The behavior and displays in these ideological flamewars have gotten so much worse over the last year, and the pace of that change seems to be accelerating.
There seems to be a demographic shift happening on HN, away from rational and genuinely interested technologists and business people, and toward college kids who haven't done anything and don't know anything, trying to sound smart and then throwing a temper tantrum whenever anything political comes up.
How a community in aggregate behaves when certain topics are brought up is more than just an isolated event, it's a litmus test for what kind of community it is and the kind of people it is attracting. I think I'm done participating entirely.
I don't think that's accurate. The community isn't that different from how it used to be; it's largely the same people after all. For example, the GP's account is 6 years old.
What's changed is that society is becoming increasingly polarized. HN isn't immune from macro trends.
I'm referring to the kind of vilification that would cause brand damage for Tesla, so consumer-facing vilification.
Consumer-facing vilification in US media isn't really about what the person has done or what kind of person they are, it's more about what form of caricature can be depicted of them based on racial, gendered, and political stereotypes.
Denholm doesn't fit into a category of race, gender, and political affiliation that easily lends itself to a villainous caricature, and to the contrary does fit into such a category that would make it broadly unacceptable to consumers for a media company to create a villainous caricature of her. In other words, if a media company attempted to do so, it would damage the media company's consumer brand instead of Tesla's. This creates a disincentive protecting Tesla from attacks from media companies (all of which have a great financial interest in oil and legacy automakers, and very little financial interest in Tesla).
This is an increasingly common consideration for organizations responding to or seeking to preempt PR issues, especially for publicly traded companies with consumer brands, and other frequent targets of the media companies (such as police departments, private health insurance companies, and educational institutions).
Perhaps compared to James Murdoch, who was also rumoured to be in contention, she’s less easy to portray as a villain.
But she is easy to cast as an ‘insider’, which is not what many thought ‘an independent Chairman’ meant. The cynics might suggest that Tesla chose her because she is less likely to rock the boat.
I always thought distributed systems weren’t necessarily decentralized systems. Is my understanding of the terminology wrong?
For example a system that uses distributed algorithms for performance improvements, or a system that is distributed by design and necessity to retain the benefits of redundancy, could be considered both centralized and distributed.
Another musical pet peeve of mine is when, usually during the intro, a song doubles the number of bars for a sequence, basically repeating itself for no good reason.
My ear is ready for the song to kick in, but at that moment it just repeats the previous 8 bars. Every time I think “really, we need to do this 8 more times? Can’t we just get on with it?”
It’s like the musical equivalent of waiting in line.
Not sure about pop music, but in the EDM world, I've always considered this as an artist actively considering how the DJ will use this track. For DJs that simply fade in/out of one track to the the next, they wouldn't care. However, for the DJs that actually beat match and mix tracks together, this added phrase at the head of the track allows for a much more seamless mix before the song "kicks in".
Your comment post-edit is pretty much the reason I read HN.
This model of geopolitics as an ungoverned society of nations is something I’ve never considered.
Then, the natural tendency of people within governed societies to analyze geopolitics as if governed social dynamics applied to it could clearly lead to some disastrous conclusions.
It also illuminates the tension between people who greatly value our military, and people who are just frustrated with it and casually declare from their bedrooms and TV studios that we should cut spending in half because it’s all such a waste. As if nations are nice people, and as if a weapon provides no value unless it is used.
Both groups mostly want the same things: a safe place to live, explore, work, have friends and family, and enjoy their lives. They just have a different model for how they understand geopolitics and the state that it’s in.
Lately I’ve noticed an increase in politically-motivated downvotes on HN. I think that’s really unfortunate. This was probably comment of the year for me.
It also reveals a weird logic I can't wrap my head around. If you vote, and you think others should vote, you believe that we have significant influence on politics. So if we abandoned our military dominance, what other country is going to fill that power vacuum? Do we trust their country with that power, a country which might or might not have a government that is influenced by its populace? Honestly, who are the other players that would likely make such a move... China, Russia, and the EU? Well, unless you're particularly fond of two of those governments, I don't like your odds.
Isn't it better to just keep the military dominance here, with a government influenced by the people, pretty much half of which are strongly opposed to the mobilization of that power? Absent some unintuitive answer to that question, I don't see the consistency of a person who thinks we should "get out and vote" genuinely wanting to degrade US military dominance.
Looks interesting. Can you go into some detail on what your workflow is like? Is your dev environment pure Linux then, able to install everything in aptitude, etc?
> At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem.
I have a similar feeling about all articles from all sources (that I’m aware of) in journalism.
