spaceseaman

This definitely seems like a good place for either regulation or unionization.

Unionization would likely be difficult though due to the low barrier of entry for the job - artificial barriers would have to be created by the union and those break down pretty easily due to human factors (see Walmart).

I'm all for regulation in this case. Require that folks who review content for illegal posts be limited in the amount of content they review in a weekday, must have certain benefits like mental health counseling, and get some vacation / sabbatical from the work.

Risks might be reduced innovation in the field, but the big boys like Facebook and Google have already found excellent ways to snuff out their competition within the existing market.

The scenario at hand in the OP, where a cop murders a completely innocent man through mistake. I agree that a ban on guns would likely solve the problem in the video that you posted.

My point was that your video seemed out of place since the actual issue is that cops in the U.S. are held to a different standard for murder. If cops were held to the same standard, then they could be held accountable for their crimes and some of the public outrage would be alleviated.

If (for the sake of argument) the amount of guns in this country were significantly decreased via a ban and the police still held to a different standard, police would still be able to kill an innocent person out of fear for their life. Racial biases could also cause a cop to be more fearful in a situation and still kill an innocent person without consequence.

I also think that changing how police are prosecuted for crimes is much easier than repealing the second amendment in the U.S. (although both would face fierce opposition).

Does anyone have a link to how to go about generating an image like this?

Did the writer hand make the individual polygons or generate it from an image of themselves?

> does he lose all his rights?

You've just created a pure strawman. Cops should never lose their rights! I am not making such an argument, and I don't see how you got there from my points. I would never argue such a claim.

The cases I'm talking about are not self-defense. They are like the story above. If A murders B, and A is a cop, then A should go to jail regardless of the fear A had in that situation. But this is not what happens in the United States. Cops don't go to jail for shooting perfectly innocent people because the cop can claim they were afraid for their life and thought that B had a gun.

If I'm a civilian, that defense doesn't fly. But if you're a cop, then it does work. That is a flaw in our justice system that needs to be corrected because a perfectly innocent man can be killed by the state and no repercussions are felt.

The state should never be able to kill an innocent man. If they are shooting at you, they aren't innocent. But if you think they have a gun (especially in an open-carry state like Kansas or Texas) then they are innocent and should not be killed.

EDIT: I am saddened by the downvotes. Does the state have the right to kill innocent people if those people own a gun? Doesn't the second amendment protect against this? I simply do not see the legitimate argument for allowing such behavior. This just seems like rabid tribalism for police.

I have a real hard time caring about cops' fears in such a scenario. Innocent until proven guilty is a time-honored maxim of the U.S. justice system, and a cop deciding to kill you completely invalidates that.

Is being a cop scary? Hell yeah and I feel bad for those folks, but if you don't want to constantly be in fear of your life, get another job.

Put cops who murder innocent civilians in jail. End of story. This shouldn't even be a debate in the U.S.

EDIT: Since I had the goal posts moved on me, I want to make it explicitly clear that a cop should be allowed to kill in self-defense, just like any other lawful citizen.

> the phenomenon is rather that HN readers with strong ideological feelings tend to see the site as dominated by, and the mods in cahoots with, their ideological enemies.

I agree, but I don't think that's why this is a popular piece. Such a post would not resonate as well on NeoGAF or ResetERA or even Reddit, but the political leanings of this site propelled this to the front page. There's more to it than just seeing the mods as being in cahoots with enemies. It's the ideology that any moderation is inherently untrustworthy and that the power must be constantly kept 'in check'.

You can find endless examples of folks who feel they are pariahs. I still think that Hacker News has a severe idealogical bend, just like any online community. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that bend matches the mindset of many programmers - techno-libertarianism.

To be clear, I'm not claiming that the moderators have some idealogical bias - I've never come across that. Simply that certain trains of thought are very popular here, and the notion of "free speech" being impeded by aggressive moderation is something that has been rehashed on this site time and time again.

