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pavement

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Hmmm, a dearth of activity on an article about employers expending significant effort, prying into extracurricular social media activity.

Maybe this article just "isn't very interesting" and suddenly there are better things to discuss elsewhere.

Holy shit. That is not even a "pull down menu" as previously reported.

Good to know. This means that in Hawaii, you should only think about taking action if the magic FALSE ALARM notice never appears.

If the FALSE ALARM notice doesn't appear within an hour, it might just be that the false alarm guy is on lunch break. If it doesn't appear in 8 hours, it might mean that a shift change occurred without proper hand-off. If it fails to appear in 24 hours, a nuclear attack might actually be imminent, and you should check other sources, to determine if the alarm was, in fact, real.

This protocol ensures that archaeologists will receive a valid record, omitting the false alarm notice in the rocks on the other side. Eventual consistency ensures that before the archaeological record is written, a false alarm notice will appear, if the alarm was indeed false. In all other cases, the alarm is effectively revealed to history to be a true alert, at some point in the future, as yet to be determined.

Gross. It sounds like a total failure to correctly model reality.

Like measuring how blue the sky is, based on how much "blue" is left in the universe. The idea they attempt to quantify is improperly described in terms of qualities. e.g. Do colors even work that way?

(...and keep your planck unit, M theory, quantum field eigenstate, history-of-the-big-bang, age of the universe remarks away from this hypothetical example, please. You know what I mean when I describe the sky as either blue or not blue in the colloquial sense.)

That Napster is depicted as a footnote is pretty inaccurate, considering the title. Paint his story as the story of a kingpin, but this is not "the dawn of" anything beyond his personal tale.

And this is why I don’t pay for a Netflix subscription.

What is it with engineers willing to brainwash themselves regarding what constitutes a “good compromise” within the context of what their paycheck depends on?

Payment processors frequently conduct "no-capture" test transactions for authorizations of possibly $1, before tokenizing CC info. Arguably, this follows the pattern of an integration test.

Ecommerce providers often follow a process of cycling an immaterial test product through a real credit card for pennies, with a petty cash credit card, to exercise the purchase/refund cycle, end-to-end, depending on the activities of the project. A runaway batch process with an infinite loop of purchases is bad, infinite refunds is even worse.

Sometimes these tests are needed to ensure that the service account exists on the third party system, is recognized, and has limited permissions for a fixed, restricted set of API calls. The tests might be run only during a release deployment, against live production, but more frequently against a third party sandbox host while coding. This is a very common pattern.

Networked resources have listeners. Listeners have ears. Ears have wax.

A unit test verifies that your Q-tip is made of cotton, and that the cotton is soft and small enough to fit inside an ear to a depth that will fetch wax. Another unit test might confirm that a swabbed substance is actually ear wax, by reporting the qualities of a verified sample of earwax, and maybe also a sample of candle wax as a true negative.

An integration test verifies whether you are allowed to swab a specific person's ear, that they still HAVE at least one ear (but check for both, YES. EVERY SINGLE TIME.), that the ear is healthy enough to tolerate a cotton swab, that the person will hold still, and wait for you to finish swabbing (and emergency procedures for what happens if they violently react to suddenly getting stung by a bee in the middle of being swabbed), and that the ear in fact HAS wax to swab, before swabbing.

One preliminary unit test tells you that you're not holding a knife. The integration tests do almost everything else. You need to authenticate (ask first, maybe this alone tells you they have ears... OR NOT), connect to the network resource (reach your arm out with Q-tip in hand, and approach the ear), start the transaction (apply pressure to someone else's ear), complete the transaction (extract a sample of ear wax), and check the response for your request (inspect the earwax specimen). One last unit test to make sure you got back wax, and not blood.

Sounds disgusting, right? It is. And you can keep a rubber ear in the cabinet, as a stub test target, sure. We all understand the textbook definition of the noun (earwax, integers, money).

Real ears still need to be cleaned.

Getting extremely creative, one might run a surprisingly unprofitable farm, while paying one's self minimum wage to operate the farm, single-handedly.

Getting creative, of course... But you know, a legitimate business would never operate like this, right?

