aaronem

There is at least one other project with the same name ("btfs"): https://github.com/arvidn/btfs

Seems a bit more feature-complete than this one.

A huge proportion of society is easily manipulated by showing them a "manufactured consensus."

And for the rest, you just need to pander to their belief that they're immune to that sort of thing.

Well, if you go to a collision specialist who's legally prohibited from turning away anyone with a bent frame regardless of their (current or future) ability to pay, it's not unreasonable that they'll charge you more than Jiffy Lube does when you can pay. That overhead has to be covered somehow.

How on Earth did this make the front page? I mean, it's not that I ever get tired of seeing Massachusetts Yankees and California carpetbaggers use a magazine named after my hometown to tell us Southrons what they demand that we be, but I am somewhat surprised to see it here, of all places. Perhaps I shouldn't be.

The DPRK's constitution isn't intended for internal consumption.

You seem to suggest that a government which doesn't behave in accord with your wishes is illegitimate thereby. It's hardly unique these days, but one might hope nonetheless to see you stop short of treating it as something to be proud of.

Really? Weimar's human rights laws were second to none in the world for their time, and are considered exemplary even now. If what you say is true, how did the Nazi abuses occur?

The reasoning you present here is exactly equivalent to:

- You have a broken arm

- Somewhere else in the world, someone has stage IV pancreatic cancer

- Therefore your broken arm should be of no concern even to you

The flaw should be intuitively obvious, especially to anyone who's ever had a broken arm. But hey, you actually concede you're a robot in your HN profile, your hyperalloy combat chassis is no doubt proof against such mishaps, and why should anyone expect you to understand or care what humans feel?

I don't suppose I can argue your point about the origin of the term. Perhaps "professional shit-stirrer" would be more accurate.

Certainly homeschooling isn't scalable. There are techniques, methods, curricula, which can be (and are quite widely) shared, but no one can systematize it into something which will guarantee a good result in every case. Unfortunately, I see no reason to imagine anyone can so systematize anything else, either. After all, the current lamentable state of affairs is the result of concentrated effort, over a period at least of decades, on the part of many of the world's finest minds. If they can't come up with a "one size fits all", why expect that anyone else can? Perhaps the "social sciences", so called, are fundamentally in error. Perhaps every family and every child is unique, a non-reproducible n=1 experiment -- and perhaps, cast in those terms, it becomes a little easier to see just how wrongheaded the concept of a "one size fits all" solution for human beings might possibly be.

As far as I can tell, the most common objection to homeschooling is that it doesn't work in the absence of parents who are interested and closely involved with the progress of their children -- not in the modern "helicopter" style borne only of a desire not to be seen to parent badly, but rather in a consistent and, to the extent possible, effective fashion, out of both genuine interest in the wellbeing and success of their offspring, and a sense of the duty to society which also inheres in parenting, that is, to bequeath upon the world children whose presence is more likely to be overall a benefit than a detriment. Or, to put it simply, that homeschooling can't work reliably because it doesn't work at all without good parents.

Unfortunately, as the last decades have also shown us, without good parents, nothing else works, either -- and a sufficiently broken system can easily overcome the effects of even the best parents, if only by being vastly larger than them and all but inescapable. Here we have a Yale professor telling us that the existing system is sufficiently broken -- and not really telling us anything we didn't already know. Do we assume that nothing else can work either, and that our kids are doomed? Or do we seek alternatives, even those which are utterly alien to the sort of systems-first thinking that got us into this mess?

I can't speak for anyone else, of course, and I'm not raising any kids of my own, but it seems to me that the only option compatible with even the most basic concept of parental responsibility is the latter one. After all, we've not only seen ourselves that what we've got doesn't work; here we have one of its highest exponents telling us it doesn't work, which should be authoritative enough for just about anybody. Perhaps something else might work better? It'd be very hard for anything else to work worse.

Oh, it's quite possible for a troll to believe what he says. The essence of trolling isn't bullshitting; it's knowing how to get a rise out of people.

To answer your question as best I can, I really can't answer your question very well, because I'm not a parent and never will be, and thus have only a peripheral knowledge of the detailed mechanics of parenting. Based on what little I know, the first place I'd suggest looking would be the homeschooling movement, which seems to be gaining secular adherents quite rapidly of late for reasons appearing not much different from those I suggested in my earlier comment.

Your erstwhile instructor seems to be a professional troll, which is probably good work if you can get it, but I'm not joking. GP's comment casts the options available to him in the following duality: either

1. push [his] theoretical children into this race, or

2. let them eat into precious time to figure things out.

Whatever my opinion of the article under discussion, I can only agree with its author that option 1 is a horrible mistake whose consequences for his children may accurately be called lifelong impairment.

Option 2 is no better, and it only even seems that way if you don't think about it too hard. It implicitly accepts the premise, not that childhood is precious (which it is), but that childhood is precious because, and in the way that, academia claims it is. That's toxic as hell, and it will poison any parenting that proceeds from it.

