throw2016

Studies were supposed to be about science and the scientific process and even there we now have reproducibility crisis and a whole string of dubious and discredited studies.

We are being overwhelmed by a culture of heavily funded think tanks, industry groups, sundry organizations and interest groups pushing completely motivated and self serving studies and being unquestioningly magnified by the press.

It's time to be extremely skeptical and closely examine the funding, motivation and organizations funding studies and research especially in scientific communities. The alternative is perpetuating toxic unscientific narratives backed by anecdotes and 'intuitive sense' of some.

What made Linux and FOSS possible is a specific time and context and that is not happening again. There is no job security, everything is about building a resume, getting a job and hanging on or a startup, everything is related to money or status.

There is also an ahistorical perspective of tech, as if things just are or happen with no deliberate effort and its an open question whether there is any real commitment or concern for the principles which drove the open source movement.

In many ways Slashdot defined the original generation and Hackernews defines this one. And even paying lip service to principles would be quaint here. Defending building surveillance systems and stalking people 24/7 while referring to general users as idiots are often the top voted comments. This is a huge shift.

This is the definition of a police state, with law enforcement officers empowering themselves and demanding to go through your personal papers, how dehumanizing is this?

What is the difference between this and the stasi or the police of any totalitarian state demanding to go through your personal papers? There is a huge difference between physically checking your laptop or phone and demanding to go through its contents and your personal data and thoughts. This is hugely invasive and dehumanizing and is the definition of totalitarianism. The word democracy by definition cannot include this.

Even more disturbing is the cognitive dissonance of those who have complete moral clarity when condemning police state tactics in some third country and then stretching credulity to normalize the exact same thing when done by their own governments or 'democracies'. The is the dangerous road to totalitarianism where values are not defined by actions but actors.

This is a shocking display of not just incompetence and bad practices but of brazen undisclosed covert control. Why should your local browser depend in this fragile way on some muckup in Mozilla HQ? And people line up to defend this?

Where does it explicitly say Mozilla can disable my addons remotely? When did I give them this power? And this from a so called 'open source privacy focused' browser. This is a mockery of privacy and open source and they shouldn't trade on this goodwill to gain users.

There can be no bigger security hole yet security fear mongers preach exactly this abusive model. This kind of centralized remote power is a far greater security threat that anything they keep on harping about, 'good intentions' and 'good faith' are not remotely something anyone should have to depend on. Why should Mozilla babysit my installation? Shouldn't they be using their resources to do something productive?

There is something rotten in SV culture and we urgently need to think of alternatives that are not infused in this 'know it all' abusive surveillance culture as even after such an egregious abuse of peoples trust and faith all you will get is hand waving, normalization, apologism and snarky entitled comments that trivialize people's concerns and choices made on the goodwill of open source.

There are people actively fighting the dehumanization and there are people building tools to dehumanize and defend their work. In a movie or artwork which side do you think are going to be portrayed as the 'good guys' and who are you going to be rooting for? That is cognitive dissonance.

This is just more evidence of how the lack of a moral compass has led the software community to not only sell out and build these creepy tools but worse defend surveillance and police state technologies without a hint of self awareness in these kind of discussions.

Without push back and dissent it's only a matter of time the software community is completely tainted with collusion as a group of opportunists with zero ethics by the general public like those collaborating with authoritarian police states against the people.

These issues need discussion in a neutral venue. China is not a model of anything but given the intense debate in the US about the systemic corruption of the lobbying system pointing fingers at others as if corruption is somehow unique to 'other countries' seems cognitive dissonance. Political corruption is the single biggest source of corruption in most countries which is done officially in the US. Just because you make something 'legal' doesn't suddenly make it any less corrupt.

The 2008 banking crisis revealed massive levels of fraud, collusion and corruption in the banking system and the bailouts with 'too big to fail' betray something even more deep seated and systemic. There is a huge problem of revolving doors across industries with regulators getting hired by the companies they were regulating and politicians getting hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches. There is a well documented history of corruption in banking, real estate, pharma, energy and multiple other sectors and we have even seen this entering education.

Most commentators know about the widespread corruption in their countries but there is weird dissonance and finger pointing making any kind of informed discussion impossible.