I realize you may have taken issue with my comment because I said "site-runners" in my claim of an ideology. I realize that this was poor word-choice, as I actually meant the YC, not Hacker News - they got conflated in my mind and I apologize for the mistake.

Hacker News has a libertarian leaning ideology among both its community and site-runners. As a result, things like deleted posts, changed thread titles, etc could be seen by folks with such leanings as an impingement on their "free speech" by the site's moderators.

Thus folks want a way to check what has been deleted, changed, or modified by the folks in charge. I imagine this exists to help satisfy that desire.

For an example, note this comment and its corresponding thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16018978

Stereotypes typically don't come from anything. The "stereotype" of an Asian male is someone who

* can't talk to women

* doesn't understand social skills

* has poor hygiene / manners

* values STEM above softer skills

* values hard work and effort

It's pointless to make these claims because such broad generalizations immediately break down the second you meet an Asian man. There's no way to know which (if any) of these stereotypes they uphold.

Some of these sterotypes have a positive bend: Poor social skills imply that they are reserved. Valuing hard work makes you a disciplined person. etc. But these stereotypes are still bad. They lead people to make unfair assumptions about Asian men because they are Asian. There's plenty of literature out there about stereotypes and prejudice and especially about the "model minority" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_minority

From there you may see why folks are downvoting you:

> A common misconception is that the affected communities usually hold pride in their labeling as the model minority. The model minority stereotype is considered detrimental to relevant minority communities because it is used to justify the exclusion of minorities in the distribution of assistance programs, both public and private, as well as to understate or slight the achievements of individuals within that minority. Furthermore, the idea of the model minority pits minority groups against each other by implying that non-model groups are at fault for falling short of the model minority level of achievement and assimilation

EDIT: And as a bonus (since that Wikipedia article is DAMN good) "Scientific studies have revealed that positive stereotypes have many negative and damaging consequences both socially and psychologically." The citations are in the article.

The statement assumes that one considers the poetic qualities as significant as marketability - not useful. You seem to have misunderstood the creators' intentions as they have no interest in providing you a "practical demonstration" or anything practical at all.

Art has little direct use - Michelangelo's David has very little practical value, yet it's significance is immense.

The creators of this project do not care for the practical value of any of this. They wish to experiment in the hope that some poetic qualities of their work will be deemed significant enough to carry on into new works (some of which may actually be useful).

I was not attempting to convince anyone. The above poster claimed that safe spaces were meant to "prolong the coddling" of childhood, yet this directly contradicts the history of creation and specified intention of safe spaces. There is no opinion and thus no "counter-view" to be had about what led to their creation and their creators' intentions as those are facts.

Now one is free to have the opinion that safe spaces stifle discussion, or prevent ideas from being addressed or some other such things - those are all opinions and all views that can have their nuances. But safe spaces were never created to prolong some sense of childhood comfort or safety - like I said, that idea is just a popular meme of the alt-right.

> the less successful ones stay in college and promote "safe spaces" to prolong the coddling.

This is not in any way what a safe space is - stop promoting this completely inaccurate meme to further your own personal viewpoint. It has absolutely nothing to do with being unprepared for "real-life" or some other such nonsense. In fact I'm so confused why you would even bring up such a non-related topic, you must have quite the talent for shifting conversations to your favor.

"In educational institutions, safe space (or safe-space), safer space, and positive space are terms that, as originally intended, were used to indicate that a teacher, educational institution, or student body did not tolerate anti-LGBT violence, harassment or hate speech, thereby creating a safe place for all LGBT students."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-space

(Just to be clear, I have no intention of derailing this thread into the merits of safe spaces - this probably ain't the space. I just felt it was necessary to call out.)

Pretty much.

The counter-argument goes that people "should know" and be responsible with their money, but I'm not a fan of that argument. It relies on people being perfectly rational actors that they just aren't.

