vectorpush

I think you're correct to point out the inaccuracies of the image, however I disagree with the cavalier use of the term "fake news" to describe arbitrary instances of false or misleading information. The problem of "fake news" is actively perpetuated in part by the impulse to use the term as a catch-all pejorative for information we deem to be specious.

Fake news is when a media source that claims to report an accurate account of events deliberately peddles stories they know (or can safely assume) are false. Random images floating around the internet are not fake news.

Well, Theranos and Etherium are met with frequent criticism on this board with good reason, but the issue isn't about losing out on an investment - which is obviously a risk with any company and clearly not applicable in the case of Uber - but rather, negligent, reckless or fraudulent behavior dressed up in tons of marketing buzz and obfuscated by insane levels of hype that functions only to inflate the ego and perceived prestige of the founders while simultaneously fleecing consumers of their money. The bigger the hype to inevitable-reality gap, the bigger the schadenfreude payoff when the scammer house of cards finally collapses in on itself.

I think HN just has a low tolerance for willful incompetence, especially when charging gigantic fees to the consumer. As has been pointed out by other articles, despite many warning signs that this festival would be impossible to pull off as advertised, the organizers continued to crank the hype machines into turbo mode while slurping up cash from consumers till the last minute. It's a scam.

> It says something about the platforms integrity

And? I don't have a stake in the integrity of twitter or any other private business. If I don't like the product, I don't use it, same as any other business. Frankly, my default assumption regarding any business is that its integrity only goes as far as it affects the bottom line, and that has proven to be true with pretty much every business I've encountered. None of this has anything to do with free speech.

> Just because something has no cultural value doesn't stop someone, int he country, from having the right to say it.

Nobody is denying them that right. You don't have a right to a twitter account. If someone won't allow you to post on their website, you're free to post it on your own website. That's free speech.

> Human life is the most advanced creation of evolution

Arguable. It depends on how you define advanced. There are many organisms that live longer, are more numerous and can survive in more extreme environments than humans. It is also conceivable that humans might completely destroy all habitable environments, which would certainly disqualify us from the subjective qualification of "pinnacle of evolution". More importantly however, evolution has no pinnacle or direction.

Even if we grant that humans are "the most advanced creation of evolution", it does not necessarily follow that this causes it to be inherently precious.

> The most successful companies all use whiteboard interviews

Not much evidence to demonstrate that this is a significant contributing factor in their success. The five companies listed are pioneering behemoths that transcend the boundaries of rote startup analysis.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that whiteboard interviews are fine, but I think programmers tend to dislike them because the physical act of standing up to write code on a whiteboard is awkward and disconcerting, especially in the context of a high pressure interview. The skill of using a large unwieldy marker to render text by hand on a vertical surface requires a significant amount of practice and I think many programmers just resent the need to hone this skill which is mostly useless outside of an interview setting. Something like a written test or questionnaire with pencil and paper is much more well received, or more ideally an offline workstation running something like notepad that's hooked up to a projector or big screen.

> There is no need to wire money anymore. In the US bitcoins can be purchased instantly with a credit card via Coinbase, as easy as signing up for Paypal.

The caveats being a 3.75% surcharge and the fact that many of the big banks will not authorize bank card transactions from Coinbase. You might have luck calling up your bank and getting them to release the hold on Coinbase transactions, but that's already more trouble and more expense than paypal.

I get that this article is satire, but I think the deepest (perhaps) unintentional insight presented by the author's veiled criticism is that the justification for using these tools is presented as "it's 2017" and not as a solution to any particular problem. The issue isn't the 2017 ecosystem, the issue is the 2017 programmer's deference to vanity instead of engineering. All these individual tools exist for a reason, and if your project is already functioning to specification without the use of these tools, you shouldn't be using them; doing otherwise is the developer's fault, not the tool's or the ecosystem's.

No. It's definitely 41%. Look at page 6 of your link

    The earliest that machines will be able to simulate learning and every other
    aspect of human intelligence:
    
    Within 10 years 6 5%
    Between 11 and 25 years 3 2%
    Between 26 and 50 years 14 11%
    More than 50 years 50 41%
    Never 50 41%
    Totals 123 100%

Consider that 41% of those surveyed conclude that machines will never be able to "simulate learning and every other aspect of human intelligence". The next 41% conclude it is possible within an unbounded "more than 50 years". It seems to me that the vast majority of experts are pretty skeptical.

> Healthy humans are sexual ones

In the appropriate context, of which the workplace is not one. There are other places where individuals make an effort to curtail sexual discussion (church, the dinner table, around small children, within earshot of their parents), so I think it is well within the capabilities of healthy young professionals to generally keep sex out of the workplace.

> when you have younger people working 60+ hours with a close group you will have people talking about sex.