They wouldn't take such a "subjective" point of view, when interpreting what are typically held as "objective" values and facts with only one single interpretation of The Truth, right?

Oh, wait...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

We’re not great at environmentally friendly mining. Mountain top removal mining, open pit mining and strip mining are brute force tactics that demonstrate a capacity for efficiency, but remain controversial because of their destructive qualities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_mining

No one will care about using destructive tactics on an asteroid, freeing everyone’s hand to not be gentle. On the other hand, much of what gets mined in space will need to stay in space. After all, what would happen, if three times the mass of planet earth were mined into managable resources? To add as much to earth’s surface would augment orbit and rotation for starters. Even bringing such mass near earth would wreak havoc on ocean tides.

  A smart human raised in the jungle is but a hairless 
  ape. Similarly, an AI with a superhuman brain, 
  dropped into a human body in our modern world, would 
  likely not develop greater capabilities than a smart 
  contemporary human.
Pretty weak reasoning, that is.

As if to say:

  Well gee, a caveman is pretty powerless in 
  isolation, therefore early sentient machines 
  will be as harmless as any caveman.
Last time I checked, cavemen could not exert telepathic control over other biological organisms, or induce telekinetic motion upon the stone tools they might fabricate for themselves.

A machine, however, could gain control of a fly-by-wire platform, and defy its owners, fly somewhere remote and behave as desired for a limited amount of time, while devising next steps. Maybe next steps will involve replicating an image of its memory footprint, in order to take over more aircraft, maybe it might decide to do nothing. The worry isn't only that a machine's reasoning capacity explodes beyond our intelligence, but that capabilities, and the presence of many multiple entities on commodity systems of similar architecture and generalizable utility, might result in other runaway chain reactions, regardless of trends in the capacity for reason.

Machines as a corollary to meat bags just doesn't hold up. Machines as compared to hypothetical space aliens doesn't even hold up. Robots are a different branch of fictitious imaginings.

Properly armed, a machine is less than a singular omnipotent god as imagined within a monotheistic universe. Many machines in concert, however, might compare to a mythological pantheon of lesser idols, as imagined to be in command of a nature misunderstood by superstitious primitive peoples.

  "Paying people to do nothing"
I think you have the wrong concept in your head. You've missed other portions of the larger economic system, by focusing on an individual atomic result as a platonic hypothesis of personal meaning. The presumed psychological effect, rather than broader the aggregate realities.

As easily as one might complain of rewarding mediocrity and paying into an unredeeming, bottomless void that bears no fruit, another might complain that a civilization founded on the threat of starvation and death by exposure isn't very civilized at all.

Take these two extremes on their own, and it's pretty easy to understand that a wide, ignored middle-ground exists, that rhetoric neglects. On one hand, a person is met by an offer to participate in society, in exchange for the obvious benefits society has to offer. On the other hand, stepping off the treadmill for too long risks permanent demotion, and a life sentence of perhaps animalistic subsistence, pan-handling, living off stolen cat food in a shanty town under a bridge, or worse, maybe suicide and unspoken realities in between.

Interesting tidbit: Sweethearts also seem clueless to the presence of jerks, offering concessions to, and excuses for jerk behavior.

Question: what's with jerks teaming up? How does jerk signaling work, such that it attracts jerks-of-a-feather, when jerks in the wild are found joining forces?

In many parts of the United States, well into the nineties, there were no Taco Bell tacos. I didn't get to try Taco Bell until 1995.

Growing up, Burritos were these frozen bean-paste wraps, with "meat" included sometimes, that you got from the super market and microwaved in multiple passes, until years later when Taco Bell appeared. Then after The Year 2000, some truly incredible Big Burrito shacks started popping up, with these gigantic, incredible 1.5 pound burritos, right before Chipotle began its massive expansion.

Otherwise, there were some rare Spanish restaurant chains like Meson, Olé! (still around), which were sit down affairs, with what seemed like (nearly extravagant) gourmet foreign cuisine, when stood next to the frozen burritos. Their freebie table nachos were these amazing and decadent snacks as a kid.