I'm personally in favor of instituting regulation for these things. Even if it is just purely from the "we have to protect the children" angle - children are arguably the main market for these strategies after all.

Just look up the EA Star Wars Battlefront 2 stuff. It's a big old mess. You pay money for crates which randomly drop items that improve the game experience.

Some people consider it gambling because you are preying on the same tendencies in people for your own gain. People also don't get any real value for their "gambling". Other people say this makes it not gambling, etc. That's a very simple oversimplification of the subject - there's a lot of articles out there about it right now.

I do not consider Nazi ideology an opinion. Their ideas are purely based on maintaining a power dynamic. There's no logic or legitimacy to their ideas, and thus they are not opinions. They change the ideology as needed to maintain power and promote their own strength.

For a historical viewpoint, simply look at how often the German Nazi party would change what classifies as being a Jew or "undesirable". It was only ever about putting fear into people and maintaining control. They had no real opinions on why these people were undesirable - those could be made up after the fact.

If Nazism was an opinion, I would be willing to defend it. But it's not, and it thrives when it's given the legitimacy as such.

EDIT: To try and tie this back to the topic at hand, are blatant lies still "opinions"? What about death threats and hate speech? My point is simply that we already make distinctions about what kind of speech is free, so I feel that Facebook instituting policies that align with these existing rules makes sense - even though I feel that they are becoming too large to be the de-facto source for information on the Internet.

> the relevant fields are in the middle of a reproducibility crisis largely due to their political confirmation bias.

As someone who works very closely with academics (specifically sociologists), I would love to see some evidence for this baseless mud-slinging. All of science is having a reproducibility crisis

Do you have a knowledge of the field? Or do you just disagree with their conclusions? I would be happy to be proven wrong so I can let my sociologist friends know that they are doing such a thing.

EDIT: There's also this really neat nature article detailing some of the responses to the current reproducibility crisis in all of science. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-016-0021 Based on this article, it looks like the social sciences are actually the ones spearheading the effort for more reproducible science. One of my colleagues is actually investigating how the typical formulation of ideas with the scientific method can implicitly lead to biases and errors in the science actually performed.

I completely agree with you, however I find this bit a little mysterious:

> With facebook actively suppressing certain ideologies

The only ideologies I've heard of Facebook suppressing lately are Neo-Nazi and alt-right groups following the Charlottesville stuff. I don't take issue with these ideologies being suppressed.

Am I missing something?

EDIT: Apparently so because someone just went through my history and down-voted all my comments...

> Yet, there wasn't any politics in it, was tehre?

That's not the point. There's better ways to express the fact that your post isn't political than implying that people are just "too sensitive" about racism and sexism or something. Like I said, it comes across like a teenager trying to be edgy and that childish tone is carried through the entire article.

> I find the people who find it odd when people get worked up about elaborate scheming, odd.

Again such anger and vitriol. Like honestly why are people so worked up over such a thing? This doesn't bother me at all. If they're lying, the police will figure it out. If they're not, then they won't. What's so odd about just letting idiots be?

I think this armchair cross-examination is tiring and pointless.

EDIT: Never knew being critical of the author's tone was deserving of down-voting - interesting crowd here I must say.

> No politics here (though I’m sure if you squint you can find a way to accuse me of racism or sexism or something)

I am incredibly skeptical of anyone who starts an article like this - comes across like a teenager trying to be edgy.

As for the article itself, I find it incredibly odd how worked up people get over this stuff. The vitriol of the article is quite frustrating to get over even though the analysis and breakdown is accurate.

Pretty common to use that terminology in the sciences and government work for small "kernels" of code that does one thing really well.

EX: Water simulation codes, cryptographic codes, FEM codes, etc.

> Taxes are just too darn complicated!

While I understand this sentiment, I feel that a complicated tax code (or legal code in general) is just where countries end up going as they become larger and more important in the day-to-day lives of its citizens. All the various financial situations in this country are incredibly complicated.

