planetguy

No, what I'm saying is that punching people isn't a worthwhile endeavour.

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Most facebook controls are buried three levels of counterintuitive links down in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".

Or to put it another way, if I can't figure out how to make facebook show me stuff that isn't shite, how are ordinary people going to figure it out?

edit: Also I've figured out that the reason I no longer hear from an awful lot of my facebook friends is that I've probably set at least half of 'em to "ignore" due to 'em posting too much garbage.

Farmville could be blocked relatively easily. These can't be blocked at all.

Actually, I just discovered that ads keep appearing even if you defriend the person!

I just defriended someone who works for a social game company because they were pushing waaaay too many ads through to my feed. I felt bad about doing it because I don't mind the guy on a personal level, but shit it was annoying. Anyway, having defriended him I reloaded my news feed only to find that the ad was still there!

Now, maybe that's a one-off and the servers hadn't quite synchronized yet, but damn. Facebook makes me dump my friends to avoid ads and still gives me the ads!

Quite possibly. Certainly in the old days one could express an opinion that "Hey, maybe there's certain advantages to copyright law" without getting modded down to numbers so low that the HN system refuses to express them.

Y'know that book "Fifty Shades Of Grey"? Well that's what your comment's gonna go through in the next hour if you disagree with (I can't believe I'm saying this) the hivemind.

edit: Also, what's with this new "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down" message you get if people start downvoting your posts? I've had it swallow a bunch of (intelligent) posts this morning due to the fact that I expressed an unpopular opinion on a copyright thread.

That fucking does it.

>The majority of the HNers believe that there should be no intellectual property at all.

Most also make their living off producing intellectual property, which is... interesting at the very least.

Also most will totally get onboard the intellectual property train as soon as it's the IP of a sympathetic target (e.g. The Oatmeal) that's being threatened.

Basically the average HNer believes that copyright law should be "I can have whatever I want for free", hasn't thought it through too carefully beyond that.

Yes as and no. Fundamentally weight gain/loss really is a matter of calories in vs calories out; if you're burning more calories than you're consuming then you're gonna be losing weight. It's akin to saying that all you need to do to win at golf is to hit the ball really hard towards the hole -- true, but not necessarily good advice.

The reason sometimes we put too much emphasis on the basic-thermodynamics side of things is that we're busy fighting a war against dumb fad diets.

But once you acknowledge the basic calories in vs calories out principle, you can start thinking about what foods make it easiest to maintain a caloric deficit. Even the most 'traditional' of health authorities acknowledge that this is a factor, which is why they won't say "Hey, whatever, eat three slices of chocolate cake a day and nothing else". The first factor is making sure you get sufficient nutrition along with your calories, the second is making sure you feel full while maintaining a caloric deficit. There's a growing acknowledgement that low-carb diets can help with both of these.

This study suggests a third factor: that eating a low-carb diet can actually boost your base metabolic rate. How? Not sure. It would be interesting to see whether it gets replicated in a larger scale study.

>In my belief this is patently disrespectful, in the same way that it was disrespectful for people to call Muhammed Ali "Cassius" after he changed his name

Possibly, but since I don't respect Kimmy, it's appropriate that I should call him by his (sensible) birth name rather than the (ridiculous and embarrassing) name he chose for himself.

I don't respect Cassius Clay much either. Seriously, all that bragging is gauche. Saying you're "the greatest" just because you're pretty good at punching people? Get back to me when you've won a Fields Medal, dude.

Dunno, a message? A notification?

"Card" isn't intuitive because this isn't the way people use cards in real life. The only analogy for using cards as a notification I can think of is in an old novel where a visitor comes to your door, your butler shows them into the parlour, and brings you their calling card so you can decide whether you want to see 'em. This nowadays lies outside most folks' field of experience.

You do realize that if people like Kim Dotcom ... is that really his name? Fuck him, apparently his name is Kim Schmitz and I don't care what stupid name he changed his name to.

Wait, sorry, I got distracted, let me start my paragraph again.

You do realize that if people like Kim Schmitz win their legal cases it'll just mean a massive push to change the law? If current laws aren't good enough to stamp out things like MegaUpload (which, let's face it, is a massive scale piracy site which exists to make money off other people's IP) then the laws will be changed until they can.

That's not how it works. Instead, Crelm toothpaste will note that you've liked them and forevermore your friends will get stories posted directly by Crelm toothpaste with the heading

Jerf likes Crelm Toothpaste [blah blah blah a big picture depicting how wonderful Crelm toothpaste is]

From talking to other people about it (and also from the only one other comment in this thread that goes "right on, I thought I was going crazy") I'm thinking it might be a limited rollout so far... a lot of people seem to have no idea what I'm talking about, but how could you miss it when your newsfeed suddenly starts acquiring a bunch of stories posted by random jerks you've never heard of?

