StopTheWorld

In July 1992 five MoD members were charged with hacking, and they were basically defunct as an active hacking group after that. LoD was mostly defunct even before that, although the movie used the Mentor's manifesto. New York LoD members, or those affiliated with them, had been busted in July 1987. So yes, a lot of the 1995 movie was covering stuff that had happened from the 1980s up until mid-1992. When the movie was released, some of the MoD members were on probation and not allowed to associate with one another until probation ended. The busts, trials, prison terms, and probations were all happening around the time the movie was being written, filmed and released.

The writer of Hackers, Rafael Moreu, went to New York 2600 meetings and talked to various members of MoD (a hacker group which had a book written about them by a local New York reporter, Joshua Quittner, who later worked for Wired and then Time/Pathfinder if anyone remembers that).

The names and handles of the movie reflect this - Cereal Killer, Plague, Joey, Razor - all handles of local New York people. Phreak in a sense too. Some of the kids went to Stuyvesant high school, where scenes were filmed. The kid getting raided in his shower happened locally. The plant worker almost getting shot by a flare gun held by people trashing happened locally. As did other things.

Some other national things made it in, like the Hacker's manifesto written by an LoD member.

Some things were invented for the movie. There was no attractive 19 year old Angelina Jolie type hacking along with the boys as shown in the movie. These guys were not rollerblading through Manhattan together. There was no Cyberdelia nightclub everyone hung out at, although some of the guys might have gone together once in a while to the nightclubs popular at the time (The Tunnel /Limelight / Palladium / Club USA / Webster Hall).

Should point out this is not the first time the BLS came under serious fire, politically. When the Republicans regained control of the Senate in 1995, they set up a commission (Boskin commission) that said inflation had been overstated, and henceforth cut Social Security cost of living adjustments.

In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was won by Tu Youyou.

During the Vietnamese resistance war, Vietnamese moving down the Ho Chi Minh rail were contracting malaria in the jungle. The Chinese were asked for aid, and Tu Youyou was tasked with assembling a team to help.

One thing Tu Youyou did was consult "traditional Chinese medicine" with how to aid victims of malaria. Most of what she found did not work, but wormwood did produce results. Tu Youyou again consulted traditional Chinese medicinal texts and they said wormwood should be used with cold water. The team extracted artemisinin from the wormwood in cold water, and a new (and old) way of fighting malaria was born.

Can't forget his appearance at the beginning of the classic hacker movie, WarGames.

flipping quantum coins...Newsflash: neurons and digital computers both have to play by the universe's stubbornly deterministic rules

I don't really understand what this means - you obviously know at the smallest level things happen by random probability - because you mention the quantum world - but then you say the universe is deterministic.

Hunter gatherer tribes

Hunter gatherer bands. There's no evidence of any tribes 20,000 years ago.

Unless you are arguing semantics, yes there were. Tribes and tribal violence.

There is no evidence of any tribes existing 47,000 years ago. Insofar as tribes, and tribal violence, the OP mentioned them, which is wrong in that time frame, semantics or not.

What kind of world do you live in that has denied you access to evidence of early human existence?

I didn't say humans didn't exist 20,000 years ago, I said there was no tribal violence. There's no evidence the Jaburara were organized as a tribe 40,000 years ago, although later on that may have happened.

Professor Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford does research on how heterosexual couples in the US meet ( https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/ ).

In 1940, over 50% met via friends or family. About 36% met at school.

In 2021, about 20% met via friends or family. About 10% met at school. Over 50% met online. So the majority of US couples are now meeting via profit-maximizing corporations. He has a 2019 paper on this (and it has only increased since that paper).

What about simple tribal violence?

Is there any evidence of any tribes whatsoever existing over 20,000 years ago? All the evidence points against it.

There was no tribal violence 47,000 years ago because there were no tribes!

That is a statistic on one chart on that. For only those who are 65 and up, total spending of the top 1% drops to 17%. In the charts posted, from the ages of 19 to 44, the amount spent on women is much larger than on men (not sure why - obstetricians?)

Then of course, some people get cancer and some do not. With a normal age distribution of 18 year olds and up, it isn't surprising to me that very little is spent on the 18 to 30 year old men, and that one of the 65 and over got cancer and a lot of spending went toward that.