Perhaps we should take a similar route as public defenders (not in practice but in theory, public defenders are horribly under-funded at the moment). The government could provide a tax management program for the general public that does the basics for you. Basically if you qualify for a 1040-EZ you can just use some IRS front-end system. If you have a more complicated situation, then accountants are always available.

I'm frankly disappointed our governments have not done more with the Internet.

> RSS is difficult to implement? Since when?

He didn't say that - just that people find JSON exciting. There are many things that have been rewritten in JSON just to become popular again, or things people have done long before but are exciting because they're now JSON.

Ah I slightly misunderstood your position - I apologize. Personally I find the topics highly related in my mind and so my mind made a jump in your argument I should not have.

I do actually still disagree with you though:

> At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust.

Personally I don't think that people are actually putting blind trust into such sources. Rather, Facebook is instead creating a narrative about how the world is rather than what is truth and what is a lie. I don't think that Facebook is incredibly influential because people put blind faith into it. There's definitely a lot of people who do that, and they're dumb, but I think there's a larger problem at play.

Facebook is able to create a narrative about what "the world" is like. If you're liberal, you see a very different "world" on Facebook than if you're conservative. In this way, I don't think Facebook is influencing the world via trust, but by misconstruing what the world actually looks like. People have the perception that Facebook is an "unbiased" perspective on the world at large and especially your social circle. But we know that Facebook doesn't actually present such a world - it instead gives you a highly "biased" (think more of the statistical version than the political one) perspective on life.

In this way I think it's not necessary to make Facebook the arbitrator of trust on their network, but instead to require them to arbitrate the way information is disseminated.

To say it simpler: It's not a problem that Facebook has fake news, it's a problem that Facebook can create a fake world.

Again sorry for misunderstanding you.

> the first few replies were vaguely insinuating I might somehow be sympathetic to neonazis.

Please stop being so defensive. People dog-piled on you because they thought you said something dumb. They're not being "hateful" or "violent". Those words have meanings, and their meanings are actually directly related to why Reddit banned those subreddits. If you can't tell the difference between me saying "Yo your opinion is dumb and here's why" and "You're black you need to leave" then just wow, you may need to take a step away from the Internet for awhile.

I brought up Neo-Nazis and the Alt-Right because they were the main ones affected by the Reddit bans and your comment did not do enough to distance whatever you were talking about from them. Also, the Alt-Right had a large overlap with the subreddits you do seem to be talking about.

If you want to have a conversation about such a thing, I'm happy to engage over private message. But you bringing it up was so tangental, so unrelated, and so odd that I could not resist calling you out on it.

But again, it was just so out of place in a discussion where people are talking about the opioid crisis. The argument you're trying to make is horribly tangental and out of place.

To be especially frank: people are reacting to you so negatively because your comments are completely unrelated and showed an intense desire to discuss the subreddit bans. When we called you out on this, you got extraordinarily defensive and realized the conversation wasn't going to go your way. So you backed down. Welcome to intellectual discourse. If you don't feel confident defending your opinions in such a space...well maybe they're not opinions that you can defend very well.

Just to be clear for those coming to this after the fact: the reaction was not violent and immediate. Your comment was not nuanced. And it was very much not sensitive.

You attempted to claim that such overdoses are in part due to Reddit (and society in general) ostracizing neo-nazis and members of hateful groups. Not only is this just wrong, it implies that many affected by the crisis are members of such groups, which they are not (as someone who has a family member addicted to opioids I'm very annoyed by your comparison).

You just wanted to talk about your Neo-Nazi subreddits getting taken away and people called you out on it. Frankly, a Neo-nazi should be an outcast. A racist, sexist, etc should be excluded. And if they don't like that, then they should stop being a Nazi before turning to drugs.

You're implying the opioid epidemic is in part due to Reddit banning subreddits filled with hateful speech?* Or what? You're also making some odd as hell "both sides"-ish argument somewhere in there that I can't even parse.

