zucchini_head

The article doesn't touch upon education much at all, which I believe is a central part of social (im)mobility. Problems arising in society later on will simply stem from the early life of members of society, not afterwards. It's a common principle that education is the key to societal equality, in some way.

All I can offer is my story on this. I've lived in the UK all my life in all sorts of regions from those of lower working class (my hometown) to my recent years where I've lived in rather upper-class "lawyer-doctor-business owner" regions. The difference in education between the lower and upper classes is stark. Let me explain.

Upper-class children are enrolled in schools of like-minded high-achievers full of entrance exams and interviews (provides a non-zero floor to student "intelligence/quality" at the school), and strict rules/discipline. They are further pushed towards degrees leading to higher paying careers - Finance, Medicine, Law, by their families and the schools themselves. Their families purchase extra tutoring, they have smarter parents (this is a positive feedback loop across generations!) to guide them, and so on...

Compare this to lower-class children, who, in the UK (and i'm pretty sure everywhere else essentially) are enrolled in "state schools" (free). These schools have no entrance requirements (there is zero floor for student quality), the families almost never purchase extra tutoring, and are much less pushed towards "meaningful" degrees. The schools offer equal environments to the best and the worst of students.

This imbalance in education (and by extension upbringing in general) is what seeds everything else. And indeed, in the past few years the UK government has recognized all the above. How they plan of solving it? The reintroduction of "Grammer Schools"! These are state schools (still), but _do_ have enterance requirements, thereby allowing lower-class students of high intelligence/quality a chance to separate from the worst students in state schools and enroll in a more challenging education. There is much debate in the UK whether this will work, or will simply just allow children of rich families to more-often/further separate themselves from poor families. Time will tell.

That's my 0.02c anyway: Education.

Being serious here: What exactly is a "fintech" company? Every financial company on earth that isn't in someone's backyard is at-heart now purely technological (computers, algos, tracking, databases, etc.). So what makes a "fintech" company? Is it a super _ultra_ technological bank?

In summary, what are fintech companies exactly doing?

Part of me believes it's the new version of "crypto-", but i will hold my breath.

I find it quite funny, rather intruiging, that we seem to have gone full circle on trusted sources of information. Historically, a face-to-face meeting was considered as the ultimate legitimate and trustworthy way. Not story or rumors or witnessing, since the courts say people can be "decieved", "traumatised", etc. Then came microphones, cameras, CCTV in the 20th century, and then they became the ultimate trusted sources of information.

And due to AI and it's rapidly increasing misuse by enormous conglomerates, it will be very soon when videos are never trusted but rather treated as comedic rumor and folklore, and we will go back again to how it always was.

...until replicants come.

I'm saddened that there are actual "smart" people who waste their days to work on these malicious forms of AI, be it Google's almost entire arsenal, or anything. However, i'm not surprised they do, but it is still sad.

This is essentially exactly why I have not chosen to do a PhD, but go into industry. The bureaucracy is intense in academia and you can in some places spend far too long brown-nosing upper-positions to get anywhere at all.

Some of the horror stories I've heard from older people who have done a PhD are awful. For example, apparently, it's quite often that there will be a collection of people gossiping when a particular upper senior will retire or die so that they can all compete for the opened slot. It's quite terrible and grimy when you get past the good PR angle that the Universities and mass media portray. Just like any bureaucracy.

About the article specifically, it's rather insubstantial and doesn't provide any more insight into company dynamics other than heartfelt paragraphs. Still a healthy reminder though.

But anyway, about the subject matter, from the several tech companies I've been at now I can see that this kind of "exec brainwashing" does happen, and it always seems rather on-the-nose in it's indifference and facelessness. Where I work currently we even have paragraphs like these on our toilet doors! The thing is, people work better when it's "for" something. Something bigger than themselves, such as the "family" or "team" (it's probably something to do with our hunter-gatherer evolutionary genes). Execs, or rather HR and "Worker Performance Consultants" know this, and they (ab)use it to make workers produce more wealth for the company.

I think however that both companies and workers are to blame for past-shift hours, pressures to finish, and such, and both maybe partially for the same reason - a race to the bottom. In terms of companies, this can be for example when company X pushes their workers harder than company Y to undercut their prices. You definitely see this in things like ~[UK reference warning]~ Sports Direct International Ltd, which treats workers rather poorly [1][2][3], just to make their shoes a bit cheaper than that fancy hipster shop down the road who's staff work only their shift hours. In terms of workers, you see the exact same thing, where worker X will over-propose on project A to undercut Worker Y's realistically-proposed project A. So you see that if you don't work crazy hours to finish that big project, then you can definitely bet on somebody else doing it.

In the end it's not always "the evil company and their grubby execs" who are asking too much of their workers to get that good quarter result, but workers themselves asking too much of themselves to get that freelance project, job, promotion, raise, good reference, or whatever, over their job-market or worker peers.

