cbs

It seems to take an American or a European to be so paranoid that even this can be cast as a sinister activity.

They know their history. The possibility that their governments would do something as underhanded as hide a person with ulterior motive inside a humanitarian organization is not irrational.

I am starting to sense some elitism and bandwagoning from the design community.

Starting to? That's kind of what the cutting edge of design is all about. When a design advances past certain middle of the road thresholds of usability and tolerably it become more and more just a matter of personal taste. When a bandwagon (or pieces of it) has appeal, it becomes a wider trend. It's still a bandwagon though, styles in the 1980's are(/were?) the go-to example of things that appealed to tastes at the time but are laughable in retrospect.

Design is important in giving products pleasant appearances and interactions, but it's also capable of turning people insufferable. http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57508907-71/at-apple-hq-ey...

Sure, they're fair questions in and of themselves. That doesn't mean they're not used as part of unreasonable or just nonsense rhetoric.

Does the person asking them want to start a real discussion about skill- and merit-based hiring practices? I'm sure much of HN is familiar with the argument there is an over-reliance on formal education as prerequisites to employment.

Armchair quarterbacking someone's leak and escape plan is the same sort of story. There is a lot more to consider in that discussion too (maybe he's got a Chinese hookup for forged travel identification), but I don't think the blowhard on the radio actually wants to have either of those discussions.

Having questions is not the same as smearing character.

And 9/11 truthers would tell you they've just asking questions. Blowhard punditry relies on couching their ramblings in "questions" so much an entire south park episode was dedicated to it: http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/255329/preview-im-aski... This might be a bit of an odd link for HN, but we're discussing conversational tactics couched as meaningful discourse and I'm always reminded of this as a quintessential example of the difference.

I was surprised on the drive home yesterday when they interviewed his neighbor. He didn't win the local chilli cook-off, dude just revealed multiple gigantic surveillance operations. There's got to be someone more relevant to interview, right? Is this just a path of least resistance thing, where anybody with anything worth hearing about this story refuses to speak to the news?

I assumed it was the work of the programmer tasked with installing the key for the NSA, not some self-deprecating humor.

Why is it that IRS targeting is not important enough to merit a single post, but Verizon et. al giving the NSA access to all our data is?

One is a widespread systematic invasion of privacy. The other is a bit of red tape that unequally scrutinized 501(c)(4) applicants based on party affiliation. The scope of these two things are so incomparable that I don't even know where to begin.

It is important the IRS (c)(4) process get fixed, but if they had applied the same level of scrutiny to both left and right leaning groups the reaction would have been more of a murmur. Or maybe even a productive debate on (c)(4) review (lol, probably not). Its not OK that they targeted by ideology, but the fact the criteria was political means Americans are just going to use it as an excuse to be loud. American politicians act like their parties are such delicate flowers, I've seen more dives taken in DC than in Johannesburg 2010.

On top of that, Hacker News is more or less about tech and startups. Not only is the NSA is data-mining from 3rd party tech companies, security and privacy concerns have been large elements of tech culture for decades. A few items on the IRS scandal did get posted here, but didn't get many comments. If I had to speculate, I'd say that even if this this audience finds the actions wrong, they just don't have a whole lot to say on the topic of the burden faced by political organizations abusing (c)(4) classification to hide their donation lists.

From what I understand, modern X applications run remotely are just painting a region of bytes to be shot over the wire anyway. I'll borrow X terminology for a second here, what functional difference is there between these two approaches:

X client -> (network) -> X server

Wayland "client" -> wayland intermediary "server" -> (network) -> wayland intermediary "client" - wayland server

I get the feeling that the pushback (not necessarily yours, but in general) might be rooted in the visual interface where an X server will manage and composite remote applications as if they were local but vnc and rdp (in most use cases) offer a window to the remote system. As I understand it, the former presentation style isn't precluded by wayland's approach.

Wayland's design for a client and server on the same machine doesn't do much more than pushing a buffer full of painted bytes to the server. So anything fancier than that isn't something they refuse to implement for just a network connection, they don't do it at all.

Giving an inch doesn't mean you want to give a mile. Or perhaps more appropriately to facebook, giving a mile doesn't mean that any passerby who wants an inch is entitled to it.

Making privacy tradeoff decisions about facebook doesn't mean someone has given up on privacy all together, just that facebook has proven itself worth the cost of the information they give to facebook.

Not to mention the fact most people don't understand just how deeply facebook is datamining them in the firstplace.

There are multiple pages to the article. I missed the navigation buttons at first too.

Anyone with the legal knowledge to help you probably knows better than to do so. Find a lawyer, this type of thing is why they exist.

The government doesn't do anything at market rates. They employ below market rates, and contract external companies above market rates. This is (unfortunately) by design.

Normally I have a kneejerk reaction to someone calling someone else jealous. It always strikes me as someone projecting their own jealousy onto someone who very well may have legitimate criticism.

That having been said, it is a bit rich for Vibhu Norby to be concerned about the hurt feelings of employees by making a 17 year old a millionaire. That is an incredibly, incredibly, incredibly, narrow area of the social consequences of wealth to focus on. I have a hard time taking such a myopic point at face value.

let's not pretend that he is an innovator

C'mon, this can't be the first time you've noticed that "innovation" has been overused to the point of meaninglessness in tech. "Disruption" doubly so. Don't harp on this kid, he is no less innovative than 95+% of "innovation" I've heard about in the last year.

