georgemonck

"That in combination with unrestricted submarine warfare really did mean German conduct in the war was far crueler then the Allies."

Both Britain and Germany tried to prevent the US from shipping arms and supplies to the other country, via whatever tools they had available. The US either chose to not even try to ship supplies to Germany, or if they did, since British naval power was in the form of ships,so they could turn away US merchant-ships without blowing them up. But with US shipping supplies to Britain, the only tool Germany had available was the submarine warfare, which is a much blunter tool.

From the perspective of an American citizen, I think that the 'unrestricted submarine warfare' pretext was bogus. The US should not have shipped supplies to either side, and then there would have been no submarine warfare against US ships.

this isn’t a disagreement on tax policy, this is advocating hatred and violence.

I think some "both-sides-ism" is in order here.

From the perspective of the right, the left is also advocating hatred, violence and is also trying to do an end-around to thwart democracy. Consider:

- The riots we've had in four different cities, riots that occurred before the facts of the case were even known, and which white people were being specifically targeted for violence -- http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/milwaukee-pro...

- Michelle Obama's support of Beyonce's Black Panthers homage at the Super Bowl (if you are unfamiliar with how destructive the Panthers and the movement associated with it were, you can start here https://devinhelton.com/hate-group-history )

- The left's strategy of "electing a new people" -- favoring mass immigration from Mexico because it will help push liberal policies. This was stated openly in Paul Krugman's "Conscience of a Liberal" and you see articles all the time about it (for example https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/19/... )

- The continued scapegoating of "white men" and "structural racism" as being the source of problems for minorities, even when you do a deep dive on the statistics and the situations that is clearly not the problem.

- Selective enforcement of the law, going after Republican associated people in groups, such as the John Doe investigations in Wisconsin ( http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417155/wisonsins-shame... ), the IRS going after tea party groups, or the adminsitration trumping up charges against Peter Thiel's Palantir company

There are serious issues at stake, and a lot of bad behavior on both sides. The only way a two-party system works, is if when one party wins, it doesn't try to punish people who supported the wrong side.

Many endorsers have already committed to implementing changes consistent with the report recommendations – from revised essay questions and marketing materials, to the development of entirely new recruitment, scholarship and high school programs focused on community engagement and caring for others...."We don’t want students who do things just because they think they have to in order to get into college"

This is sort of an impossible goal. If you put something on the college application, and judge students by it, then you are certain to be selecting students who are doing that activity just in order to get into college.

At this point, I think it may simply be better to use a lottery to fill slots at the most selective colleges. Set a bar at 1400SAT, top 10% of class, and one significant extracurricular. Then award students additional points for slightly higher SAT or better class rank or more exceptional extracurricular. Do a lottery, with your chances weighted by total points.[1]

Top-ten schools are recruiting from a pool of over a billion people, that means that among the top 1% of that pool there are 100,000 students each year. Distinguishing among that top 1% is nigh impossible, and if you try to do it based on any measuring stick, you will just set off a red queen race. Asking for people to show that they contribute to the community on the application is not a recipe for producing people who can successfully contribute to their communities. It is a recipe for producing people who can create the appearance of contributing to the community. The two are very different.

[1] I'm sure this policy would have to be slightly more complicated when taking into account the needs of recruiting a competitive football team, or in rewarding the biggest donors. But overall, I think this kind of plan would work for filling most of the slots in college class.

"Every morning, we all wake up to a world that isn’t optimized. Reading the news, commuting to work, ordering coffee, planning a vacation; far too few of these experiences were optimized using data. As a result, our lives are filled with experiences that are never as good as they could be."

Oh the horror! Just the other day I was getting a cappuccino from my local cafe, and as the barista expertly poured out a perfect latte-art fern, I thought to myself, "man, if only this process could be optimized using data, like they do at Starbucks." Then I sat at my computer and read some idiosyncratic posts from my favorite blogger. After enjoying a few posts I said to myself, "man, if only he could optimize his blog posts for maximum clicks like Buzzfeed does. Why doesn't he use data to make his experience better?"

</sarcasm>

I do generally dislike cheap negativity when responding to startup news. But this first paragraph was really tone-deaf and deserving of ridicule. Let me try to balance my criticism with some constructive advice for rewriting this press release.

Drop the first four sentences. Start off with, "When Pete Koomen and I founded Optimizely five years ago, very few companies had even heard of A/B Testing, and optimization software was about the last thing anyone considered putting in their technology stack." Then give an example. "When we first helped XYZ Sporting Goods optimize their site, we knew we were on to something. Not only did we help them write more compelling copy and better imagery that bettered their sales, we also created a much better experience for their customers. No longer would visitors click away because they could not understand what the site did, or what their message actually was. A/B Testing and data based optimization allowed us to match the website to the people who were actually visiting their site. Fast forward to 2015 and much has changed...."

Not every company is going to change the world. But you can still write a compelling, feel-good narrative without making me want to throw a shoe at the screen.

An account shares access to the same file system, but can be restricted as to which files and directory it can see and execute.