This reads as a 'ahistorical' interpretation of events. Is is possible to engage in informed discussion without context?

How many centuries did it take for the transition from feudalism in Europe yet there is this kind of 'magical thinking' when it comes to Africa emerging from centuries of rapacious colonialism and are often independent states for just 50 years to somehow be the mirror image of western states rightaway. How does this work? Without explaining this no discussion on Africa can be serious and sincere.

And ignorance of the incentives for corruption and the history of plunder in these regions by supporting 'strongmen' and opposing forces of empowerment that continues unabated. And this can be easily confirmed by historical record. How come people like Lula and Chavez are demonized with very little to no dissent in the west and their governments destabilized openly when its them who empowered large number of their populations with social policies rather than just supporting a funnel of extraction by western capitalism. How do institutions and democracy emerge in this environment?

Perhaps its best not to have these discussion where simplistic 'explanations' perpetuate a culture of misinformation and prejudice and where the depth to understand the forces at work and historical events is completely absent.

Discussions about ethical, privacy, surveillance issues often get hand waved and diluted here. See yesterday's thread on Google's retaliation as an example.

We need a diversity of communities that can represent the the software industry in more dimensions than the VC funded side of things, growth hacking and the singular focus on success that are often in heavy conflict with any kind of value dimension and ultimately greed and opportunism crowds out every other concern.

There is also often a extremely selfish mercenary view of the world this is disturbing and can jade most of us and needs some maturity to handle without letting it poison ones worldview.

What these people are doing takes tremendous courage. Posts here over the last few months have many wondering why people in Facebook and Google are not speaking up and in this instance we have some genuine dissent, activism and protest at least on one issue.

But history shows dissenters are always a tiny minority, from the initial struggles that secured labour rights to equality for women. Most people will conform and fall in line for whatever reason, and in these cases there is unfortunately always resentment against the dissenters from those who fall in line.

In most other situations you would expect the early dissenters to get growing unequivocal support as more people find their compass and courage by example but there is a moral crisis in the software community and it looks these individuals may not get the widespread support they need.

But these kind of incidents will make it increasingly difficult for Google leadership and others who work there to go to events, meets and publicly talk about ethics and others issues these protestors raised.

China is a totalitarian country. Its not a democracy so there is no point criticizing them for the lack of democracy but its democracies that must be held accountable, yet we do not see that right from Snowden, Assange and Manning to a culture of surveillance, torture, war crimes, secret courts and processes and border agents demanding to go through your personal papers.

You can't claim to be a democracy and do these things by definition yet not only are 'democracies' doing these things openly but we have people who seem less outraged by what's happening in their own 'democratic' backyards and more outraged by what a totalitarian country is doing.

This lacks credibility and seems more like a way to score political points than out of any genuine concern for democracy or human rights.

Meritocracy depends of equality and you can't conceptually have equality with wildly differing starting points.

The transition from feudalism to capitalism would require land reform for equality and meritocracy to have some measure of credibility and meaning but capitalist states seem to have 'forgotten' the crucial step of equalization and moved straight to talking about conceptual 'equality' and 'meritocracy' as if they are operational. This is disingenuous.

'Capital'ism by definition favours capital and the only group that had it in the transition from feudalism were the feudal class who had monopolized all resources and used it to accumulate more wealth and power.

Humans have fought for land and resources for millenia and the equitable distribution of this most basic fundamental resource is the prerequisite for an equitable society. It can't be ignored in any discussion about equality and meritocracy and to do so is so deeply flawed and untenable it requires some level of self interest or simplemindedness to accept.

But a population who fail to have empathy for their fellow citizens and are disingenuous about equality and meritocracy every time they talk about it is perhaps a bigger problem.

It seems just like crypto the 'ai' hype cycle is coming to an end with zero achievements to show for itself beyond puffery and premature speculation about radiologists, drivers and others losing their jobs.

And its not just hype, like crypto the ai hype stepped well beyond the line to outright fraud and deception with tech folks trying to pass off backward looking pattern matching as 'intelligence' and hope no one notices. Every single commentator here knows there is nothing in computing or software engineering today that will allow one to 'create' an 'ai' as the world understands the term yet no one questioned pushing intentionally deceptive communication.

