HN user
Articles like this appear pretty much every month. Anything from gay activists to artists to mainstream political parties have been subjected to Facebook's puritan censorship.
It's become a bit of a running joke.
I find this argument hilarious, especially in this context.
you can't just flagrantly break the law in other countries simply because yours believes differently
Facebook, and many American tech companies like it, have no problem breaking the law in other countries when it suits their bottom line. Primary battlefield: privacy rights.
As much as Americans like to act like it, we can't enforce our ideals around the world
Facebook, and many American tech companies like it, enforce their puritan values around the world by fanatically censoring all kinds of harmless content (mostly, "boobies") on their services.
These companies are clearly willing and able to make both commercial and ideological choices with complete disregard for local laws and values.
What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?
It appears to be what we are moving towards, and so far it ain't looking pretty. Sure, "our kind of people" profit from it, but mostly workers are being ruthlessly exploited on a massive scale without the protection offered to employees in most civilized countries outside the US.
Repeating jokes without attribution has been the cultural norm for centuries. The whole notion of plagiarism and copyright and such are the recent inventions.
Thank good nobody cares, that just means that the intellectual property mafia hasn't indoctrinated us so much yet as to destroy any notion of a common culture.
Extremely ironic that you post this in response to Google search results, which have become a prime example of choosing what's best for Google over what's best for the user after first decimating the opposition.
And so far still pays off nicely for Google, even though the results are getting shittier and more biased year after year.
The only lesson here seems to be "destroy your opposition first, before you start focusing on ruthless exploitation". Let's just hold off on drawing conclusions about SO until another decade.
People who've made bad technological choices and then claiming "technology doesn't matter" just because they fucked up are about as annoying as people who always want to use the latest new shiny toys.
You just made the wrong choices at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. Period.
That doesn't say fuck all about the next guy who may have perfectly good reasons to either choose the next new bleeding edge shiny or go with tried and proven old tech.
The final sentence is the worst advice possible. Never, ever stop experimenting. Just properly separate experimenting from building.
And please stop lecturing other people because you can't keep that shit apart.
Especially in recent years I've encountered a growing number of entrepreneurs who proudly called their companies tech start-ups, but who had no affection for technology whatsoever.
But worse, they actively seemed to dislike the kind of people that do love tech, i.e. nerds, hackers, engineers and such. These were young kids, the stereotypical "cool" start-up founders, but the way they talked about engineers and engineering made you think you were talking to 50 year old pointy haired bosses with not an ounce of respect for technology.
And they keep saying completely the opposite, they keep saying "we love tech", and they actually seem to mean it. Except everything else they do or say indicates the opposite. They just like to use tech, but are completely uninterested in the process of developing tech.
These people aren't just greedy cunts who are in it for the money. These are people who have grown up in a world where consuming technology has become so normal and easy that they simply don't get that creating technology is a totally different process.
And I'm not yet sure whether these people should be avoided or educated.
we never let one country or group of people dictate what people can share across the world
That's even more hypocritical, given that Facebook itself enforces its own prudish values on the rest of the world by systematically censoring harmless and completely legal content because "omg, boobies!".
Zuckerberg saying "Je suis Charlie" makes me want to throw up. If there is one other force besides reactionary muslims that has a chilling effect on the freedom of expression and liberal values in progressive Western countries, it's the dominance of reactionary American tech companies like Facebook.
Remember, TSA's job is to spot outliers, oddities, and flag them for review.
I seriously hope that is a carelessly worded interpretation on your part.
Because that is one scary concept.
The reason why they don't care about whatever you think about the state of journalism is because it allows them to play you directly like a cheap fiddle, without the risk of any pesky journalists getting in the way.
QED.
The state of journalism may suck, but this airheaded attitude suggests it's merely trying to follow it's intended audience and failing.
People this shallow are not going to be reached with quality journalism, so please stop blaming others for your own shallowness and disinterest.
The "political process" isn't the media or the current crop of political parties, it's you. You switch off, it's 100% your problem.
Don't blame others for your own contribution to turning it into shallow entertainment.
Apple had that feature, at least on my previous Air.
