bananaface

Do you work at a large company?

FWIW the acquisition was only 25ish percent above market value. In the public markets Nuance was worth something like $15 billion.

If the industry demands weird or suboptimal practices or has strange evaluation criteria then the people making the most will be the people who are best at the game.

I think the popularity of untyped languages is one example of that. Clearly worse, you're removing an entire class of embedded test and nuking your ability to refactor safely, but huge chunks of the industry don't see that as a bad thing. I'm a worse programmer because I've spent so much time in Python.

Why not just:

    function foobar(version: number): string {
      if      (version >= 3) { return 'result_3'; }
      else if (version >= 2) { return 'result_2'; }
      else if (version >= 1) { return 'result_1'; }
      else {
        throw new Error(`Cannot interpret version '${version}'`);
      }
    }

I don't see what advantage the switch provides here.

Is this really true? In my (limited) experience, the best coders are the ones who understand the technology, understand the hardware, and understand good program structure. "Communication" and "teamwork" are totally unimportant and they're usually organic side effects of understanding the domain. I've done open-source stuff with a total asshole and it wasn't pleasant but the end product was good because he was good, and I learned way faster than with most people.

But I've not been exposed to that kind of corporate environment. Is it really that important? It reeks of corporate buzzwords to me.

That assumes the selection process is effective, but FAANGs are all monopolies so there's very weak selection pressure for them to distinguish candidates correctly. They don't get punished for their mistakes.

I'd argue the people at FAANGs are the people who are best at hitting the requirements of a FAANG. That's still a competition and they'll brain drain from smaller companies, but it creates arbitrage on unrecognised ability and other opportunities may exploit that (e.g. starting your own venture relies much more on genuine ability than where you stand on a FAANG progression matrix).

I was contributing to an open-source FAANG project recently and the oversights they'd made in the codebase were surprising to me. There were very basic errors and mistakes and the people managing the codebase didn't understand what some of the functions were even supposed to do. The API wasn't consistent. Tests were testing behaviour that was outright wrong (and, somehow, passing). Feature prioritization was way off. There were half-hearted implementations of some features that were bad enough that they weren't useful. They weren't talking to other departments working on the same basic area (who are also open-source, and hold the state of the art), so there were important features that weren't ported. The project was small, too (but not unimportant).

I don't have high market value, but I was fixing some of these bugs in minutes. The guys managing that project are obviously a lot better than me overall, but I think it betrays a flaw in the institutional structure. Those weaknesses in the codebase would be cheap to fix, the problem is the FAANG standards are such that they are able to go unrecognised.

I get what you're saying but Marxists don't bomb the homes of billionaires, or shoot them. There's no actual warfare, genuine violence is directed at the right, not the rich. They do make a show of constructing a set of gallows in front of Jeff Bezos' house but they don't actually do anything to him, and that's a big difference. I think it's because they don't have the fight-or-flight terror that drives far right-wingers to push the gas pedal of their car into crowds of protestors. They might, in a different system. But I think then the ideology would be different.

In the 70s there were genuine left-wing terrorists like the Weathermen, which might be a good comparison, but the vibe I get is that they liked violence first, and fell into a movement that gave them a justification to perform it. They didn't seem scared to me. The far left rarely seems genuinely scared, but the far right seems very scared.

The difference to me is that nowadays, left-wing threat narratives tend to exist to justify behaviour they already want to engage in, whereas right-wing threat narratives exist much more to be scary. Toward the center things are similar but the differences are quite stark at the fringes.

I don't mean this as a technical argument or anything. I could be wrong, I'm just trying to describe my instinct.

The Great Purge

Was a genocide by people who attained power, not the fringes of society acting out for weird psychological reasons. I wouldn't really compare the motivations. Dictators are dictators, right or left, and the support they get is much more transactional. I'm also skeptical that Lenin was genuinely motivated by Marxism. I think Marxism was an excuse he could use to gain power.

And which permission do I take to access that?

I said it's less sensitive.

The left-wing narrative is usually "[group A] is hurt by [issue and thus group B]", whereas the far-right is, "[group C] will hurt you, if you let them." I think it's a deliberate difference. The far right would never say Jews were accidentally conspiring against Americans, it wouldn't help them. But it helps the far left to say their issues are inadvertent, that [villain] can't help his bias, or that he doesn't have to do it deliberately.

Left-wing narratives are often decoupled from intention (e.g. systemic and unconscious bias) because it makes them easier to propogate, whereas right-wing narratives are the opposite - intention is ascribed whether or not it's there, also because it helps the narrative propagate. They're selling to different human tendencies, I think.

Watch the far-right protest. Their eyes usually convey fear or animalistic aggression, even when they're dominant. Far-left groups carry very different emotions, even violent ones like Antifa.

Firefox already has this. Click reader view, it also gives you a time estimate.

It would be nice if Firefox provided an API that only exposed the static HTML of sites you're visiting. I don't care if an extension wants that data, it's nowhere near as sensitive.

I guess this doesn't solve injection, but there must be other ways to solve "display some additional data."

I think there's crossover but I don't think those two groups are motivated by the same thing.

My observation is that far-right activists tend to feel that they're being deliberately stabbed in the back by the powers that be, rather than seeing themselves as collateral damage. They're also significantly more likely to be paranoid, and they perceive their targets as you would an invading army.

Far-left activism isn't like that. They don't perceive The Man as sadistic, they perceive him as disinterested. "Nobody cares about global warming" vs. "they're deliberately raising the temperature of the earth to hurt me." I also get the vibe far-left activists often engage in activism for fun. It's an exciting mission to break into the farm with your friends. They almost always do it in groups, whereas you're more likely to see jilted right-wingers plan solo attacks like this guy.