This end result of dystopian scaremongering amounting to nothing is there is now zero credibility and extreme suspicion of problematic in-built bias. At the minimum there must be some standards for machine learning solutions to be thoroughly transparent, open to verification and exhaustively tested for racist and sexist bias before any rollout, for anyone who cares about the impact of their work in the real world.

How do we understand these kind of threads of HN?

In the last 6 months there have been security breaches at Facebook [1] Google [2] Cisco [3] and look at those threads and some of these breaches are extremely amateurish and the general consensus is these things happen and the top voted responses mirror this attitude.

Yet on the same site on the threads about India, China and non US companies we see some kind of dissonance where these are reframed as showhow affecting these companies uniquely because of 'poor standards' and 'mediocre engineers' and the top voted responses reflect this.

Far from informed discussion this not only demonizes entire groups but creates and perpetuates prejudice that will no doubt impact everything from recruitment to general behavior. And this continues on discussions beyond security to things like corruption, surveillance and other issues.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19565918

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18170174

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507225

It's interesting to understand what is happening internally in these social media companies engaging in blatantly shady and unethical behavior.

Its more than weird that inspite of HN being a place where many of these individuals are there is little to no discussion on the actual forces and pressures at work driving these decisions, are there ethical dilemmas, difficult decisions? Because there is nearly nothing on this discussion wise or whistle blowers that would suggest this is something people working inside these companies are grappling with.

If this does not concern engineers its unlikely discussion on issues being raised by outsiders and regulatory bodies are going to lead to any kind of productive discussion beyond dilution and denial.

This is a bit like saying we left the safe open and nothing was stolen so its not that big of a security problem. The specifics of the exploit is besides the point as it could be anything.

This is an indictment of the designers of wild lands systems like ruby Gems and npm and a culture of pulling in hundreds of dependencies that simply cannot be verified by end users.

It's one thing if this was just for developers who made a conscious decision to use a gem or npm package, but the whole system is carried on to end users who are expected to have a build environment and pull in hundreds of unknown gems and packages which in turn pull in their own dependencies simply to deploy.

This is bad engineering and design, it not only dramatically increases the complexity of deployment and wastes millions of man hours in debugging, versioning and build issues but leaves end users exposed to security issues.

Hey look we have democracy, freedom, free speech but if you actually try to use any of these seriously beyond ranting about some politician to actually exposing the rot we will demonize and come after you.

This is a nice arrangement, the vast majority will never offer organized dissent and can keep on posturing about 'freedom' and 'democracy' while those who put their head above are swiftly cut down to size.

Isn't it curious that the bare basic actions of whistle blowing and dissent are not able to operate freely in the west?

Given US state linked organizations like Atlantic Council, ThinkProgress, Propornot manned by ex US security services personnel are working with Facebook, Google and other social media websites to 'takedown' dissent on US involvement in Yemen, Syria, Venezuela, black activism against police brutality, general anti-war activism and socialism leaning content it seems the time to be concerned about censorship is passed.

Who can explain these SV 'relationships' with state actors? Anyone who cares about censorship should be extremely concerned about state actors flagging content. Snowden is still in Russia, Assange is virtual imprisoned and Manning is back in prison. Isn't it curious that these basic actions of whistle blowing and dissent are not able to operate freely in the west?

Is it simply as transparent as when other countries take down dissent or imprison activists its censorship and totalitarianism and when we do its 'fake news', 'Russian propaganda' or 'some reason'. It's incredible people can ignore everything and talk of free speech, censorship, and democracy as if none of the above is happening.

There is a already a crisis of invasive surveillance, profiling and profiting from stalking users. There is also government surveillance that can't be thwarted with its own panopticon of secret orders, secret courts and secret processes.

Both of the above need to be urgently reined in to retain some sense of accountability and democracy. And these efforts including awareness are predominantly coming from outside the technical community.

When the problem is concentrated global monopolies and power how can centralizing more control be the solution? And yet these seem to be the only solutions from the community.