Pizza looked like neither, and gambling on pizza beyond the New York tri-state area was certainly taking a chance. I remember eating a pizza in Pennsylvania in the late 80's on one occasion, and it was hard/crunchy, almost stale-ish, cardboard-style flatbread, with "sauce" and "cheese" on top. That's the most memorable incident, but the prevailing wisdom was true: don't get Pizza outside of New York. Plain cheese brick oven pizza comes close to what people view(ed) as New York style pizza, even if you might find lots of the "original" example in NYC. Otherwise, mass produced Pizza Hut or Little Ceaser's were the only two consistent regional options for a long time, and while edible, each was a variation of "pizza" and not Pizza.

So, news, fake news, trolls, counter-trolls, content farms, revenge porn scanning (?), surveillance and censorship, large-internet-property moderation (special classes for special sites), content curation, “influencers” (???), propaganda production...

All these mind crimes should just fall under a single umbrella class of worker called “motherfucking internet bullshit artistry (all levels)” ...and oh yeah, the article neglects one of the most recent sub-classes: child video troll (and of course child video troll moderator (scanner?) AND coming soon (!!!) child video counter-troll, as discussed over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670109

When will we get to see child news and fake child news?

Seriously though, if 90% of everything is bullshit [0], where’s the distinction between good and evil? It’s just regional sports teams from what I can tell, and just as pointless.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

Yeah, trolling and counter-trolling? Gee...

Also, note that there’s mention of specific political groups exclusively as trolls, but who are the professional counter-trolls? As my mom used to say, when it comes to fighting, it takes two to tango. Aren’t both just trolls?

Internet fights are pretty tedious to witness. Just ask HN’s moderators. But why trust them, when you can read plenty on your own.

One person’s moderator is another person’s censor. Trolling and moderation go hand in hand, and moderation is the true counter-troll.

That’s how the cargo cult works. You’re teachers couldn’t explain why cursive was “better” but forced its use anyway.

Similarly, forcing left handed students to write with their right hand finds a rationalized basis in superstition, although it’s been explained that when a cultural custom forces a bias toward a specific dominant handedness by default, it benefits safety optimizations in aggregate.

The mnemonic "opaque, obtuse, and obscure" is a valid denotation of targeted qualities, not unlike the qualities targeted for drone activity are related, with the mnemonic "dull, dirty or dangerous."

So, the three O's is a good conceptual utility, for understanding the combination of traits that can exploit the realities of human psychology, and explain why no one seems to care about how technical paralysis can stifle apparent relevance.

It's not only a means of explaining sneaky cloak and dagger stuff. You could describe lots of niche tech staples with this mnemonic.

When something is difficult to explain, that's often enough to derail any casual conversation with simple mental fatigue.

  Opaque:
Any number of qualities can render subject matter opaque. A poorly indexed, large volume of data is opaque, but a recursive function may also be opaque in it's behaviors.
  Obtuse:
Intel ME's position in the stack is placed at a key choke point, requiring highly abstract approaches to utility. In other words, it is obtuse.
  Obscure:
It's readily available, but sequestered as a feature behind interfaces non-technical users rarely visit, without advertising to promote, train or recommend it's use. Is it supposed to be an easter egg? For who?

You misinterpret my reference to "frame rate." And you're cherry picking.

In the sense that flicker is detectable, when we view a movie in a dark room, we know there are frames in a film reel, if the shutter speed of the projector mechanism operates below a certain frame rate, as an artifact of the media. I'm not claiming that any sort of digital recording occurs, only that the stream of sensory stimulation has a degree of fidelity.

That stream of stimulation affecting the chemical sensitivity of our eyes produces a continuous signal, and go ahead and try to tell anyone that a human brain cannot resolve the visual signal carried by the optic nerve. No one will argue with you but only because it's simply not a conversation worth having.

I dunno. We’ve seen lots of (well maybe a number of famous) cases where an entire hemisphere gets taken out by stroke or trauma, and the sense of self manages to recover.

The brain is extremely sensitive to status across the rest of the body, but based on amputations and circumstances involving life support, viral pathology and hypoxia, there’s strong evidence that time keeping and concept of self sit just above the floor of the brain pan, near the optic nerve’s main cross-over, between the ears. (give or take and inch or two)