Hacker News Reader

uselesscynicismon Truck driver leads NJ Senate president after spending $153 on campaign

Predicament? A regular Joe beat a career politician for local representative. In what world is that a predicament?

Or are you so completely partisan that having an R next to his name makes him obviously the wrong choice, even though he was liberal enough to be palatable to New Jersey voters (not exactly a paragon of conservatism)?

uselesscynicismon After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)

Reality creates scarcity. The "current system" produces a modern society with so much abundance that people like you have forgotten that scarcity of everything is the natural state and the "system" is responsible for artificial ABUNDANCE, not scarcity.

Yes, there are edge cases like intellectual property but "no economy please" is the kind of thing someone who is completely ignorant to the nature of reality would say.

uselesscynicismon [dead]

A dystopia with fewer people in poverty than ever, and the ability to communicate instantly with people around the globe, while we wander to the supermarket and buy plentiful food sourced from all over the world at prices normal people can afford, to go home and sit in climate controlled homes and entertain ourselves with endless games and have our housework eased by machines that wash our clothes and dishes with water that flows freely into our homes and doesn't need to be fetched, and we choose when our next child will be born

Yes what a dystopia we live in

uselesscynicismon Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC

> they have a problem with racism and sexism? Which would have been unusual because it was a lefty place.

I'm sorry but the critical theories of gender are incredibly sexist, especially towards mothers, so I would personally expect a "lefty" place to be all about erasing biological womanhood, which personally I view as incredibly sexist.

uselesscynicismon Chery QQ Ice Cream goes on sale in China – a modern electric car for $4,600

In addition, EPA rules made it impossible to build sedans and wagons with the performance desired by consumers, which is what caused the death of the station wagon and the birth of the SUV, which according to the EPA is a light truck and is subject to different emissions rules.

Now everybody with three or more kids is practically required to buy a van or SUV because you can almost never fit three car seats in the backseat of an EPA approved sedan.

So families buy larger vehicles, which have the problem described above, and the EPA doesn't even succeed at regulating the market

uselesscynicismon The Frustration with Productivity Culture

> There are plenty of less stressful work environments in technology that will pay someone a decent salary and will be much less demanding.

There are?! Could you list some examples? I would take a pay cut for fewer responsibilities if I could stay in tech and if it didn't pay like thirty grand, which is what you will make in support.

How do I transition from a high stress high pay software engineer to a medium pay low stress other kind of technology worker like you have described???

uselesscynicismon Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show

> The anti-cancel-culture people make it sound like they are being horribly oppressed. But for what? The color of their skin?

At work last week, our "diversity and equity" team announced that our company is "obviously" not diverse enough.

This is a company in the US with employees across North America and Europe, with some employees in South America, Australia, India, and even Africa, and not just South Africa, either.

The company does have more employees in Europe and North America than elsewhere, and those employees share one thing in common: skin color. They do not share a nationality, a language, a cuisine, or a mindset.

The only possible interpretation of the D&I&E officer is that there is too much white skin at our company.

Is that horrible oppression? No, but it is racist and prejudiced AF and I would 100% lose my job of I said a single word.

uselesscynicismon Vaccine experts: Covid-19 booster shots aren't needed now

I'm fairly convinced that the pharmaceutical companies want Uncle Sam to buy and mandate 350 million shots per year and that's why the boosters are being pushed and combined with flu shots, while Dear Leader figures out the best way to dictate the health choices of his subjects without so much as first having Congress vote on it.

uselesscynicismon Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

Oh, Fediblock! The list of based instances. It's amazing to me that the people who maintain these lists don't seem to realize that they're maintaining a useful directory for all the people they don't like to help them find places to congregate, meanwhile isolating them from more moderate influences.

uselesscynicismon Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

>consider if someone is a proponent for privacy, but isn't sure if the're joining software created by activists they disagree with .. the folks behind Gab

Gab is a hilarious example because it is a non-federating fork of Mastodon.[0][1] This is especially noteworthy because the ActivityPub "Fediverse" is full of antipathy between camps of users who run Mastodon (more Left) and those who instead run Pleroma (more Right) to the point where you can predict a user's politics by the software their homeserver is running. Is this the future of FOSS that we want?

If you support the right of individuals to run social networks, and if you believe in libre software, you have to understand that sometimes people will use the tools you release for free to do things you disagree with.

An analogy: if you're a manufacturer of hammers, you have to accept that someone could use your hammer to commit a murder.

[0] https://joinmastodon.org/ [1] https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork...

uselesscynicismon What Should Be Done About Social Media?

Who said anything about Section 230? The GP was describing what he thought the law should be, not what it is.

uselesscynicismon Extreme Debugging

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60450102/why-does-ld-pre...

> No, it doesn't. A static binary has no need to resolve any symbol dynamically, and therefore the dynamic loader is not invoked to resolve the usual library function symbols.

uselesscynicismon 2020's fastest-rising tech jobs? Programming language PHP leads the way

Most is 51%. If PHP was bad from 1994 to 2002, when "A Fractal of Bad Design" was written (18 years), and is OK now (assuming it got good immediately after that post was written 8 years ago), it has been bad for most of its existence by simple arithmetic.

uselesscynicismon Facebook reportedly choked traffic for left-leaning news sites

Notice the careful wording:

>policy executives were concerned about the outsize impact of the changes on the right, including the Daily Wire

This could be reworded: the initial implementation primarily punished right-wing news organizations, especially the Daily Wire, but someone noticed and complained

>Engineers redesigned their intended changes so that left-leaning sites like Mother Jones were affected more than previously planned

Engineers decided that it would be good to censor far-left propaganda outfits like Mother Jones as well, if they were going to censor the Right, since someone complained, instead of only censoring the Right, so they changed their algorithm to be somewhat more critical of e.g. Mother Jones than the original algorithm, leaving the final implementation ... a black box that censors some political voices and not others.

Fast forward three years, to this week. Consider the NY Post Hunter Biden corruption story that hopefully you've heard about by now. Now it's clear Facebook and Twitter have no problem blocking an "individual publisher" founded in 1801 in the final weeks before an election, when anything is permitted to stop the "fascist" Donald Trump from winning another election, if said newspaper publishes information that might make Joe Biden look bad.

uselesscynicismon How to Hide from a Drone

Then what? If you can't vote to get the change that you want, what's the alternative? Violent revolution and hoping that the new boss is better than the old boss?

I'm so tired of this kind of useless cynicism. Voting matters, especially at the local level. You can get involved in your party at local levels, too. How do you think all these politicians get into the political class to begin with, in free societies?

Or should we overthrow our democratically elected government, because you believe cynically there's no point in voting, they're going to do whatever they want anyway, and install a dictatorship or Party and hope that we get a benevolent one?

Or are you suggesting that the Socialist Utopia is right around the bend, if we all just give up on voting and... I don't know, what's the point of your comment?