I think maybe the little post misses a few parts of the picture, but like I said, a good reminder of the topic.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/08/inhuma... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/dec/09/how-sports-... [3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-36855374

It's about willing to do the job good, and not just for the money I think.

But anyway, I think that maybe my above story is all just gobblewash. Overnight, I was thinking about how all these jobs that pay a lot for rather low-skill labour are all related to real-estate. Wood and bricks are what makes houses. I wonder if the good pay comes from that, rather than not many people wanting to do it.

Regardless, it's the opinion now quite a few of these labourers hold now - that the younger generation aren't able to do what they do. Maybe that's a little short-sighted, maybe it's on to something wrong with the future generations, maybe it's just wrong. Who knows.

I have a little story about this kind of thing, where doing something rather simple and low-skill can make an absolute fortune.

One night I was talking to an older friend of a friend, 50+, around a year ago now. We were talking about what we did for a living and what we got paid. We started off with what he did: He's a bricklayer, nothing more, and told me that they get paid per brick they lay. It's something like £4 per brick. What shocked me was an experienced bricklayer like him usually lays enough bricks to make around £400/day.

"That's almost £150,000/year!" I said, trying to not sound too envious or anything (spoiler: I failed). And this doesn't include the one-off jobs they get every weekend from rich foreigners who have extravagant houses built in the UK all the time. All in all it can amount to some very large amounts of zeros in your bank. In a few years he became a millionaire from bricklaying. I have since then talked to a few others who are in that trade and it all (anecdotally) corroborates, approximately (the older you are the more you get picked for "specialist" properties that involve very rich Chinese and Arabians apparently, which can make you ~£1,000 in one weekend).

I asked, as any sane person would, something along the lines of "why isn't everyone and his dog laying bricks?". And the reply was very intriguing. He said essentially that younger people these days (my age) don't want to lay bricks every day now, or don't have the stamina. They want to go on their phones and become world-famous and important and work on new gizmos and apps every day and be looked at by everyone and be payed attention to, etc, etc.

Since then I've not really been able to get my head around it all. It seems like although we talk about automation stealing jobs and everybody will have to be a "techie" to make any sort of decent living, there is definitely a small "elite" minority doing these very old-fashioned jobs that no-one wants or can do anymore. I fear sometimes that we (the younger generation) are slowly going mad with technology, and forgetting about the practical skills. What our own two hands were made to do so to speak.

We never got on to what I do in the end funnily enough.

Anyway, more relevantly, this lumberyard article is just a (slightly Americanised) theme of the above. It's these jobs that were done for a pittance in the past (sometimes even by slaves and prisoners), and now are these trades that sometimes are paying exorbitant salaries, just simply because nobody wants to do it, because no-one can be bothered anymore.

Apologies if this was long and off-topic, but I hope it's left some kind of thought somewhere.

The parent comment wasn't saying that nobody was saying otherwise...

I suppose. I come from the C and C++ world, before I moved onto webdev (quite rare for a young millennial like me to be dinkling around with static C-related languages, I've been told by older colleagues), so I guess that I don't see it from the most understanding point of view.

Wow. That's disturbing!

Not having the same code on paper and on machine so to speak does make debugging typescript a little hard. It's a little bit of a black-box.

I code typescript for Angular 2/4, and although yeah, the aforementioned debugging pains are annoying, the time saved on having types to enable linting and strong predictable variable comparisons, is much greater.

Also, needing console.logs everywhere should be discouraged. Your code should be clear enough that you don't need a console.log debug line to print the boolean result of a comparison, for example. This is the whole point of typescript like I said, to make variable comparision and management easier so that you don't need that console.log line...

I don't know what you MEAN, I read it just FINE.

It's certainly a phenomenon that exists, we've all seen and heard of false accusations to damage people's reputation, business, and such. "Scandals" have been around since humans have, it's gossip, it's libel, it's whatever you call it.

Question: did they provide you with any substantial evidence?

Anyway, ultimately your case and many others is why the law is at it's very core based on an innocent until proven guilty paradigm. Once you take that principle away, you put all the power in the accuser and none in the accused, which is objectionably unjust.

I've recently seen a few very disturbing comments on HN and from similar people (above-average education, born into privileged conditions, politically left, etc.), who naively believe that this is a bad or somewhat ineffective paradigm, and that we should "just believe" rape accusations, because ???? shrug. It disheartens me that some people can be so blindly ignorant about the law and human nature. We only need to take a short walk down history lane to explicitly see that if you give one side of anything human-related an enormous amount of power (like in this case if accusers are believed before evidence), there will be many who abuse it. It is human nature, and the law prevents it from reining free and causing utter chaos.