Specifically: He won't be able to relax around his kids, because he'll always have that nagging ambivalence that he's doing wrong by them, failing to equip them to compete as functional adults in a world which does not care about them, and that will come through in his actions. It can't not, and his kids will pick up on it, because a young child's parents are by far the most important things in her world which are not actually her, and she notices everything about everything they do. She won't intuit any of the paragraph I just wrote, of course, because you have to be old and jaded and cynical for that. She'll just know her daddy is never happy or comfortable or relaxed when he's around her, and with the unconscious, inevitable egotism of the very young, she will assume that's because of something to do with her. And she'll almost certainly never get over that.

I don't know that I agree with David Benatar that bringing a child into the world is invariably harmful to the child. But I certainly have a hard time arguing other than that it's harmful to bring a child into the world to endure the kind of parenting I've just described -- hence my advice to GP.

A better third option, if anyone's interested, would be to opt out of the entire nonsense and raise your kids without reference to it. The trouble is that you are not more powerful than the society in which you exist, and it is interested in your kids whether you like it or not. You might find or make an enclave, and a method, in which to raise them without having them be too badly stunted by its more pernicious influences; people have done it before, are doing it now, and will no doubt continue to do so. Perhaps you will be among them. But it's not implausible that your notional kids are better off never having existed at all, if you're not even equipped to recognize the need to be willing to make the attempt.

Stanford also confers more degrees in social sciences and "interdisciplinary studies" (i.e. degrees in having graduated from Stanford) than in engineering and computer science, and has done for some years now. I don't doubt you can obtain an excellent education in those fields at Stanford, but it's been a long time since that was what Stanford was for.

Well, yes. When you decided what you wanted to do with your life, and made that decision stick over parental objections, that was in the nature of a declaration of adult independence. Good for you! Lots of people never make it that far. But, having done so, you can hardly expect to retract it eight years later. "Mommy, Daddy, I don't want to be a grownup any more!" With whom do you imagine this playing well? How would you react if your presumably notional kid tried to pull it on you?

If you want to go to the world's best school for mine engineering, Yale shouldn't be on your list to begin with. It's a sign-off for pedigreed elites, not a trade school.

Only 26? Surely not. Why, at that age he might not even have a master's degree yet!

Option three: do your kids a favor and don't have any.

And I think we see that in the last 50 years, the meritocracy has created a world that’s getting better and better for the meritocracy and worse and worse for everyone else.

But weren't you saying just the opposite? That being part of the elite, which here you call "meritocracy" because you're playing a card trick, drives people crazy?

Here's what I think: You're talking to the elite (if you weren't, you wouldn't be in the Atlantic), and you know said elite are more comfortable thinking of themselves in terms of "meritocracy" (even though one of your theses is that there's no meaningful merit involved), and you also know that pretending to care about unequal distribution of social benefits is currently in fashion among your audience (hence the preference for "meritocracy", because it implies that your audience's unequal share is earned). Keeping all three of these plates spinning at once is difficult; the sentence I quoted is them all hitting the ground at once.

Davis: Some criticize this kind of self-reflection as narcissistic[...]

Deresiewicz: [...]the main point is to know yourself so you know what you want in the world. You can decide, what is the best work for me, what is the best career for me, what are the rewards that I really want. And maybe you’ll end up saying that I do need a certain level of wealth, but you will know it because you will have come to know yourself.

Nope. Nothing narcissistic here. You know, in ages past when countries had explicit aristocracies rather than the implicit ones which deposed and replaced them, "the main point" as you put it was to serve others, rather than oneself. Can't imagine what brought that to mind just now, though. Totally unrelated to anything, no doubt.

Gaining self-knowledge isn’t a simple or predictable process. Are there certain things that can only be learned outside the classroom?

Could there possibly be any wronger question to ask?

Aside from the classes themselves, the fact that we’ve created a system where kids are constantly busy, and have no time for solitude or reflection, is going to take its toll. We need to create a situation where kids feel like they don’t have to be “on” all the time.

Are you sure? What it sounds like you're saying is that "we" have been doing the best "we" can for decades, and the result is barely tolerable. Are you sure it wouldn't help more if you just stopped creating situations? If the problem is that you're raising your kids inside a Skinner box, why would you think the solution is to make the walls less opaque? Are these the only terms in which you can think? You don't need to answer that one.

When I taught humanities classes, I never talked about self-reflection, and I never invited students to talk about their feelings or their backgrounds or their experiences.

Well, you got that right, at least, if only by accident. And it has to have been by accident, because you think you got it wrong. The context couches this as a failure on your part, but why would it be? Why would you think that someone else's self-reflection should have anything to do with you? You don't need to answer that one, either.

So how does this amazing article finish? With its subject telling us about his own college experience, in the course of which comes this marvel, which I've emphasized so you don't miss it:

I drifted for two or three years after college until I reached a cinematic moment in my life[...]

Why cinematic? Because we've all seen this movie. To call it "transformative" would be erroneous, because a plot twist doesn't change the shape of the plot, it's part of the story all along; to call it an "epiphany" would be the same, plus stupid, because we all know God is dead. Indeed, part of the interview describes how academia has tried to fill the former social role of religion and failed at it.