Isn't Wikia also created by Jimbo Wales? He's pushing the content off of Wikipeida to his for-profit site! Collusion!

Do you seriously believe the female or feminist tech community has the resources to perform DDoS?

Take a good hard look in the mirror my friend. You're calling "take your head out of your ass" abrasive, but that is downright tame compared to the sexism on display in your presumption that female(s) couldn't possibly have the necessarily tools and ability to launch a DDoS attack.

TechCrunch reporting on misrepresentation of a quote that TechCrunch originally read too much into?

This is my surprised face.

Is that what everybody outside the US thinks?

Well, considering that whenever the actions of an employer are questioned people on the internet are quick to assert that privacy in the work place does not exist and that employment is at-will.

I can see where our foreign friends get the impression.

I disagree with what you said. Please tell me where you work so that I may go create a PR nightmare for your employer that is best solved by firing you.

Is it fair for people from that 3rd world country to sell the book back to the USA and for you to miss out on your profit?

The law should only be concerned with fairness insomuch as it informs "right vs wrong". Nobody is entitled to a business model.

Conferences are a minefield. Conflicting opinions of if a particular conference should be, is, and what qualifies as, a "professional work environment" run rampant.

When you have everyone attending because it's necessary and/or just a break from the office, they have a professional setting because people are not excited to be there. I see this in the business domain (not-tech) conferences all the time, any recreation happens completely separate from the conference.

Tech conferences get tech enthusiasts. Suddenly people actually want to be there and have fun with the other attendees. An easy example is DEFCON, people treat it like a party with talks, because for over a decade it was unambiguously a party with talks.

Problems are multiplied when people want to relax standards of professionalism on some axis but maintain it on others (or even ratchet it up beyond what people are used to in their own offices). Clearly defining socially feasible expectations of behavior and communicating that to attendees never happens, then "incidents" occur.

The concluding 3 paragraphs are like the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense.

Yup. This guy did a fantastic job articulating what many others have just given up on trying to. Those of us who voice trepidation are usually marginalized as jealous and/or haters. See: http://xkcd.com/743/

It's a common bit of firearm carrying wisdom. Not directly equitable to, but in the same vein as, "even when the gun is unloaded, its loaded".

Of course its a deterrent, but the only thing that makes it more of a deterrent than a whistle is that the officer is (or presumed to be) ready to shoot.

I'm an embedded systems developer, targeting a realtime operating system and have hard realtime application requirements.

Could someone explain to me what these folks mean when they say "real-time"?

they should have done a way better job sharing that vision and framing the discussion that way.

In a market where some game's design decisions for online focus and/or online passes are driven by an effort to reduce piracy and the secondary sales market, it becomes very hard to convince people that any one game isn't.

Good luck selling that: "No, not in this case, our design just happened to support them by coincidence, and, oh, we're also part of EA and even though the cynics have been right about our motives in the past, we're totally not doing it this time."

A guy with an axe to grind tricked some websites that either aren't focused on games or are just desperate for page views? That's not going to change my view of Rock Paper Shotgun's editorial chops.

Maybe you're right, I'll wait for the Maxis PR statement, that's where the truth will lie!

Those with an editorial reputation in the gaming press are (perhaps even uncomfortably) close to the guys in the industry they cover. They knew better than to run with that hoax, and Rob Crossly even called the hoaxer out on it (read the emails he posted to twitter if you want to see the hoxer have a hissy fit).

If RPS says they got a Maxis duder, they probably got one. One has to be suspicions of all reporting, but even though the NYTimes fucks the pooch sometimes, its not really grounds to handwave away every bit of reporting ever.

What would an ideal question have been, in my mind? How about this: [...]

If they wanted to have that kind of discussion, why not use a panel moderator to ask those questions and invoke that conversation in the portion of the event the panelists were driving?

I didn't attend this, but based on Skepchick's own summary, the presence of Chen on the panel, relying on the audience to challenge their criticism, other posts online covering the panel and the fact MrGrimm felt the need to strait up "filibuster"; I get the impression they were there to recite well-known criticism rather than engage in analysis of reddit.

I wonder if, out of an audience of 300, nobody was able to meaningfully challenge the panel's position or if those that could just didn't bother. Why didn't they?

What if you're depressed because you're afraid of death?

In that case, you shouldn't take any advice from HN unless that advice is to talk to a professional.

It's a lot like legal advice, sure people on the internet can talk about the issues, but they're probably wrong and even if they're right it's still unwise to take what they say at face value. The people with the professional capacity to help you can't do it well online for all the obvious reasons.

I find attitudes like this fascinating. If they were within their legal right to do this, that explains why the resident deans are complaining instead of suing.

When did the fact something is permitted become reason to shut down or marginalize discussion on if it should happen and/or be permitted?

So what now? How can this work?

It doesn't. Our most recent copyright overhaul (which this is a feature of) currently works close-enough to OK to be tolerable to those who would otherwise fix it.

That reminds me; did you here the one about women? Terrible drivers amirite?