They don't post things I don't like -- they merely like things I don't like and the things they like post things on their behalf and without their knowledge.

Even if you put a person on "ignore" the ads will still show up.

Actually I've discovered that the ads keep appearing even if you do hide all their posts from your feed.

I'm considering leaving facebook for the first time, because of the Sponsored Stories thing, which is showing up with disturbing regularity, and frequently winds up as ads for things that make me angry.

Nowadays, if you "Like" something, then that something can pay for the privilege to insert whatever stories it likes into your friends' facebook feeds, under the heading "so-and-so likes such-and-such" followed by your own message. Interestingly the person whose name is being used for the advertisement has no idea what ads are going out under their name.

Two of these in particular show up in my facebook feed several times a week and raise my blood pressure every time they do. One is a particularly annoying evangelical preacher slash motivational speaker who fills up my newsfeed with god-stuff due to the fact that a vague acquaintance I've met a couple of times happens to "like" him. Another is a political thing which fills up my newsfeed with posts I find highly disagreeable under the name of another friend of mine.

What were they thinking? Facebook has designed a feature which makes me hate my friends.

It took me a long time to figure out that you meant "principle" rather than "principal".

For school teachers, perhaps the reason might be principal.

I think the US regulations about car seats might be entirely different, but I haven't looked into the details.

Sounds difficult -- the oil wells of Saudi Arabia can only produce so much oil per day

Yep, he sure has some wacky ideas about history. Still, gotta give him credit for the fact that his wacky ideas are at least unusual -- he seems to have developed his stupid belief system for himself rather than acquiring it wholesale from someone else.

Also, he sure is good at chess.

Statistically very few acorns will wind up finding the correct conditions to grow into a full oak tree, so until further notice I just see a nut.

> "This kind of violent activity tends to become more prevalent and audacious when grown men and women can no longer provide food and shelter for their families."

I doubt there's much overlap between "people who would commit armed extortion against a giant company" and "people who can't feed their families".

This isn't a crime of desperation, it's a crime carried out by organized criminals who have been in the business for a long time.

Pretty much it. This is also a good illustration of the difference between the private and the public sector. In the private sector your boss would rather keep all his employees, but your boss's boss, or your boss's boss's boss, would rather cut costs and increase profit.

Start working for the government, though, and every level of management is keen on having as many people beneath them as possible, and there's no real desire at any level to reduce costs; the less efficient your department is the bigger your budget is and the more important you look.

Occasionally a politician will sweep through with an attempt to cut costs (they're the only ones who even pretend to care) -- the bureaucracy will respond by firing the most useful and publicly visible of their employees to ensure that service levels drop thus justifying their case for an increased budget later on.

Or else men just thought the "second best looking" was better looking than the "best looking" one.

Or else men don't like it when the only photo is a black and white close-up from an odd angle -- makes it look like you're hiding something.

Well that's even worse, as the whole cost is pinned not just on landlords but on a single generation of landlords. Bam, I just took away hundreds of thousands of dollars of your money with a stroke of a pen, how do you feel about that?

Much better overall if the increased cost merely gets reflected in a rise in wages for unskilled labour in the city. If indeed it ever is an actual problem which I don't believe it is.

That's a shame, because this writer is far better than most science journalists.

If you're out there, anonymous writer, nice work!

This might be the case sometimes; in this case the best-looking one isn't in the unattainably-beautiful class though. Her nose is kinda big.

In this case I think it just indicates that the initial judges did a poor job of judging who the most attractive one was. Or perhaps that the black and white picture used by the most attractive woman is a turn-off.

As for the "most attractive" man, he has a nice smile and nice eyes but his baldness and undefinable ethnicity might be a turnoff for the average woman.

Or to satisfy both crowds it could have been either, and we could have assumed that the reader is smart enough to be able to know how many square feet there are in a square metre, to within the desired accuracy.

Ten and a bit square feet to the square metre. Know it, use it, love it.

This right here is astoundingly good science journalism. Accurate (to the best of my knowledge) and clear, that's all I ask, and this brief article in The Economist gets it right.

Am I missing something, or is the writer's name not mentioned?

I think it's an extremely useful blog post. It's a fantastic perspective check for people who might be going through a similar process.

Y'know what? Twenty-nine rejections and one offer is a perfectly normal rate, not just for faculty positions but for many things in life, but it doesn't make each one less painful. When you're stuck in the middle of it and you don't know how the story is going to end, you can lose perspective.

I'm applying for faculty positions at the moment.

I haven't even got one rejection letter yet. A few rejection emails, in each case many months after I'd given up all hope of getting the job, is all I've got to show for it.

Sigh. Good thing I'm pretty.