In your case, by the sounds of it they did not present to you any form of evidence (right?) to show you your misconduct. No sexually harassing text transcripts, no internal email transcripts, no witnesses, nothing. What this is is chaos and injustice, under the guise of some very malformed concepts of "progressiveness", and it's unfortunately ever-more prevalent.

I agree that whenever these political topics arise on HN, you generally get the same situation - a few politically unpopular comments being downvoted to oblivion, even if the comment was well formed and wasn't snarky, unnecessarily cruel, etc. Simply saying "I think that this isn't an event that should be encouraged because X, Y, Z reasons", should not be downvoted if they provided interesting insight, reason, logic objective angles, etc.

And as we've seen in this thread, the usual few HN snobs come in making insubstantial points-seeking comments deriding how toxic all those downvoted comments were. I'm rather tired of how a growing number of HN users like to play "morality-police" on these kind of topics.

If anything I found your comment rather insightful, and it's sad to see it downvoted. It has an interesting links to the ongoing Facebook moderation debacle where their ridiculous "minority-ness" rules have been complicated so much that they can be gamed so that you can hate on a certain group because they don't score enough "minority" points, but another very similar group gains "protection status" from hate.

Come get me downvotes, I'm ready!

There could be some hidden costs that the publishers incur, no? I'm just playing tenth man here.

I'm not the most knowledgeable about scientific journal companies, but hosting thousands of papers online/offline and having to vet all these individually may be quite an expensive process, right?

OTOH, the infamous Alexandre managed okay with Sci-Hub, but maybe it was because she didn't have to vet these?

In the end, seeing the profits these companies make I suppose nullifies any devil's advocate position here. Some of the upper-echelon positions in these journal companies are multi-billionaires @_@

According to a tweet from anti-virus company Avira, [these attacks] were taking advantage of the EternalBlue exploit previously leaked by the group known as The Shadow Brokers

So it's using the same exploit as WannaCry? I'm very inexperienced when it comes to transfer protocols and windows vulns and all this kind of stuff, so maybe I'm missing something, but how could this be allowed to happen again? Some big firms have been hit!

However a quick glance on other news sources and twitter, Vice is doing a clickbait with the title, since it's not really a high number of firms that have been hit, but more that the few that have are geographically sparse.

I think maybe your definition of "resolved" is a little skewed. It is not about the features of the object, but more by the Rayleigh Criterion [1][2]

So we can already (and have been able to for a long time) to "resolve" things as apparently-small as exoplanets, but for resolving _surface details_ we are one order of magnitude away for interferometers and two orders of magnitude away for standard single-mirror telescopes. Right?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution#Explanation [2] Lord Rayleigh, F.R.S. (1879). "Investigations in optics, with special reference to the spectroscope".

Hmm, i've definitely heard that story about decreased competition being a factor in USA post-war prosperity, but I seem to have been misinformed, since after looking at [1], it was due to a lot of things - namely increased fertility and farmers learning how to do more economically valuable jobs - but not from them winning the war.

What's very sad is when you read a little further on about the USA economic decline after 1970 to today...

Anyway thank you for letting me know I was being a dingus!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United...

That's amazing resolving power, even if it's been done (maybe not in the exact same way) for quite a while now. Hopefully newer telescopes like the James Webb Telescope will be able to resolve even the _planets_ around other stars, which we are already able to do with the biggest of exoplanets today (good example -> [1]).

[1] http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/files/2014/05/1RSX_J...

Yes but was the decrease in demand greater in magnitude than the increase in sales due to less competition? I'de disagree, but getting numbers on these things is very difficult since it's a long time ago. Most of what you'll get is "general ideas" that the industry was "fairly big/small".

I'de say it was rather large, since looking around, it's believed that it was very big pre-WWiII, but a quick look for numbers isn't revealing any good sources. I suppose it'll just have to float around as a "general belief" that the Japanese automotive industry was "rather big" pre-WWII.

WWII definitely effected the US less than a lot of countries though that is for sure. But I think certain industries benefited more from USA's post-war advantage than others (automotive maybe being an example).

Firstly the linked source is paywalled so that's ignored.

Secondly, we are talking about post-war USA, so very generally '45 -> circa '70, not 2016 and the modern globalised world that are not representative of the world back then where even the internet didn't exist.

Well, a lot of historians say that the USA's economy flourished post-war not necessarily because they "won" it (hard to define concept these days), but because everybody else's manufacturing infrastructure was completely flattened.

Why do you think the USA automobile market exploded post-war? It's because the two biggest automobile manufactures - Germany and Japan - were flattened to smouldering ashes and took around 30-40 years to recover.

That's why the USA auto industry declined on an enormous scale after the 80's, because in the end the USA was never automobile king. There was never the "good old Detroit days". It was just a temporary market vacuum that the USA capitalised on, while Germany and Japan, who simply were better at making cars (debatable of course, but they make more money and that's probably the most reliable metric here), were rebuilding their entire country from catastrophe.