I worked with a guy who went to a public university - not a top 25 public university but in the ballpark. He was hard-working, smart and "got it", but he wasn't at the level of some super-geniuses I met coming out of school. He worked with us (Fortune 100, non-FAANG, non-tech, non-big metro) as a junior SWE for a year and did not get promoted as he desired. He jumped ship for a FAANG-adjacent company after a year working for us, and his TC jumped from <$100k to over $200k. Two years later he was promoted to senior and his TC is now over $300k.

He is smart but not a genius. He kind of knows what is going on though, he "gets it". Probably even more motivated than smart, but not insanely motivated. Motivated enough to learn how to get features done at a brisk pace, take ownership of his team's work, and to study for interviews. Didn't go to a top tier CS program, didn't come out of FAANG or FAANG adjacent, and probably took a detour working for us, but three years later his TC is over $300k. He also had the luck to jump ship before the FAANG layoffs of late 2022.

There is a push, which has been around for decades, to measure how effective teaching is for a school system taking in taxpayer dollars. This is measured via standardized tests. The tests are generally passed via testing and repetition. Often this becomes the metric for measuring teacher, principal, superintendent performance and school funding. So these authorities begin having the students memorize, do repetition and testing - and testing not to guide a student's progress, but to reward or punish them. The school authorities have the students due this to pass the standardized tests, at the behest of those who have authority over the school authorities and want measurement.

So then the question is, is this the best way to learn in general? You can read studies of education including John Dewey's from over a century ago to see that it is not. The purpose of the education system is not to educate, but to do this thing described in the first paragraph. Nowadays the public schools are contending with charter schools, vouchers and the like, so there's a more injection of profit, religious fundamentalism and the like in the educational taxes people pay than there was a few decades ago.

Madoff took in other people's money. The Medallion Fund stopped taking new outside money in 1993, and in 2005 it got rid of all outside money. The people making (or potentially losing) money are the people making the trades.

Right. The current world population growth rate is about where it was at the time of World War II, and that growth rate was the highest it had been in about 8000 years. The baby boom in the 1950s and 1960s was a world-wide phenomena, and we are not at that peak now, but world population is currently growing faster than it did from 4000 BC to 1940.

Some countries, like in the Baltics, are seeing population decline, but human population is still growing fairly quickly.

population doomerism

In 1927 world population was 2 billion - now, less than a century later it is 8 billion. In the 1960s world population grew by 2.1%. For most of history until about 1700 or so that rate was about 0.04%.

The world population growth rate right now is much higher than it was in 1900 (and 1900 was higher than 1899, which was higher than 1898 etc.)

There's not really that much to population doomerism if you look at the historical trends. The only thing to it is that the growth rate in the 1960s was probably the highest in recorded history, and we are not still at that peak - but the world population is still growing faster than it has from 4000 BCE to 1940.

The other thing is it varies from place to place. Uganda's population is growing faster than the world rate, whereas Latvia's population is currently shrinking.

(Of course these things are all estimated, no one knows exactly when human population hits exactly 8 billion people etc.)

Didn't expect to learn about Sahlins posthumous book via HN's front page. Stone-Age Economics and The Original Affluent Society (the title a pun on a book well-known by 1960s intelligentsia, Galbraith's "The Affluent Society") were interesting reads.

Reading this article and other things, I don't see it declining so much. It was the most downloaded app worldwide in 2023 and had the largest consumer spending in 2023 ( https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/10/app-economy-recovered-in-2... ).

Yes, now that it is number one in these categories it is "mature" and its growth rate as not as fast as it was as it was climbing to these numbers. I don't see how being #1 in the world for app downloads and sales means it is "in decline".

I demand to know why "Men are going to brutal boot camps to reclaim their masculinity" was removed from the front page!</s>

"Believe that people can change the world", or caring for and investing in employees... Can you point to any industry that was sustainably disrupted by a company following such a mindset?

The company with the largest market cap in the world, Apple. Steve Jobs believed in recruiting great people, and he entrusted in them and expected of them to create sustainably disruptive products. From Steve Wozniak all the way to Jony Ive. I don't know if I'd say Jobs was caring for all people working at Apple in my conception of things, but he did not look at the people working on an important Apple project as disposable cogs, and he didn't look at the products they were making as junk commodities to raise next quarter's revenue.

Whatever it boils down to, and whether it can continue creating things like the M2, there is a reason the company with the largest market cap in the world is Apple.