Every time an article interests me enough to dig deeper into the subject, I find the original article was inaccurate and biased, and frequently misrepresents small but significant details to fit a narrative in a way that can’t have been a mistake.
The way I consume news these days isn’t the greatest, but it’s the best I can do: I only read headlines. If a claim in the headline would cause the source major legal issues if untrue, I mostly trust that the event occurred, but not necessarily how they say it did.
I ignore all other claims in headlines, and I don’t read the body of the article, because it’s usually just a thinly-veiled opinion piece by a non-expert, or worse, the dramatic prose of a journalist who seems to think their writing is the story.
If there’s an event in a headline that seems to have actually happened, and it’s relevant to my interests, I research it independently.
I think the polite term for this is advocacy journalismhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism
I too have descended to being pretty much only a headline reader, partly because of the prevalence of advocacy journalism and partly from the shear volume of content of all types which assaults me.
So "advocacy journalism" is basically a form of journalism wherein all the statements are technically factual, but the journalists intentionally and transparently ignore all other ethics and standards of journalism.
I understand why this will outcompete real journalism, but I don't see how it serves anyone.
It also saddens me that this practice has attained a degree of general acceptance that it's referred to as a "genre of journalism." I would refer to it as a more insidious and enduring form of propaganda.
Have you considered paying for news? If they are free, then you’re the product being sold.
Aside from that, your approach makes little sense. You read headlines and comments, but headlines are notoriously bad, especially on free news, and comments are a jungle. I mean, anyone could tell you anything and not ever be held accountable, unlike actual media, but you’d rather spend time on anarchy, uninformed opinions and outright lies?
Furthermore looking at this particular article, even if we say the numbers are lower than they are in the private sector, does that mean there isn’t a problem? We’re talking about people in power who are bullying their juniors who are trying to do research that may alter human history. Even if the numbers are lower than somewhere else, that’s still not good.
Consider a city where the murder rate is half of the country wide one, it would be a little unusual to claim it has a institutionalized murder problem based on those numbers.
Maybe it has one (e.g. particularly bad neighborhoods) but it would be a weird conclusion from just the number
(I didn't read the article, did not feel that was relevant to this specific response)
I'm not aware of any paid news sources that fit my needs, maybe you can recommend some.
I agree that headlines are bad, which is why I discount them almost entirely, as I mentioned in my original comment.
I'm not sure why you don't think it makes sense for me to trust my own independent research over everyday news sources. I think it makes a lot of sense.
I never said anything about comments. HN is the only place I read them, and I'm not treating them like they're a news source. It's just an online conversation happening among people in tech.
I haven't expressed an opinion about this Guardian article, or the root commenter's assessment of it. But if the numbers are higher in the private sector, that would suggest top UK universities have a bullying rate below that of the general population and comparable populations, which would suggest that those institutions do not have a bullying problem.
It looks like the root commenter is saying that the Guardian article is suggesting the opposite, and based on those statistics, the Guardian article is wrong. The root commenter is additionally claiming that this is consistent with a pattern they've noticed of The Guardian writing skewed articles to fit a narrative of institutional injustices.
As an experiment, I read the body of this article and did a bit of research, and I would agree with the root commenter. Within the opening paragraph, I'm already losing confidence in the article:
> "Hundreds of academics have been accused of bullying students and colleagues in the past five years, prompting concerns that a culture of harassment and intimidation is thriving in Britain’s leading universities."
Citing population sentiment is a common form of misdirection in journalism. "People are concerned that ...", "we're receiving emails that say ...", "people on twitter are ...", these are all just misdirection. There are billions of people in the world, there are people concerned about everything. Twitter has over 300 million active users, every point of view on every topic is being tweeted by everyone all the time.
Citations of unquantified population sentiment are factual in all cases and for all arguments and all narratives. Journalists do this to give support and credibility to their narrative (which is often skewed), and to make it appear that they aren't the drivers of that narrative (when they often are).
As an example, Wolf Blitzer can point to a scrolling list of tweets that are all unified in any point of view on any subject at any time, based purely on Twitter's broad demographic and volume of tweets. It doesn't actually mean anything at all, other than that Twitter still exists and people still communicate.
Wolf Blitzer pointing at that list will increase the prevalence of tweets reflecting that unified point of view. This Guardian article stating that their FOIA findings are "prompting concerns" is in itself what will prompt those concerns. "People are concerned" actually means "we are telling you to be concerned." It's all just misdirection and deception, there's no honest reason for a journalist to cite sentiment in this way.
A more honest writing of that opening paragraph would be something like: "Academics in UK universities have been the subject of complaints at a very low rate. I am trying to prompt concerns that a culture of harassment and intimidation is thriving in Britain’s leading universities."