As someone who lives in a place where cycling traffic (i.e., completely silent traffic) is massive (Amsterdam), I would suggest this is just a matter of careless habit in a car dominated society.
The only people not looking, relying in their ears and therefor constantly causing dangerous traffic situations over here are tourists. Those are the only ones blindly stepping into traffic because they don't hear the bicycles coming and therefor assume there is no traffic.
The need to have traffic go "vroom, vroom" in order to avoid accidents is just pathetic, and utterly unsustainable in a future where all traffic is likely to be silent by nature.
Imagine living a place that would be as nice an quiet as a village on a sunday if it wasn't for all those vehicles creating artificially amplified noise pollution. Ridiculous.
And AWS is the only service that supports both, and any finegrained solution in between, by triggering programmatically actionable alarms.
You just have to set it up, and if you cannot be bothered, AWS isn't the service for you. If you don't want to do your own cooking, fine, but don't whine about the grocery store not providing you with your own personal chef.
oafitupa is just whining for the sake of whining.
The vast majority of companies are perfectly fine staying at "basement scale" for decades. Fuck, for many types of businesses (including much of the tech industry), that is actually the perfect scale.
This is all Silicon Valley navel gazing. If you want to stay in the basement, stay in the basement. Very little is stopping you, most business models are not based on explosive growth.
Not necessary, because this person and her views are quite well known: http://firstround.com/article/The-woman-behind-the-Netflix-C...
What's basically clear is that the candidates complaining here a) didn't do their basic f-ing homework, and b) are seriously misrepresenting Netflix views on letting people go.
Not I agree with that part of Netflix culture (and it would pretty much be illegal in most Western countries), but there is a clear logic behind it, and I seriously doubt they skipped that part in the interview.
The "second-tuesday-of-the-month" policy is a completely arbitrary MS-only policy.
If Google (or any other group that discovers security issues) has to take into account every policy of every software producer it becomes utterly impossible to have any disclosure policy.
If MS wants to handicap themselves, that's their problem. The rest of the world doesn't have to bend to their will, those days are over.
Yes, this is about being an ass. And it's Microsoft that's being an ass by claiming the rest of the world should take into account their peculiar policy.
That just means you haven't properly aligned your developers' interests with your business interest.
Limiting developers in which languages and technologies they can use is not going to solve that problem, it merely addresses the symptom. Developers make hundreds of little less obvious and visible decisions that have a long term impact on your business. Picking the tools should always remain a developer decision.
If you a) hire the right people and b) make sure your goals are aligned, your developers limit themselves to a few core technologies. If not, you're screwed anyway.
(And yes, that does mean mutually accepting and respecting the fact that your developers' interests in exploring new things and your business interests in may not be aligned indefinitely.)
I would say that is mostly because, thanks to RMS and the GPL, we now live mostly in an ecosystem where the threat of a world dominated by closed, proprietary software has been pushed to the background.
People don't feel a strong need to "weaponize" their licenses against a dormant enemy. Hell, there's a whole generation of hackers for whom the threat is merely theoretical, a bit of historical hacker folklore. For them, copyleft clauses are merely a nuisance that serves no immediate practical purpose.
However, should one or more major players be stupid enough start abusing this and stop playing nice with the open source community, my guess is you'll suddenly see an upsurge of GPL licensed projects.
MIT and BSD licensed projects are cool as long as everyone plays nice, and most companies, even Microsoft, have learned to play nice. That may not always remain the case.
It's a recurring pattern that Apple has to re-invent the entry level laptops every once in a while because they've become so powerful and versatile the target audience for the "pro" laptops starts to prefer them over the heavier, more expensive and overly powerful high-end alternatives.
Personally I have found myself continuously switching between the "pro" and "regular" offerings ever since the days of Powerbook and iBook, and if a 12" Air would be nothing more than a newer, better Air with a retina screen I would probably pick it over the 13" Pro I currently use.
Apple regularly moves the goalposts to avoid cannibalizing the high-end line.
Job title has in my experience strongly affected my ability to influence entrenched company and engineering cultures.
Titles affect how you are perceived by others, including engineers, no matter how often we like the repeat the "but we're a meritocracy" BS. People don't work that way, not even engineers. There are a lot more variables that go into how we perceive and treat people than just their technical output.