I'm sorry, but we don't have to give spaces for people to be hateful - Reddit banning those assholes was the highlight of my week. I'm not trying to claim that these people should just be ignored, but you're conflating very separate problems.

More importantly, the people being affected by the opioid crisis are predominantly not members of these hateful groups, and I'm pretty frustrated you would conflate them in such a way just so you can have an excuse to talk about the loss of a safe space for hateful rhetoric.

*EDIT: After rereading what the poster wrote a few times, I believe they were attempting to claim that the subreddit bans would encourage more people to head to drug use, rather than vice-versa as I originally interpreted it - it's still pretty off-topic though, and again I'm not very sympathetic to people being sad they no longer have a place to be hateful.

> There is no reason that users should consider random words on random Facebook accounts any differently than words posted on 4chan.

You're right! They're both dangerous. If I posted your public address on both of those websites, how you would you feel about your own safety? Not your Facebook account mind you - just somewhere on Facebook.

That's unsafe speech. Other examples of text where being associated with safety makes sense:

1.) "Hey everybody! Let's kill all type of people who like X tomorrow. Like and share to get the word out!"

2.) "Hey here's the address and personal info of someone I disagree with politically. Let's organize an effort to camp outside their house with guns to scare them. Or lets "SWAT" them.

I am not misusing my information in either of these cases. Instead my information is being misused by others who use the space as an organizing ground. When people ask for Facebook to be regulated, they want hate speech like the above to be removed. People make the argument that this is a slippery slope, but that's a fallacy for a reason. It's trivial to regulate speech of this form on their platforms if they were willing to pay for it, but they aren't. Thus we must force them to regulate this.

You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech. Hate speech is not simply speech I disagree with. It can be clearly defined in many cases (like above), and in the cases where it can't one can simply err towards allowing it.

But it's not funding anything!

There is no actual income being made. This is imposing a tax on something that no one actually gets! It's an accounting procedure used by Universities so they can meet the requirements of you being a student by law.

I am a PhD student. My tuition of $30,000/year is waived by the University of California since I take no classes and am purely doing research. I need to be a student for various tax purposes for both the University and myself. If the money from my waiver was taxed, I would somehow have to come up with an extra $10,000 out of nowhere! Where do I find that money? My PhD is my job. The government is not funding anything, and I feel you're using that terminology purely to muddy the issue.

To be clear, I don't much care for your argument here. Regardless of your ideological concerns about the ideal way to tax stuff, this policy clearly hurts people who are already in a precarious financial position. It will have remarkably negative effects for students like me. I will simply have to drop out, and all of the domestic PhD students I know in STEM will as well. We can't afford to take out loans for taxes...

This policy has a clear goal. It's impact is what matters. Simply demanding that the tax code be simplified is in this case ludicrous. You're really missing the forest for the trees here - this effectively kills all STEM PhDs in the United States. It's impact would be devastating.

What always happens: $$$

Lots of growth occurred at Qualcomm since then. I'm assuming most of the leadership changed as the company became more and more profitable.

There is a long storied past of humans banding together. The "kill or be killed" narrative is just a narrative.

Any examination of sociology, anthropology, and history shows a rich, long history of humans helping each other through peril, banding together in the toughest of times, and cooperating. It is by far our most recognizable trait as a species, and it appears in isolation whenever humans are together. I do not buy that there is some primitive animal culture that we will revert to if the Internet went down. There are humans who have never experienced "civilization", and they do not live in chaos and evil so I don't buy your argument at all.

> then your matrix is allocated on the heap not the stack, meaning slower operations

This doesn't seem right at all... Does anyone know more? Maybe they meant slow to allocate / deallocate? The author's problem appears to require you to generate a lot of temporary data and then throw it away. They might benefit from just writing their own pool allocator, so they don't have to wait for heap allocates (assuming that's their problem).