Reading through the rest of the article, the bias in this case is quite blatant:
* 135 UK universities became: "top UK universities"
* A filed complaint became: conclusive proof of bullying
* 294 complaints at 135 universities over 5 years became: hundreds of presumably recent complaints at "top universities"
* Less than 1 complaint against an academic every 2 years per university became: "a culture of harassment and intimidation in Britain’s leading universities"
To me it seems that The Guardian told their journalists to leverage FOIA requests for news stories. So their journalists try to think of a FOIA request that might get dirt for a good story, then send in that FOIA request, and then when the FOIA is fulfilled they just write whatever story they were hoping to write when they originally thought up the FOIA request.
After reading the article, the headline itself actually appears to be an outright lie. It says "hundreds of complaints at top universities", but they only found 294 complaints in total from all UK universities. Unless every university in the UK is a "top UK university", the headline is a lie.
The Guardian also leads the article with a stock photo of people wearing academic regalia with their heads down and backs to the camera, which paints an image of guilty and shamed academics.
Relating this all back to how people consume news:
* Reading only the headline, and believing it, would've made me very misinformed
* Reading both the headline and the article, and believing them both, would've made me the most misinformed
* Reading both the headline and the article, believing none of it, and doing independent research to disconfirm all of it made me slightly more informed on this subject (if you can even call it that) than the average person, and took 20 minutes of my time
* The approach I detailed in my original comment, which would've been to read only the headline, recognize that in this case it bears no consequence for The Guardian whether any aspect of the headline is true or not, and therefore ignoring it completely, would've had a neutral effect on how informed I am, but would've only taken 1 second of my time
In this case I regret reading the article at all, and I think I would've been better off just reading the headline, recognizing that it can't be trusted, and ignoring it like I normally would.
There is still utility in headlines though, which is why I still read them. If the story is, for example, that someone won an election, or that a proposition passed, or that someone died, or that a hurricane is coming, or that a company was acquired, etc., then that will be stated in headlines and you can confirm almost immediately that it's factual.
The large majority of important news events are in that category.
From there, if the subject is important enough to me, I'll do independent research. That research usually won't involve reading news articles, because I've found them to be extremely inaccurate in almost all cases.
Not really true at all. Having no degree at all may present an obstacle in entering the interview process if you don't have strong experience to make up for it. But once you've entered the process as a candidate, the type or lack of degree will have absolutely no bearing on whether or not you're given an offer. It may be used past the decision phase when the hiring committee is deciding how to level you, but if so that will only be meaningful if they're slotting you for the first two levels or so.
Everything becomes easier with a degree, doubly so with a degree from a top university. But they only use that as a factor in deciding who to interview; all they care about when deciding who to hire is interview performance. Someone without a degree should be optimizing their search by convincing hiring managers or employees to refer them into the process directly, thereby short circuiting the recruiters.
Have you considered the possibility that a degree from a top university could influence an interviewer's report of the candidate's technical proficiency?
During one interview I had at Google, I stumbled when performing addition on base 64 numbers.
Since I don't have a degree, it seems likely that interviewer will write that I have a conceptual deficiency with numeric bases and mathematics.
If I had a degree from CMU and gave an identical performance, they might instead write that I was rusty with numeric bases.
There's also the fact that most of the interviewers have a degree, many from a top 10 university. Hiring people that match their own profile validates their own background which benefits their career, so a self-interested and rational interviewer should rightly tend to give more positive ratings to people with degrees, ideally from institutions similar to theirs.
I think this is relevant at every stage of the interview process. If you sound nervous and don't have a degree, they might think you have a mental disorder, whereas if you have a degree from CMU they might just think that you don't want to disappoint your family.
I feel disadvantaged at every stage of the interview process for not having a degree. I'm sure there's no moment where someone is consciously docking me points or arguing against me with specific reference to the lack of degree. But I do think it's heavily influencing how academic types perceive me, and what they write about me in their report.
This will vary widely based on job function: it may be true for engineers, but it's not true for marketing. From what I hear, at Facebook and google, if you apply for a marketing job, You absolutely don't stand a chance unless you've come from a top 10 school or ivy leage school
Everyone I've talked to in the industry views people with a Masters much less favorably than people with a Bachelors or PhD.
And from experience I can say there is a shockingly high number of people with Masters in Comp Sci churning through the hiring pool who can't write a single line of code or even valid HTML.
I don't know why this is, but I think a Masters is getting a negative reputation to the point that you might consider not listing it on your resume at all in certain cases.
Getting an MS is a sign that the candidate wasn't particularly good before getting one, because of the various reasons people get an MS. And it's not like they became a better developer as a result of getting one.