Do you have any details on the US driven sanctions regime in effect on Venezuela and its impact? Here is the official UN release [1] on the results of illegal US sanctions on Venezuela and an interview with the UN rapporteur for Venezuela.[2]

So these conditions are being artificially created by the US and its allies in another brazen regime change operation. How can commentators talk about 'suffering' without mentioning the sanctions? It's absurd to claim to care about 'suffering' while actively implementing sanctions at the same time.

Here is the latest UN resolution on the sanctions and their impact on the people of Venezuela. [3] And here is US National security advisor Michael Bolton openly orchestrating regime change and admitting its about oil. [4]

The same regime change playbook driven by greed cannot be executed everytime with the same results of millions of people suffering and entire countries destroyed and people playing 'innocent' everytime affecting 'concern' for ordinary people.

[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii5MlQgGXyk

[3] https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/NewsDetail.aspx?...

[4] http://time.com/5516920/inside-john-boltons-month-long-p-r-c...

Piketty's extensive data on global wages raises serious questions about Pinker's narrative. And if there is still doubt Pinker's data sources [1] and interpretation are questionable to say the least.

Here is Pinker himself admitting his selective use of data [2] Watch his answer at 4.30. This is extremely poor use of stats, and makes him look a side character apologist in Hunger Games.

And here is an even more substantial criticism of Pinker's approach by Leon Wieseltier in the newrepublic [3].

[1] https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAQ0BfcftBA

[3] https://newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-respo...

This can't be right. The bulk of US defense expenses in the last 2 decades for instance have been in needless middle east wars that destroyed those countries, killed millions and enriched US corporations and their employees. It created power vacuums and destabilized entire regions that allowed the rise of ISIS and other extremist groups. There is now slave trade in Libya which was one of the most advanced countries in Africa before the US intervention. Massive immigration caused by these actions is taking a toll in Europe. How does this help global security?

A country's defense expenses are for its own benefit providing easy global market access for its companies, leverage, favorable terms and markets for arms for its own defense industry. All these benefit the US and its citizens.

There is a well documented history of military intervention under pretexts driven by business interests going back centuries with the latest being Venezuela. A country is being openly destabilized, millions will suffer, there will be increased immigration leading to more right wing extremism against immigrants, and more business opportunities for US companies with access to the largest deposits of oil in the world. How does this help global security, this seems to transparently benefit US interests at the cost of everyone else. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7eW4ASIo3I

This is not because consumers are 'ignorant' or stupid but because of willful deception and complete lack of transparency from Google. What do Google engineers think when they design those deceptive 'improve user experience' dialogs, are they thinking consumers are 'stupid' or are they being extremely shady?

Android being designed to leak like a sieve and Google hoovering up your data without transparency is NOT the users fault, its Google and its engineers willfully engaging in unethical behavior in pursuit of profits. Its can't be that educated people do not know or understand privacy is a basic human right, and collecting and collating data is fundamentally shady and invasive behavior.

Once the public understand the full extent of the collection, collation and behavioral targeting in play and regulations start flowing these companies and the engineers who built these systems are going to be tainted.

The only way to get on a network is via an ISP or mobile provider and this step itself gives up your identity and credit card/financial details and your browsing history, location data and other metadata is available to any state entity and the private surveillance economy. If you use a VPN you paid for that is the same thing.

There is no way to get absolute privacy in this context for the average user. Journalists and activists should be aware there is no technology solution to protect them from spying by any sufficiently committed actor, with state actors all bets are off.

It's false self empowerment by some technical folks to presume there is a technical solution against state actors who are well staffed, have near endless resources and are working 24/7 to thwart any localized technical solutions.

If there is a way to get online truly anonymously ie public wifi points, mesh networks these will immediately be subverted by state actors with things like illegal porn, terrorism and made illegal or compromised and used as honey pots. There is no winning here.

If facebook and other platforms can quickly take down nudity and porn why can't they take down extreme violence?

There is always 'censorship' in operation. Either overtly when things are not allowed or covertly where some things are simply not aired, people not given visas, opportunities, blacklisted and generally isolated. The problem is when people take an absolute and utopian position pretending these are actually not in effect when they always have.