Doesn't solve the problem. This approach contributes to urban sprawl, which is normally bad for the environment (people doing 2h car commutes is incredibly polluting, verses a shorter and commute or using public transport).

A good summary of the bad effects of urban sprawl is available on Wikipedia [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl#Effects

Just skim-read through that story. Sounds pretty part-and-parcel for these kind of things, it's the same where I live too (UK).

The first step is always to include irrelevant statistics, since this bulks-up the case with "we are good people" rabble, and makes it harder to understand. It's essentially used to drown-out the key details of the case and to slow things down by making it much longer to read.

One of my older family members has been a council (our version of states I suppose) member for over 40 years, and some of the stories I hear are incredible.

I've heard stories of people submitting 300+ page testimonials and hundreds of correspondence over just 1-2 days just over small renovations, purely to obfuscate the case's legitimate and important details that are against their favour.

I'm really glad people are documenting things like this so we can actually see how bad it is getting...

It's basically the same situation as to the rampant tax avoidance schemes that are run these days. Who do you blame more, the avoider or the laws they blatantly game?

I'de always assign blame and disgust on the avoider or the tower builders/designers, since they are the entities that are _actively_ choosing to cause utter catastrophic social damage to their neighbors around them for cash.

But of course, both of these kind of things are set up to be as unaccountable as possible so that once everything hits the fan, you're left with no certain names, no figures, but instead just an unfortunate outcome for those affected and a vague non-court-withholding knowledge of who or what is responsible.

In this tower case, everybody knows that it goes right up to the council (who are always involved in these poverty estates), the builders who obviously knew of the dangers, etc. etc., but you'll never hear any names, or any specific group, just a nebulous cloud of blame that enables the perpetrators to carry on as if nobody died or no tax was avoided.

Such is humans and life.

Well, the internet essentially was born from scientists displaying their research and papers, linking to other scientist pages, experiment data, and so on. The early internet was essentially a fancy FTP server with a bit of Times New Roman paragraphs in. That's why web-servers were originally called Internet _Information_ Services (IIS). Because it was designed to be essentially an online library.

Then of course commercial, social, political, and many other areas jumped on board. People found out that sales (if you was commercial), views (if you were political or social), and whatever you were aiming for essentially, magically increased if you made your website _look_ better. It's how humans have always worked.

This gave birth to an arms race where the weapon of choice was including increasingly advanced ECMAScript code into your website.

From this the modern web was born. (i'm simplifying a lot here, but that is generally the very quick overview as to how I experienced it over the last 2 decades).

I'm not very experienced with these nginx settings. Could you explain how this improves speed so much for you?

It seems that you've followed [1] by the similarity of what that suggests to what you've suggested. tcp_nodelay seems to force it to not wait 0.2 seconds, which nginx does so that it doesn't send lots of really small packets. I can see this increasing speed by 200ms (a lot) but increases network traffic as a cost.

tcp_nopush seems to be about optimising each packet sent, reducing the total size of them.

Interesting stuff though!

[1] https://t37.net/nginx-optimization-understanding-sendfile-tc...

Elon's Mars ideas has been a real hot topic on HN recently, and generally on average the most upvoted comments seem to be those deriding his ambitions. I think that's fair. They seem quite bonkers at times. Most of the reasons being that it's "ridiculous", "pointless", "a waste of money", "impossible", and so on and so on. Essentially the overriding HN opinion _seems_ to be that something that sounds for the most part irrational, should never be attempted until we have first completed every single possible "rational" incremental step beforehand, so that eventually we've learnt enough to make the initially irrational idea more plausible and therefore rational. For example, on HN i've seen such steps being "colonising the Sahara Desert", "then colonising the moon" , and so on.

I really disagree with this view as a whole. It's unsustainable and in the end unproductive. It seems ridiculous to say, and maybe a touch over-zealous I admit, but we as humans could still be simple hunter-gatherers like tens of thousands of year ago, if it wasn't for that one guy who everybody laughed at for mixing mud and water and burning it with fire - which initially seems absolutely bonkers - but actually makes clay.

At the end of this ramble is maybe a little sense. Robert Zubrin and similar people love to bash the ISS and the Space Shuttle as complete failures. After all, it _appears_ that they are a step back from the "good old Apollo days", and in some respects that is probably true. But if we didn't try new things, try things that initially seem to have little benefit, then we'd go nowhere, or at least excel much slower.

They called JFK mad for asking the US to go from never having sent a man above a few ten thousand feet to over 1.2 billion feet to the moon in under a decade.

I think we need a fair balance of rationalism and irrationalism (or at least "optimistic ambition") in technology, since sometimes the best things in life come from a witches-brew of the two. We keep the ambition irrational, the math and science rational, as my Professor always said.