standard is "how the past generation did things".

>What age groups are affected by Common Core?

K-12

> I wonder if this helps or hurts the homeschooling crowd.

Ostensibly helps, because more teaching aids/material will be available, and knowing several algorithms to achieve the same thing helps you understand the concept in a much deeper way.

Actually it doesn't matter, because home schoolers aren't obligated to follow CC standards, and are likely to treat anything CC-related as pure unadulterated evil without actually evaluating pedagogical evidence.

Suppose after a week of lectures on sorting, you ask your students to implement a sorting algorithm. From one student, you get back a 400 line monstrosity that somehow, miraculously, does the right thing. Do you shrug it off and say "as long as it works", or do you grow very concerned that the student is somehow missing the forest for the trees, even though they arrived at an apparently correct answer?

In my experience teaching, it's far more likely that the student doesn't understand some basic, necessary underlying concepts than that the student is very bright and was trying to come up with a super optimized sorting algorithm. Both will exist, and you have to differentiate. The worst bit is that often the idiots know this, and imagine themselves to be super intelligent, so they're impossible to teach.

IMHO "just get the right answer" has never been a reasonable way to teach math.

> All this has done is remove parents from the teaching process.

I hear this a lot. We're basically just talking about different ways of doing arithmetic or multiplication.

It's akin to bitching and moaning because someone taught your kid insertion sort, and you only know bubble sort so now you can't teach your kid sorting.

Is the problem that the curriculum developers are being obtuse, or is the problem that many parents and teachers never really had a deep enough understanding addition/multiplication/division in the first place?

It's pretty scary how few of our elementary/middle school teachers -- who teach math -- cannot differentiate from the definition of addition (a set of axioms), and algorithms which implement addition. Because they don't know the difference between a specification and an implementation, teaching multiple implementations seems silly. But it's not silly at all, and the difference between the definition of a thing and an algorithm matching the definition is something our elementary, middle and high school students can, should, and hopefully will understand -- unmotivated and stubborn teachers/parents be damned.

You left off the part where de facto government granted monopolies helped build the capital base and in many cases directly funded infrastructure investments.

Anyways, this tangent is so completely unrelated to my original point that we might as well be quibbling over wording.

Well then, I don't care much for your notion of "democracy", and don't particularly understand why it would be worth defending or even necessarily better than minority rule in the first place.

Most reasonable definitions of democracy delineate between mere mob rule, and democracy as a governmental philosophy (including aspects like equality before the law).

But I agree in spirit.

Well, you are at KFC. Half the people are putting off the torture for as long as possible, and the other half... well, they're about to willingly eat KFC :-)

Then I noticed the disclaimer (horribly placed; I skipped over it the first time because it looked like a caption text for the banner image): Editor’s note: Simon Black is CEO at London-based Sage Pay.

edit: So, this is a long-form advertisement for a payment processing company. Why do people still read tech crunch?

Also, biometrics for payment? Christ, because payment processing hardware/support/service isn't expensive enough already! And has the past decade of massive privacy violations by both the private and public sectors taught us nothing?

Okay, even if, why does this matter? Lots of suburbanization was motivated by white flight.

> I have no doubt that this benefited whites more than blacks. But it was not rooted in whites trying to get away from blacks/cities/whatever per se.

Not being around minorities most absolutely, undeniably, as a matter of pure fact WAS a motivation for leivttown. Fuck, here's a quote saying as much from the contracts:

Originally, the Levitts’ racist policy was enshrined in the lease itself, which stipulated that “the tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be sued or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.”

No body was bothering to even try to hide it.

It really irks me when all the good stuff is attributed unquestionably to American Entrepreneurship, and for all the accompanying bad stuff there's a long and nuanced story with lots of historical context and no clear, single, indistinguishable cause.

This sort of thing is too common. Here's another instance of this sort of reasoning far closer to home: rugged entrepreneurship clearly explains the massive success of the US tech industry, but exploitative labor practices in hardware and device manufacturing are caused by a myriad of global geopolitical and economic circumstances that cannot be obviously explained by any one factor.

edit: to be clear, "the story is complicated and there's no one cause" is the correct answer in both cases. Obviously. But also, in many cases, entrepreneurship benefits either passively or actively from nascent conditions. For instance, large swaths of sub-urbanization were undoubtedly driven by white flight.

More seriously, I like lunch meetings. I'd rather get out of work and back to the family an hour earlier than spend it idling with co-workers.

And often times, there's really not a good place to meet. Why drive 10-15 minutes, find parking, etc. at the nearest mall when you can walk down the street to the nearest restaurant in 5 minutes? Plus, I'd never invite a potential client to a mall plaza, esp during the summer...

What you're saying, albeit you managed at least a bit of tact, is that Japanese internment and the genocide of Native Americans don't count as military-assisted oppression because "it was just the minorities".

The second one seems a bit high, but could be plausible if there are choke points.

At the end of the day, social pressure to put down your damn phone is probably the best solution. But if the restaurant isn't up-scale enough to use social pressure, there are probably other options.

Given that a significant number of customers were requesting wifi access, I wonder if some sort of landing page could be used to encourage the customer to choose something more quickly.

Some other subtle tricks might work as well. E.g waiters might give an explicit time frame ("I'll check back in 3 or 4 minutes") instead of the more common open-ended "in a few minutes"/"in a bit"/"later".

It also seems like the "request to be seated elsewhere" problem would be easy enough to solve by allowing customers, when they arrive, to select a table or ask for the soonest available table. I have a feeling most parties would select the latter. And then there's an implicit agreement -- whether a table is selected or not -- that the person will sit where the waiter take them.

The pictures of food/friends/etc. is annoying and probably not solvable except by social pressure. Except maybe the hostess (or another staff member) could field these sorts of requests so that waiters don't get behind with other tables.

The best way to think of it is that markdown is a replacement for .txt. It's not a typesetting language, it's just a conventional way to structure text documents.

Most of the elements of markdown are already there in .txt files from the 80s and 90s. All markup does is standardize how to do headers, lists, code blocks and bold/italic so that you can generate documents that actually contain those elements, but could also just treat a markdown file as a normal .txt.