Perfect examples are hate speech and incitement to violence and even things like nudity and pornography. Most countries have laws against this. For instance most islamic extremism videos and content are already banned and taken down rapidly, preachers and other known purveyors of hate are not given visas and are not allowed to air their views. That's clear cut and no one has a problem with it.

Since most ideologies and religions have an extreme element they will propagate extreme views and incite hate, and the question then becomes if you are comfortable having social media full of people openly spreading hate against religions, race, sex or any other subgroup.

And its here we must explicitly beware of double standards and some people supporting some kinds of extremism opportunistically and muddying the waters under the pretext of free speech because it doesn't threaten them personally.

Isn't this the nightmare scenario the GPL was created to fight against, a device that is not acting in the users interest but against it, with tons of private APIs [1], complete lack of transparency, deceptive language and hoovering up user data to send to others. And the kicker is this is happening on the supposedly 'open' Android platform. Take that Stallman.

Its really disappointing to see how the software ecosystem has degenerated into these shady mercenaries with zero compass. The only thing that can temper this crazy greed fueled appetite for surveillance is regulations and prosecutions because what some of these articles describe is venal and corrupt to restore some sense of propriety and civilization values.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/25/android-users-security-and...

There has been a lot of fud and scaremongering on China and Russia with very little evidence and facts. This makes it look like the commitment to competition, free markets and due process is hollow and self serving and the moment it doesn't benefit you you try to change the rules.

China is now running into some of these invisible barriers and constraints that have been in place all along and this brings them into light and exposes the self serving hypocrisy of the current system to the rest of the world. There are global mechanisms to take complaints with evidence yet this 'war' is not being fought in the trade commissions but in the public press with innuendo and smears and political pressure on allies.

How do we then even talk about words like competition, free trade and innovation in neutral terms when companies like Qualcomm can succeed unhindered while others like Huawei are politically demonized and constrained in market access.

This kind of subgrouping has little value as it tends to manufacture elaborate myths about the 'ingroup' and alienate and dehumanize the other leading to a fictional narrative of the world.

So for instance we get the myth of 'freedom', 'liberty' and 'dissent' by a particular subgroup but in reality what we have seen is complete lack of moral compass, crass opportunism or quietly falling in line. There is only one Snowden.

We also get authoritarian and ignorant perspectives like all 'users are stupid' to facilitate opportunistic exploitation, imagine if people in government as a group thought all citizens are stupid or all professionals thought their clients are stupid. This is dehumanization and is the building base of authoritarianism.

It would be easier to understand how human groups behave when they have status and power both real and perceived and when they don't. That follows a predictable path. Self appointed 'smart people' are always dangerous as they are quick to assume a monopoly on wisdom and lack empathy for the 'other', and are unable to perceive errors in their ideology and thinking and course correct.

This is becoming too common. Laura Poitras has documented her harassment as have multiple others activists and journalists. The idea of opaque no fly and other secret lists, secret processes and demanding to go through people's personal papers is totalitarian.

If this happened in China or for instance Venezuela there is instant global outrage about 'freedom' and yet every time the exact same thing happens in the UK or the US the outrage is quickly replaced by legalese and apologism. Surely if people cared so much about any of these values they would severely push back when it happens in their own backyard but we rarely see that, just more demonizing others which quickly loses meaning and becomes complicit in the descent to a quasi police state.

Many who make sweeping statement about 'democracy' and 'freedom' seem to be severely disconnected from things on the ground as those those who use these 'freedoms' in any serious way in terms of actual activism or critical journalism however slight end up on some kind of list and singled out for harassment. [1]

[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/25/the-tsas-role-as-jou...

Having just deployed Discourse and Diaspora its obvious Ruby and Rails was not designed for end user use. There is complete and total dependency hell and a hard requirement for a build environment for basic app deployment.

This kind of engineering directly leads to endless wasted hours troubleshooting errors, routine build fails and apps that think nothing of pulling in hundreds of dependencies that in turn have their own dependencies that can fail at any time.

This is plainly wasting millions of man hours of end users time if its not a SAAS app. Compared to that Go is an ode to simplicity, PHP just works, Python is relatively painless and even Java causes little stress. Its node and ruby that seem to be designed by people who revel in complexity and have zero concern for deployment and end users.