t2015_08_25

Hmmm, which one is the result of a team of experts competing with other major corporate entities, getting paid to optimize a set of well-known algorithms for months prior to delivery to an audience of millions who will spend thousands of hours with it and which one is a one-off hack meant to demo the first iteration of some new code for the first time on its new platform?

I'm glad you point this out. So far no one has noted that lottery is a service the government provides as an alternative to gambling privately in dangerous, much more exploitive conditions.

Interestingly, the job of advertising state lotteries should walk a fine line between drawing would-be private gamblers to safer state circumstances and inducing people who wouldn't normally gamble to take it up. And it sounds like some of those ads have stepped over the line.

So the most salient part of this article deals with advertising lotteries.

The part about turning the lottery over to private businesses I don't find compelling. After all, the role of private business is to make profit and often does so by gravitating laws in their favor. I don't think businesses would compete to see who can make the most benevolent advertising.

Awesome posting. I feel the same way about people advocating tuning music to 432 Hz (as opposed to 440 Hz). Even the Pythagoreans, who saw a few interested patterns in numbers, fell prey to the desire to see mathematical patterns everywhere.

> who remembers CEOs of Intel

You're right. We should pity those poor CEOs of Intel who have nearly no recognition except for daily news articles and a single wikipedia page, leaving their wretched souls with merely their 8 figure annual salaries to comfort themselves.

Surely we can do something to get them what they really deserve? Won't someone please think of the Intel CEOs?

Oh, just those who want to do magnetics, motors, radio, radar, batteries, robotics, sensors, electrostatics and so on. Pretty much anything beyond become a television repair technician.

Thank you. I was going mad trying to comprehend what the phrase "dumping anti-virus" means.

Just the mere fact of people downvoting you for what you wrote validates what you've said:

I agree with you 100%. After reading so much social media which is designed to increase one's professional reputation, ego and social status like facebook and HN (as well as main stream news about celebrities and politicians), it's grounding and humanizing to go to a place like /b/ where you can't maintain a reputation. You can actually be honest and get an honest human response.

This was one of moot's main reasons for keeping it going. I chat there with suicidal people, people afraid to go to doctors, people abused and neglected by their parents, people trying drugs, people seeking spirituality, homosexuals from small towns, all afraid to speak up in public, their doctors, their schools.

I hate the racism there. The sexism is not great. I especially the deplore the animal torture. But even real-life socializing isn't as intimate and bold as anonymous socializing. And what people need to remember is that a .gif of a scumbag who rigged a clothesline to drown a dog every time it moves is just a picture. The disgusting act has already been done. Moreover, these images are evidence that bad things happen and we can feel justified in doing something about them in real-life instead of only acting on fear.

I need to look past all of that crap in order to have actual human connections I can't get in real life or online. And so do the people on the other end of my connections. Because mainstream social life has failed us.

When I said you can't maintain a reputation on /b/, though, there are some workarounds: People create labels for their groups like gamergate and anonymous that leak out into the rest of the world. There are plenty of those people who obviously aren't satisfied to have intimate, anonymous conversation and have bigger axes to grind. They wreck the environment and as the saying goes, "This is why we can't have nice things." I could see all of that being too damn much of a toll to take on moot, and I don't require of him that he maintain any particular ideals. I also heard other things, but who knows.

> people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything

Yes, especially on HN and reddit, voting is not used to eliminate spam and off-topic, but to indicate consensus values and idols. So even if you're right, if you don't validate the hivemind, you get downvoted. You could tell the world the Earth is round during the dark ages and get downvoted. If you're a recognizable name on HN, you instantly get upvoted. It's the same chickenshit conformity that creates the capitalistic hierarchy in mainstream social life.