So the question "how will my job title affect my ability to do X?" is a perfectly valid one, and meritocracy buzzword bingo is not a valid answer.
There's your fallout: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/02/north-american-b...
I have the same "talent". Exploited it for a via a former employer who runs an agency for temporary contract workers, and who regularly ran into such jobs, also because he was in a network with several other such agencies.
Nice gigs, usually no more than a few days, and working with tech I had no real experience in and otherwise wouldn't encounter.
Usually very similar problems: system slows down to a crawl or completely stops working because it hits some bottleneck (often after years of working flawlessly), original supplier no longer exists. Fun things to figure out if you have no immediate stake in it.
Pointless. They do not care. Even in totalitarian states like the former DDR, most people didn't care. People only start caring when it's too late, when they themselves get affected.
Besides, the technical people don't care either. Many of us may care about our own privacy, but on the whole, we really don't care about what we do to others.
Most of us work for or own companies that directly or indirectly willfully violate people's privacy without thinking twice about the consequences. If only by adding yet another tracker to our apps.
We have no problems feeding our gullible users to the Google beast, yet we should be the ones warning others to take their privacy serious?
Although I am the son of an immigrant, am married to an immigrant and am a hiring manager who regularly hires migrant workers, I have no problem understanding anti-immigration sentiments when it comes to people with your attitude.
How is it that every time someone makes this argument, they do it in such a superficial, arrogant and ignorant way that makes me not want to work with them, remotely or otherwise?
The bandwidth of personal IRL interaction adds enormous value. Yes, in many scenario's that value is not strictly necessary, or can be compensated.
But if you think it's bullshit, or something for "dinosaurs", you have a serious problem. Not just as a programmer, but as a human being.
The plainly manipulative, superficial and dishonest argumentation of pg is the root cause of this.
I pretty much stopped reading after:
where they then paid them the same as they'd have paid an American
pg knows full well that the argument of those who feel immigrant programmers are used as cheap labor is that wages are currently either being artificially depressed, or there is no shortage, or both.
By ignoring that, and using this BS argument, it's quite obvious that he has no interest in an open, honest debate about the matter. This essay, which consist of little more than superficial political propaganda, is certainly not a good starting point for such a debate.
For anyone with actual skill, nothing really changed. But then again, for people with actual skill nothing has really changed throughout the last 25 years, despite the crisis.
Yes, there was a huge market through Y2K and the dot-com bubble for people who knew how to operate a keyboard, and that market collapsed. But those people where as much developers as I am a surgeon because I know how to apply a band-aid. Personally I was glad the bubble burst, because it became increasingly harder to avoid landing in a place where most of the "developers" weren't utterly incompetent.
HN isn't a representative audience though. Most of those people wouldn't be on the early 2000's equivalents of HN either. If this is a bubble and it bursts, most of HN-ers that get affected won't be out of work for more than a month.
Many may have to take a boring enterprise gig, but that's pretty much how the second wave of internet-companies started: bored and with time on their hands, many hackers started to work on what was then called "social software" projects, which eventually resulted in a wave of social media startups.
Things may be different in SV, especially when it comes to the balance of wages vs cost of living, but SV is an outlier.
Every damn time. Could we please stop equating dangerous behavior with cycling being dangerous?
If both cyclists and other traffic behave normally wearing a helmet whilst cycling is as idiotic as wearing a bullet proof vest while walking.
Not everyone lives in the US where the cycling culture is a mix between cyclists racing through traffic where the drivers can legally get away with murder.
First, is there any evidence dystopian fiction is actually significantly more popular? Most of my favorite dystopian fiction in literature and cinema is many decades old. It's not exactly a new thing.
Second, I grew up in the early late 70's / early 80's, when the nuclear holocaust was the theme of the "inevitable" dystopian future fiction. I don't think it signifies anything other than the angst du jour.
Most Americans support either Republicans or Democrats. There are no significant political parties to the left, and those Democrats with somewhat left of center views are considered to be on the far left of the party.
You don't really need statistics or bias to conclude that most Americans conservative. What part of that upsets you so much?