(I'm not trying to paint the far-left as better here. I think they're often quite dishonest about their motivations, whereas the far-right is extremely up-front, pied piper gurus aside. I think that's one of the reasons paranoid schizophrenics gravitate more toward the far right, although it helps that their narratives are more about conspiratorial persecution.)

The demographic distributions are also different. Almost all far-right activists are male, whereas vegan & climate activists are mixed.

I would argue if you're not bringing your idea to market, that's not innovation. It's the opposite, you're blocking innovation.

Patents stop other people from creating useful stuff. I think it's reasonable that you should have to fill the gap in order to retain the right to stop them. Although enforcing that is difficult.

How is that legal?

I mean mechanically, how do they get away with it? What legal defense do they use?

Tht's insane. Is that rule in the contract, or is it something that's imposed after employees are hired? (Or is it like, "you agree to adhere to all Amazon internal policies"? Is that even legal to begin with?)

I don't understand how they can enforce something like that without it being an explicit agreement in the contract. Is it the case that they are explicit clauses, but people don't negotiate them out?

I'm on the outside here so I might be misreading, but are these internal policies explicitly written into their contracts, or are they secret, internal rules that Amazon unilaterally imposes after you're hired?

It sounds like they're breaking rules they never agreed to. Is it legal for Amazon to impose rules like that? Is this common across the industry? How do companies get away with it, is it just a US thing?

Hah, to be clear that is what I meant - the idea that Facebook doesn't have the resources is ludicrous, the problem runs deeper.

Facebook took $85 billion in revenue last year and has thousands of developers on the payroll. They could absolutely maintain 3 separate services.

Bear in mind WhatsApp used to maintain a userbase of 200 million with 50 total employees (not even just developers).

If they didn't publish a retraction, they probably could have been sued. They're covering their ass, I wouldn't give them moral credit.

Getting a mortgage isn't purchasing a home, paying off a mortgage is purchasing a home. The bank owns your home when you get a mortgage, and they have the right to sell if you miss even your last payment.

If the housing market crashes 30% tomorrow it'll bankrupt everyone who signed on for a 30-year mortgage in the last 10 years, unless they've overpaid substantially. Very few leveraged first time buyers who bought since 2008 own their homes yet.

I've noticed that Reddit thing too. It's super weird, and it's a really grating style. I think one corollary on HN is overwriting. Comments do better when they're fluffed.

I think a reputation-based system (in the sense of real reputations, not virtual points) could work. I think it's happening in some places. People like Jon Blow, George Hotz & Handmade Hero smoke the competition when they stream on Twitch, and their currency is respect.

The best part of respect-based attention is people who know their shit are able to speak against the zeitgeist, without putting in much effort. That's the biiiig problem I have with upvote systems. It's not so much that they encourage groupthink, it's that they don't present reputation. Every post has to stand on its own merits, which is nice in theory, but in practice it means very experienced (and thus busy) people can't just state their opinion, they have to make an argument, so they end up not interacting full stop.

Is it always the same group?

This is also a problem with Hacker News imo, it's just a lot less obvious. Most HN comments are not worth their weight because the system rewards power posters who know how to post over people who are concise, successful and busy.

I'd argue upvote systems in general dominate the world of tech discussion to the degree that some of these reddit mechanisms end up driving aspects of the industry.

This situation is orthogonal to what's predatory. Its predatory that they generally encourage customers to front more than they realise they're fronting. Many customers think they're betting £1000, they don't realise they're actually betting their house.

Hanlon's razor is not a good heuristic, I don't know why everyone is so into it. If there's a monetary incentive to be deliberate, it's way more likely to be deliberate. Deception is everywhere, especially in sales.

For what it's worth, Emacs is an example of what you describe and it's extremely functional (and carries a huge amount of global state). Millions of lines, an insane number of contributors, development period of decades with a very decentralised management structure.

Emacs has a lot of problems but once you learn the base language, it's quite easy to interface with. I'd argue it's because of the limitations on structural complexity - you don't need to wrap your head around non-locally-defined structure in order to understand any one line. The parts that attempt to emulate OO tend to be a lot harder to deal with as an outsider.

Oh, give it a rest. You're not actually outraged, you're just jumping on an opportunity to call him a hypocrite. The guy fumbled an analogy. I don't buy that you're that apoplectic about serfs from the 1500s. You get it, I get it, he gets it. It's fine.

I understand where you're coming from but I don't think a coordinated ban of the sitting president across platforms is equivalent to a forum ban. And I don't think you think that either.

Look, I'm not trying to argue this "wasn't a special case". I'm saying, it doesn't matter. If you want a president silenced, have congress vote on it, not Vanguard and Goldman Sachs.

You're giving private equity the power to unilaterally decide what they deem "threatening", and I expect them to abuse that power. Like, obviously they'll abuse it, it's private equity. Why on earth wouldn't they?

I would argue the public is at a much higher risk of being tricked by giant monopolistic media organisations with very private interests than fringe lunatics. Murdoch was bad, but at least you didn't have to communicate through his tabloids.

Underneath all of this seems to be this assumption that Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey etc. are benevolent, and won't betray you. Putting aside whether that's right, it's incredibly short-sighted. Jack Dorsey owns 2% of Twitter's stock. Twitter is owned by index funds - they have control, not Jack. You don't want private equity dictating what kind of propaganda you're allowed to see.