From my knowledge of and participation in hacker spaces - I would say this is it. My understanding is hackerspaces like the L0pht were not paying exorbitant real estate prices, and had a core of founders making decent enough money to pay for the place. On the other hand, some hacker spaces start out very ambitiously with a large space in the center of an expensive city, without as much of dedicated, close, core team to sustain it, and those did less well. Also - when you have a small core team and expenses are too high, it causes friction and stress in the core team, and people want to participate less.

Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy gave a speech 13 years ago saying Kashmir was never an integral part of India, and New Delhi just announced she is going to be prosecuted for her speech https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/south-asia/booker-winner-a...

I just listened to the beginning of one of these books.

The book text starts out "I." as in, roman numeral for chapter 1. The audio book read this as "eye" (or "I", but not 1).

Then the third sentence in the text says "1793-05". The audio was "1793 to 2005". Actually it was 1793 to 1805.

I listened to a few more sentences and had an idea of the state of it currently. The tech has advanced in the past few years, still has a way to go. Insofar as striking actors, they probably should be worried about what the big companies are up to.

Rule 7: Don’t use leverage.

Using margin accounts or mortgages (for other than your home) puts you at risk to lose more than your original investment.

As this says, margin accounts used in a certain way can put you at risk to lose more than your original investment. However, they are sometimes necessary to make investments with little to no additional risk. For example I may own $50,000 worth of XYZ Corp. and want to sell it on a Monday so as to buy $50,000 worth of DEF Corp on that same Monday. I can't do that if I don't have a margin account - settlement is usually T+2 days.

You can incur additional risk with a margin account, but not as much if it's just to borrow money you are almost certain you will have in a few days.

Dawn of everything ... one specific (anarchist) viewpoint in his work

Anarchism means without a ruler, and there is scarce if any evidence that migratory hunter-gather bands at the dawn of history had rulers in one class expropriating surplus from another class. We can look for historical, or pre-historical evidence, but we can also observe the few remaining migratory hunter-gather bands remaining in the Amazon and such that have not been killed off by mining companies.

Modern authors don't impose an anarchist viewpoint on such groups, this is how they lived, and still live.

You'd have to uproot how the western world works to get us back to how we evolved to be healthy and survive on this planet.

To take it literally, it is impossible for eight billion humans (current world population estimate) to live as migratory hunter-gatherers on earth, even if the planet was terraformed back to how it was ten thousand years ago. It's highly unlikely even eight hundred million people people can live like this. In fact, it's possible there are not enough resources that even eighty million can live like this.

So aside from the terraforming, world population would probably have to shrink to less than 1% of what it is currently.

I'll ask ChatGPT 4

Q: 'Does the idea that "given that all decisions are a form of action, and that votes, when made conscientiously, represent our values, then every choice is a reaffirmation of our values" sound nothing like existentialism?'

A: 'The idea that you proposed does indeed align with some aspects of existentialist philosophy, which emphasizes the individual, the subjective, and the importance of personal freedom and choice.

Existentialism posits that life has no inherent meaning, and it's up to each individual to create their own purpose or essence. This philosophy emphasizes the act of decision-making and the consequences that come with it. In this light, your statement that "all decisions are a form of action" and that these choices reflect our values is consistent with the existentialist view that we create meaning through our actions and choices.

Moreover, the existentialist emphasis on authenticity—living in accordance with one's true self and values—also resonates with the idea that conscientious voting is a reaffirmation of our values.'

Congratulations, another member of the professional-managerial class has rediscovered existentialism.

If stock market always goes up in the long run

The DJIA was 381.17 on September 3rd, 1929. It then went down and did not return to that level until over 25 years later - November 23rd, 1954. Factoring in inflation it would be losing money over a period of 25 years.

The DJIA was 1,051.70 on January 11th, 1973. It then went down during a period of enormous inflation, until it hit that level again on November 3rd, 1982.

We can look at the dot-com collapse in 2000, followed by the sub-prime collapse in 2008, which really roiled the economy, followed by the more recent period of stocks sinking last summer, inflation, FAANG layoffs, relatively tight VC money etc.

As Keynes said, in the long run we're all dead. You can put your money in the market and be underwater for over 9 years, or even over 25 years. Of course, on the other hand you can be completely out and miss out during one of the go-go periods.

Bart Ehrman has written a number of good books on the history of Christianity.

Max Weber's book on Protestantism is good.