But this possibly quite significant point is glossed over entirely because it's not important to Deresiewicz's movie and therefore not important to the article or the audience, who are (presumed to be) in much the same state as the subject: their problem isn't that they've failed to live the movie plot they thought they wanted, it's that they've succeeded at it and found themselves nonetheless unfulfilled. Which is fine as far as it goes, what a shame for them but who cares, right? Except they've managed to inflict the same disaster on the next generation, because they are not only narcissistic but incredibly stupid besides.

And, having recognized the existence and nature of this error, what do they feel really matters? Is it that their descendants, their students, their supposed protegees, are going to have to find their way out of this clusterfuck on their own because everyone who might be expected to help them is too self-absorbed to bother and too stupid to succeed at it anyway? Of course not. No, what matters is who gets the blame, specifically that it be anyone but they themselves:

But the take home message is that everyone has to liberate themselves from this system. Education should be an act of liberation. We need to make a better system but ultimately everybody has to claim their freedom for themselves.

These are literally the last words in the article. Do you think that's an accident? Because it's not an accident.

That'd be a great idea if psychiatry had any better idea of what moves people to commit crimes, and how to stop them doing it again, than anyone else does. And even then, it'd be a terrible idea. You're proposing psychiatry become, not just an arm of the state, but an arm of the criminal justice system, with all the baggage that implies. What in the history of the field gives you to imagine it's mature enough, with responsible enough practitioners, to be given that much potential for abuse both well-meaning and otherwise?

It takes bad parenting to give a kid that age the impression that asking questions could ever not be okay. As long as that mistake isn't made, the rest follows organically.

Concern over privacy, which has been severely compromised by the confiscation of ~65k users' data (including stored email) in an investigation into the actions of one, seems not particularly on offer in this case, where the only significant departure from the norm is that the service is named after a shameless dick joke.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10774152 for details and analysis.

Yes, but reading is the single skill with the highest payoff, when it comes to learning things that let you learn more things. Why give the kid a fish, if you can teach her how to catch her own?

(Again, as in my other comment, I feel it worthwhile to point out that this isn't a purely theoretical discussion for me: I was myself taught to read at age two, and have never been other than glad of it.)

Well, I can't give you a peer-reviewed, n>500, p=0.001 answer, but I can tell you that I've never regretted my mother teaching me to read at age two. Reading has given me a great deal of both pleasure and knowledge throughout my life, and I can't think of a single time I've looked back and said "Gosh, you know, I sure wish Mom had waited three more years to teach me to read, or just left the matter in the hands of the public school system."

Of course, that was thirty-odd years ago, before kindergarten-aged kids were expected to be familiar with English lit back to Chaucer and mathematics up to basic trigonometry. I can see how in the modern environment someone might react negatively to the suggestion that it doesn't hurt kids to know how to read when they're two, because letting on about it could well result in an environment where a kid who's three years old and can't yet read is either developmentally delayed or has bad parents, or of course possibly both.

Edited to add: It doesn't help at all that the author of the article under discussion couches his reasoning in terms of improved educational outcomes -- he's explicitly trying to turn his kids into highly performant overachievers, and that is super creepy. If that's your only available perspective on the matter, I can't blame you at all for being bothered by it, because I actually was taught to read at age two like he's advocating and it bothers me too. He sounds more like an education researcher than like a father, and that's disturbing.

But Mom didn't teach me to read early because she had some kind of n=1 eugenics experiment in mind. She did it because she loved me and thought I'd enjoy being able to read, and she didn't use the rather chilly and vaguely clinical-sounding methods this author describes. As she described it to me not long ago, she'd just read part of a story to me, showing me each word in turn and helping me sound it out and learn its meaning, and offer me as much help as I wanted in figuring the rest out for myself -- which I would, because I wanted to know how the story turned out. Evidently this method worked well enough, and as I said before, I've never regretted it. Make of that what you like, of course.

In Germany we have learned our lesson, and we will fight for our privacy online on all ends.

Except dick jokes, of course.

You might not, too. The LA district shut down. The NY district, which also received a threat, did not. Why? And why the difference in response?

And? KCBS isn't an affiliate; it's owned and operated by the network. The difference in domain name is purely cosmetic; if CBS corporate weren't OK with the content of the story, the story would no longer be online, if indeed it had ever been published at all.

It says "CBS News" at the front of the headline. If they aren't inclined to make the distinction, I don't see why they deserve the benefit of the doubt from me.

Have you seen CBS's [1] and the Daily Mail's [2] hit pieces on him? Of the latter such flagrant nonsense is to be expected, but one generally doesn't expect to see CBS descend to the same level.

[1] http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2015/12/18/cbs-news-maine-nat... [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3367044/Maine-colleg...

Seeing as he's yet to be accused of anything except being a community-minded sysadmin with a low sense of humor, I'm not sure a mere lack of taste excuses the extremely unsympathetic media attention that's been focused on the operator of this service in the last few days.

Is that a problem with persistent IRC, or a problem with community members not stepping up to ensure that knowledge which gets developed in IRC doesn't die there?