An account in a chroot jail gets its own view of the entire file system that is completely isolated. The root folder for the specific account is not the root folder for the system as a whole. But the account still shares RAM and the CPUs.

An account running in a container gets a chroot jail plus its access to system resources, such as RAM and the CPU's are restricted. So you could restrict an account to using a maximum amount of RAM and a maximum number of CPU cores.

I don't like how politics becomes warfare, but the phenomena exists, and we need a name for the people who engage in this kind of activism. I don't think that all leftist activists are social justice warriors, but there are very clearly activists who believe in shaming and purging, and there needs to be a name distinguishing those aggressive activists versus activists who just want to convince people. The war tactics exist, refusing to label them as such does make them go away.

For example, I think you're stacking the deck with your talk about "left-aligned mobs" and that you are intentionally eliding the history of right-wing fascism to make "your side" look better than "the other side."

I mention that because we were talking about social justice warriors, who are on the left. If there was a term "Right-wing Warriors" or such to describe right-wing people who wanted to dox, shame, purge, ban, and use any tactic necessary to fire leftists, then that would make sense. It would be completely appropriate to label such people as "warriors", if they are engaging as politics as warfare rather than as a way to convince people.

The thing is, there is no big yellow line between aggressive politics and warfare. If someone gets me fired from my job, that is actually worse for me than if I get punched in the face. And while many SJW's don't engage in violence themselves, they do play the role of trumpeter, and the trumpeter should be considered a type of warrior - http://www.bartleby.com/17/1/79.html And there are plenty examples of the left either using the state to engage in violence to further left-wing causes, or in tying the hands of the state to allow left-aligned mobs to engage in violence.

The defining trait of SJW is not that they are activists for a cause. If they were just trying to win hearts and minds so they could win at the ballot box, that would be one thing. The defining trait is that they use any means at their disposable to defeat their enemies: naming and shaming, purging, getting people fired, getting people banned from communities, lawsuits, criminal complaints, etc. That is the mentality of warfare, and deserves to be called as such.

What word would you use for a left-wing activist who aggressively wants to name and shame, or purge, or get fired, or get banned, any person on the right who crosses a certain line? These types of people exist, is is a real phenomena, so it needs a name.

There are a few underlying issues here.

There is a lot of denial about the nature of the intellectual bell curve. The majority of people are not that smart and cannot make thoughtful contributions to most discussions. The majority of people will at least some of the time lose decorum and make vicious personal attacks when they perceive themselves as being threatened or as being wronged. Upvoting and downvoting is an action, and action requires motivation. Thus, unless an audience is especially smart and valuing of rationality, comments are most likely to get upvotes when they provoke an emotional reaction.

To have a high quality discussion board you must have a critical mass of reasonable, smart people. You must avoid letting in the hoi polloi. And you must quickly ban users who make dumb comments or violate decorum.

However, most internet business models are based on advertising. Advertising revenues are based on eyeballs. And a normal stupid person's eyeballs are worth just as much as smart person's eyeballs (perhaps more, the smart person probably has adblock installed).

Thus the central conflict. Business models are based on making it as easy as possible for normal people to get engaged in the platform. But the result of normal people getting engaged will be vicious and unsavory content. Also if it is easy to create account, then it is easy to switch accounts if one account is banned. So it becomes impossible to silence the unsavory users.

I think that ultimately Reddit will end up as sort of the Wikipedia version of a newspaper. All pretense of being free speech or democratic will be dropped in the major subreddits. Rather it will be a media site on a variety of issues that is mostly top-down, and controlled by the actions of entrenched, established users and moderators.

It took a lot of active mismanagement and folly to keep Pipes from living up to its promise.

I would love to read a blog post about how exactly it was mismanaged. It would be great for others to learn lessons from the mistakes.

Actually, if you were really worried about epidemics, it would be better to fragment the world further. Make travel much harder and rarer. From an existential point of view, mass air travel is a really bad idea. If a pandemic ever breaks out, it could be far too difficult to contain it in one continent, thus posing a threat to all technological civilization, and humanity itself. If continents were separated, America might have time to develop a vaccine before a disease incubated in Europe could reach it.

Back when I was in middle school I was a fan of world government. The big problem is that exit is a much better way to enforce accountability and make governments serve the people than any form of voice is. "Voice" is an illusion since bureaucracies always maintain the real power and are resistant to change. Furthermore, world government is a massive single point of failure.

There are really two issues: the knowledge acquisition and the money. I have made a good living in software for nearly a decade, without having a computer science degree. Being self-taught was not a problem. My only problem is that I never invested in learning some of the core material - writing my own operating system, writing a compiler, learning 30 common algorithms, etc. For most jobs, this knowledge is not required. But if I wanted to work for Google or Facebook, lack of this knowledge might be a problem. When you work at their scale, often operating system patches or crazy algorithms are needed, and the base knowledge comes in handy.

That said, there is no reason for the base knowledge acquisition to cost $100k. It merely requires an investment of time. There is no equipment needed, professors are not that helpful. You just need to the work of reading through the material and coding the implementations.

So waste of money, yes. Waste of time, no.