Well perhaps they shouldn't. Of course, sex or topics of a sexual nature might come up, just as say, the color of your last bowel movement might come up, but I'd argue that it shouldn't be a topic of regular discussion and that a culture that aims to defer such discussions to a venue outside of the workplace is a good idea precisely because it is impossible to manage the variable spectrum of comfort in sexual discourse among individuals, especially among a diverse workforce (and not just with regard to gender, but also age, cultural and religious background, as well as sexual experience, history and maturity).

> That should be expected but the current legal standard doesn't allow for that.

The current legal standards certainly allow for it, the bar for sexual harassment in a legal sense is generally pretty clear (proving what actually transpired is sometimes a different story), but what tends to be less clear is company policy regarding the fine line between what is permissible and what is inappropriate. I think the spectrum of what is considered over the line varies so wildly that the only sensible approach is "just don't bring it up".

Can we just avoid sexual conversations at work? That's a pretty simple rule that negates all the complexities of determining what type of sexual discussion is and isn't sexual harassment. I've sometimes heard the argument that such a notion is puritanical and sterile but honestly I am just not at all interested in sexual banter at the workplace and I feel like nothing of value is lost if I don't have to overhear remarks about sexual escapades, desires, or jokes during the work day.

Perhaps adding a way for users to tag a story as left or right leaning (or even more descriptive tags like anti-union, pro-life, anti-regulatory etc) might also provide some insight to your classifiers. How an individual classifies a story would only need to be visible to that user, but from a UX perspective it might encourage more honest input into the system that could be used to ground political viewpoints. You might find that a lot of partisans mark themselves as neutral, but most partisans won't be able to resist labeling a story in a manner that fits their partisan perspective.

Well, the tagline on their front page does read "We don't assume you're stupid.".

I'm not calling you stupid, I think everyone has failed to backup something important at one point or another, just saying that the sentiment behind the business seems to be "services provided with minimum hand-holding"

To start with, CS students are not the masses.

In addition to that, some CS students at some schools are exposed to the linux command line, and even less are exposed to linux desktop environments because most CS students have grown up using Windows or Mac and the curriculum is nearly always structured in such a way that it is unnecessary for the student to install a linux DE in order to do their work.

Finally, I'm not willing to blindly accept your claim that "very few of them still choose it", if you have some way to substantiate that claim I'd be interested in the details, but my experience says quite a few of them do choose it, though I'd certainly be willing to yield my anecdotes to some actual data.

Nothing killed the Linux desktop. At the end of the day, it all comes down to the fact that the masses only have two options: Windows or Mac. People become set in their ways using a particular system either at home or work and there is basically no reason that they will ever be exposed to a Linux desktop, and if they are, they will find it just as impossible to use as any other OS that isn't the one they've used exclusively for 10 years.

Anecdotally, prior to the ubiquity of tablets, I've observed several computer illiterate relatives thrive on Ubuntu systems (gnome 2 and unity) because they needed a PC and I passed on an older machine with a fresh copy of Ubuntu. My uncle who had never used a PC more than 30 minutes at a time before I gave him an Ubuntu laptop half a decade ago barely uses his 2015 MacBook that my aunt bought him for his 62nd birthday because he is so comfortable with his Ubuntu machine.

Try

Trump antichrist - 447k

Trump anti-christ - 1.7mil

Obama Hitler - 27mil

I think the takeaway is that stringing a couple terms together in google gives us little in the way of political insight.

Almost everyone here seems to be discussing the economic challenges of UBI, but so far I haven't seen much mention of the political challenges. UBI is a completely unworkable concept in the U.S.A and likely many European countries as well. American citizens will be literally shooting eachother in the streets before they accept such a massive wealth redistribution mechanism, and that resistance will be mostly made up of the masses that could benefit from it, to say nothing of the powerful that will leverage the full extent of their influence to prevent their gains from being redistributed.

> again, the use case I made up is not important. And to argue the use case would be missing the point.

This is precisely the point. Blockchains are met with negativity because enthusiasts keep trying to evangelize their merits without having anything to show for it. If blockchains have uses besides cryptocurrencies, point to a practical example or build something and Show HN, but the incessant proselytizing of blockchain vaporware is tiring and makes non-enthusiasts roll their eyes whenever the topic comes up.

> However, for argument's sake. People can counterfeit drivers licenses, or passports. Good luck trying to counterfeit something on the blockchain.

This is another example of how blockchain enthusiasts commonly misunderstand how their technology interacts with the real world. Creating a counterfeit driver's license or passport has nothing to do with computer systems. Today's counterfeiters don't hack into a mutable database and modify identification records, they simply create a physical passport or ID that looks authentic enough to fool a human being who doesn't exist on a blockchain.

The blockchain phenomenon is akin to when a star-eyed developer writes a 10 page blog post about their FPS-RPG-RTS-MMO hybrid with a physics and chemistry simulation system that offers unlimited possibilities! Except the project usually fails after debuting a few misleading demos, and if the project ever escapes the alpha phase, the reality is hugely underwhelming and not at all resembling anything close to what was advertised. That is the blockchain in a nutshell.

