unishark

> Just the thought of 18 to 30 interviews a year makes me anxious and I don't even need to interview now.

That was their life as a contractor. I think the advice was just to do more than zero, not necessarily go to such an extreme. You can't really hold a full-time job and do that much interviewing unless it's just tiny screening interviews.

The subject of this story is both a user and a customer. But apart from cases (like this one) where the advertising is for political campaigns, the goal of advertisers is to sell products to facebook's users. So instead of being customers of Facebook, they are customers of Facebook's customers. The money trail simply has an extra step in the middle. There are surely be some nuanced differences in that more-complex relationship, but overall the motivation for facebook is the same as if they were trying to sell their own products directly to users, which presumably they do sometimes also. Though they probably have to deal with a higher risk of antitrust accusations when they operate that way.

Kind of works out to special freedoms when the govt limits the number of people who can observe events and hands access credentials out based on whether they are more legitimate-appearing journalists.

I can imagine some degree of inflation where experienced people are called senior engineers so they can be paid more while the still have room to move around and get training in a new area. But at a high enough level, I'd think the goal switches over to hiring key engineers based on their command of a niche. E.g. a principal engineer with 15 years experience in whatever to lead the new product in that area.

> Perhaps. Or perhaps it's groups of people that are fundamentally flawed.

This is totally all there is to it. Also individual people for that matter. There was some twitter thread that was linked here recently that totally reminded me of a clique of vicious adolescents backstabbing someone in middle school. A side of humanity I hadn't seen in decades.

I think it's very common and important for people to vote to undo downvotes. I do it. A single downvote can turn something gray and make it appear like an unpopular side of the discussion when it's not controversial at all except in the opinion of one downvoter on a mission or something. At the same time, I may otherwise be stingy with upvotes unless a contribution is especially deserving (or makes me laugh, of course, which always deserves a reward).

Well I mean it's no more of a defense of Facebook than of a liquor store or whatever. But I don't follow your logic. If you shut down the restaurant on the corner here I will go somewhere else too. Doesn't mean I'm necessarily fine with people granting themselves the right to shut places down.

Maybe more options would work in a savvy place like this to separate out important versus trivial reasons for a vote. I often feel like the most upvoted comments are the most worthless as they just tell everyone what they already think. Whereas downvoted moments are often the ones that simply challenge people and make more interesting discussion.

Very possible, unless there's some other trick nowadays. AC does not go far underground or under water, but high voltage DC can be used for much longer distances.

The boy who cried wolf is not a story of over-reactions. And none of this evidence proves or even suggests such a thing, unless perhaps you were claiming the laws themselves were an over-reaction. Or unless you are defining over-reaction as any reaction at all other than omnisciently knowing when a warning is false and not reacting to it.

This is a repeat of the same argument. An unrealistic hypothetical does not establish that we need to consider something in the real world. Hypothetically perhaps UFO's were beaming ideas into the cops' heads, hence we cannot trust their statements and need an alternative data source. Nope, this is preposterous so we can go ahead and not worry about concerns based solely on this argument.

As for this disclaimer at the end: "The allegations of a criminal complaint are merely an allegation, and all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law."

I hadn't noticed it before, it seems relatively new at least, if not unique to this release. Apart from being circular, is the first half even valid grammar? Or is it somehow important to note that multiple allegations are hierarchically combined into a single allegation?

As the post says, paying accounts are less likely to be "accidentally" removed.

I'd guess political opponents were reporting the page as spam or racist or something, and while the candidate was a paying customer he got a higher level of protection from such attacks. Perhaps human moderation versus automated.

instinctive needs to connect and interact with other people, to gain new experiences/information and be entertained, that kind of things. People will just seek it out elsewhere if not on Facebook.

I see the same engagement issues everywhere on the internet, including this site where discussions constantly veer off into the same old fights. I realize it's tempting to focus more blame and hate on facebook (I don't like it either, and Zuckerberg especially seems like a first-rate snake). But this idea that they "infect people with mind-viruses", or whatever, is just too reductionist and misses how they actually operate, which is simply "fill a need people have so those people will use the product and you can sell ads". It just happens to be a baser need we'd rather people not go fill. I have read that in the past everyone just drank alcohol constantly to escape, so maybe it's progress.

As for this person's specific complaint of hypocrisy or whatever, I don't actually think the imposition of "silicon valley values" or whatever into their operation is at all beneficial to IT companies' finances. I'd place it under the category of hackers, who are abusing/corrupting the automated moderation systems and forcing the company to waste money trying to actually be fair and not alienate half their potential customers, not earn more money by it.