This post is a quintessential example of why blockchain discussions are met with negativity. Your response to criticism is to castigate the critics as unimaginative and averse to "out group" technologies rather than counter the criticism with substance. It's also telling that you suggest people use their imagination to find uses for blockchains; no other technology has such backwards expectations. When you start with a solution and have to brainstorm imaginative ways to discover a problem that fits your solution, you know you're dealing with a cargo-cult instead of an effective tool.

> I've recently had conversations with companies working on solving two big problems in large media buying agencies - bot-based fraud, and auditability of programmatic trading. These problems are being solved using the bitcoin blockchain.

How is the bitcoin blockchain solving these problems? Please offer some kind of details or explanation. I could be wrong, but I'm betting that you're going to offer an example of how the blockchain could, in theory, maybe solve some of these problems but there are practical barriers to implementation and no real solution to be seen. That is exactly what creates a negative response towards blockchains, big talk and nothing to show for it. Cryptocurrency is literally the only thing that blockchains have been demonstrated to be useful for yet we're constantly bombarded with claims that blockchains are going to solve countless problems and it never pans out.

And thousands of them lose their money due to bugs or simple mistakes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/search?q=lost+wallet+help&r...

Blockchain evangelists promise the world and deliver nothing except hype and political grandstanding in return.

When we discuss the cryptocurrency concept, specifically bitcoin, I think reasonable people can agree that blockchain technology has yielded something unique, interesting and worthy of technical merit, despite it not living up to the insane prognostications of bitcoin fanatics . On the whole, I think it's fair to call bitcoin a success because it continues to exist and has been self sustaining more or less within the parameters of the original design for quite a few years. Although it is small, there is some real commerce that occurs in the bitcoin world, and even among some of the alt-coins that followed it. A self-sustaining mini-economy based on computer code is fascinating, and without all the breathless evangelists talking about how bitcoin will end all wars and liberate the masses from the tyranny of taxation and government, I think we'd see a lot more meaningful technical discussion of bitcoin and the other potential uses for blockchain technology.

But that is not the world we live in. We live in a world where every conceivable problem is met with an overwrought and unworkable blockchain solution. We live in a world where startups can drain 100 million dollars on a clearly stupid idea because "blockchains are the future", we live in a world where bitcoin evangelists refuse to face the reality that the incumbent financial system is not at all threatened by bitcoin and concepts like "smart contracts" and that people with common sense aren't ignorant or misunderstanding blockchains just because they're trying to tell you that throwing millions of dollars into a "decentralized autonomous organization" (a misnomer which exemplifies blockchain insanity) is a dangerous and terrible idea.

Blockchain enthusiasts need to put up or shut up. Storing land deeds and stocks on the blockchain is unworkable. Using the blockchain to power smart-locks and self-driving cars and autonomous drones and autonmous AI VCs is unworkable and unnecessary. Bitcoin, bitcoin copycats, and RNG roulette are the only examples of blockchains working mostly as intended and providing at least a marginal utility (in that cryptocurrency can be converted into spendable money). All the rest of it is demonstrably pointless (see literally every project created with etherum besides decentralized gambling software).

This is leaving aside all the political nonsense and all the bitcoin hesits, thefts, scams, and buzzword swindling. The bottom line is that people are tired of hearing about the amazing capabilities of blockchains when nobody can seem to actually demonstrate their utility (besides bitcoin) in practice.

Fair enough, but I've heard similar reasoning espoused from other vim users who were reluctant to transition away from arrow keys. Perhaps you might find the productivity dip worth it in the long run, but I am not unsympathetic to the cost of shaking the routine up.

Yeah, I'm not a numpad user myself, but I never really noticed the hands off-center issue, my brain seems to adapt without much distraction.

I am no longer a Mac user, but might I suggest remapping the escape key to another, it really saves a ton of time. Personally I use "hh", which makes some vim users cringe, but let me tell you, it's so much faster than escape.

Yeah, 17" is pretty much a prerequisite for me as far as laptops go. I was in the market for a laptop a few years back and considered the MBP but I ended up going with the 17" Asus Zenbook and have been very pleased with it. I'll admit that the MBP has a bit better build quality, but I'd say the Zenbook is 90% there but much cheaper, much better specs, and of course I got my 17" display.

It was only later I discovered that the newer MBPs don't play nicely with Linux, so I dodged a bullet there.

I would say Srinivasan is particularly egregious. Regardless of how you feel about bitcoin, and even among many bitcoin enthusiasts, the economics of the 21 bitcoin computer were clearly absurd from the outset, yet Srinivasan still managed to fleece million of dollars from investors using buzzwords and guile. I think he is fundamentally untrustworthy and a terrible choice for the head of a government agency.

For those who rely on tabs, one great advantage of relying on the multiplexer instead is that your "tabs" live within the terminal, so when you ssh into your session, the machine has all your "tabs" ready and waiting instead of tied up in a non-accessible GUI.

In a tmux workflow, you're generally not spawning that many new terminal windows, instead you ^a+c to spawn a new tty within tmux.