It was the air force. And anyone who can graduate from an engineering program (and lacks a drug-use history or whatever probably) can probably qualify for that. They recruit pretty aggressively at universities.

He did make an unnecessarily-specific statement about being a lt. colonel at one point, but I don't know that it's a hard rank to get to. I though it was more the point at which career officers got stuck.

I do agree no one should be whining about being unable to find sufficiently-skilled people to hire when the only real problem is they don't offer enough to get them. But I'm not sure it's fair to hold all businesses to the pay standard of massive tech giants who can monopolize one new product niche after another by leveraging their current dominant positions along with the patent/legal systems. Not to mention their exuberance-driven stock to throw around. Such a business model simply can't be available to all.

However I suspect we aren't talking about FAANG/unicorn-capable top talent here, hence the candidate applied to this job in the first place. I'd also be suspicious the candidate is ducking questions because they can't answer them. Unless it's just interview practice for them and a waste of time for the company anyway.

Yes it's clearly not a photo of the actual event. Are you complaining that you were misled? or are you suggesting "techbase" uses of stock photos is more authoritative than their own primary sources which I just summarized for you?

Sure but the point was the comparison to the Dutch system, hence the "...like the Dutch government" part of that sentence. So while its great to make sure people are clear about describing tax laws here on the internets, it may not be an aspect of the argument that is relevant.

Did the parent comment about the Netherlands also apply to business owners? I have dealt with business taxes in other countries besides the US (though not Netherlands) and you absolutely are expected to hire an accountant to do it. It may well be impossible to file them otherwise. In the US for the most common businesses you can do pass-through taxation and just add a schedule to your regular return.

I don't see anywhere people are saying it was actually SWAT or any kind of "raid". It was simply a bunch of cops according to the family members in the video. They did not enter his house, they merely approached it. He appears to live in a rural area.

> Swatting however generally provokes an over reaction.

How can you know this. My guess would be it's like hacking any other system. You hear about the few times they succeed. Especially if turns into a horrible incident the news media can use to fit one of their favorite narratives.

Yes but the reasonableness of that hypothetical can still be challenged. This isn't a math proof, but a discussion of the reasonableness of a policy.

The person saying there was no way to handle it differently was talking about the specific case in this article where we know the details and can consider each of the police's actions logically using common sense.

Swatters are obviously hacking the system by finding ways around that like spoofing numbers. This is a problem that will always exist, though the phone system certainly needs to be be made more reliable. But there's not much the cops themselves can do as a policy change. These laws you cite also force police to accept calls from burner phones with no identity. In one case the swatter called the local police's non-emergency number which doesn't go through the reverse lookup. It's basically social engineering in these cases.

Generally they spam you with a letter or email or popup window or something when terms change. You make it sound kind of like keeping your software up to date, which is an interesting way to look at it.

Perhaps in the future legal aspects of life will be just another kind of software updating, with the govt rolling out emergency patches and big annual feature packs.

> The free market is about to create the commercial real estate version of the housing crash.

If so it's another correction that is sorely needed. Hopefully this time people are allowed to lose the money they richly deserve to lose.

I read that abstract twice and still can't parse it, but the 30% number comes from the noaa.gov website quote:

"A new study published in the April 6 edition of the journal Nature concludes that as emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels have increased since the start of the 20th century, plants around the world are utilizing 30 percent more carbon dioxide (CO2), spurring plant growth."

...by the way perhaps not more than we thought (dunno?), but more than the 19th century.

I think you're probably right but on your link there I see a review article (from the US) criticizing the lack of diversity in studies. It is followed by papers from countries like Uzbekistan, Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Austria, Korea. A few from Italy. The US certainly seems under-represented.

The place/grid/etc cells fall generally under the topic of cognitive mapping. And people have certainly tried to use it in A.I. over the decades, including recently when the neuroscience won the Nobel prize. But in the niches where it's an obvious thing to try, if you can't even beat ancient ideas like Kalman and particle filters, people give up and move on. Jobs where you make models that don't do better at anything except to show interesting behavior are computational neuroscience jobs, not machine learning, and are probably just as rare as any other theoretical science research position.

There is a niche of people trying to combine cognitive mapping with RL, or indeed arguing that old RL methods are actually implemented in the brain. But it looks like they don't much benefit to show in applications for it. They seem to have no shortage of labor or collaborators at their disposal to attempt and test models. It certainly must be immensely simpler than rat experiments.

Having said that, yes I do believe that progress can come considering how nature accomplish the solution and what major components we are still missing. But common-sense-driven tacking them on there has certainly been tried.