The way to determine this is by measuring actual performance.
With more information, like why or how they got an MS, the probability distribution changes. My impression is, there's a set of dimwits from a dimwit part of the industry that decide they should get a Master's in order to better their career. As opposed to, say, getting one right after school because you didn't want to enter the real world, or because a 5-year MS seemed like a good idea, or being brainwashed in general about the value of formal schooling.
Don't ask me! I never got a Master's, and if I did get one, it wouldn't be in CS. In general I think work experience would inform your course selection or the decision to get an MS in the first place. That's pretty much the main way it would affect it.
Only true for recent grads (2-3 years after college). Google itself (and ex-googlers) say degree doesn't matter for job applicants with some work experience.
The computer security industry for SMBs is like 95% theater and 5% actual practice.
Conducting that test produced something tangible for whoever made the purchasing decision: It clearly illustrated a need for the services rendered, did it in a way that offered job security to management by giving them license to assert the position over their subordinates, and established a metric by which to evaluate the security company's performance which can be easily, repeatably, and predictably improved over time.
It also checked a lot of boxes that will be useful in court if they ever need to prove that they weren't negligent on privacy and security, which is a form of insurance that has real measurable value when it comes to legal claims.
> The computer security industry for SMBs is like 95% theater and 5% actual practice.
I'd say it's 40% paranoid arse-covering by IT department heads, 35% whatever middle management incorrectly assumes to be current best practices, 20% ego-stroking by the CIO, and 5% sensible context-driven decision-making by IT front-line staff.
Those numbers sound a little thin on the bottom, but only a little. Maybe take 15% out of the CIO category and just throw it away, because they're usually very quick to turn on their underlings.
> I really hate this idea of the grand visionary. ... I listened to a bit of his Joe Regan interview and when Regan asked him how he has the time to do all of the things he does, there are smoke jokes about him being an alien, but not once did he say, "Well I have an amazing team of engineers" and credit all the thousands of people in his organizations that actually do the work.
I think Elon's active perpetuation of the myth is kind of a red herring.
Promoting Elon Musk as a grand visionary is how Tesla will maximize its brand value, and contribute to a self-sustaining lore around their founder 50 years from now. It's the same story for Apple and Steve Jobs, and thousands of other companies (tech and otherwise).
People aren't capable of idolizing 200 mechanical engineers. They are very capable of idolizing a single visionary. A story with 200 protagonists would be far less compelling, which is why most stories only have 1. If you want to be as competitive as possible, and you have a leader capable of exploiting that aspect of human nature, then that's what your company should do.
Permitting and perpetuating this kind of myth-making is practically part of Elon's fiduciary duty to his shareholders at this point. You can't fault him for doing it, because he has to.
I think what's really at issue is the aspect of human nature that it's exploiting.
I think it's closely tied to hierarchy and pecking order instincts observed in all mammals. We always need to be identifying and reacting to an alpha, and using that to inform our choices and behaviors so we can stay competitive on a biological level. The same instinct might also be what causes people to immediately perceive this as an issue of Elon's individual behavior, and makes them feel so strongly about it.
I have to completely disagree with you on Elon not giving credit to others. If you have closely followed Elon Musk, ( please check his videos on youtube) even during unveiling Tesla’s new models you will find irrefutable evidence on how he credits his other team members , especially reiterating that people just think its just him but there are many others behind him who do the amazing stuff.
Insightful post. Musk has successfully built a cult around his personal brand,for the specific reason of super-charging his ability to raise capital. A poster above provides news coverage about him memorizing rocket science books. I suspect this was part of a well-orchestrated PR campaign and unlikely. I find it difficult to believe that anyone could or want to do this, let alone achieve it. Particular when that person later makes a schoolboy error exposing himself to fraud which could result in him going to prison, presumably.
That said, and being an entrepreneur and having spent time in negotiations with entrepreneurs, when people start talking about money, everyone hears what they want to hear regardless of what is said. Which is why lawyers can charge what they do. And why - in this - Musk looked a bit inexperienced IMHO.
Yes. Elon is not naive and no one thinks that Joe Rogan is just some secret thing that nobody watches. He went on Rogan with the intention to spread a specific message.
Practically the entire value of Musk projects is based on the myth that Elon is a mystical being bringing advanced technology to humanity. Going on Rogan and doing something to harm that belief, like diverting all credit to his "amazing team of engineers", would be far more damaging than anything else he's done.
Permitting and perpetuating this kind of myth-making is practically part of Elon's fiduciary duty to his shareholders at this point. You can't fault him for doing it, because he has to.
Plus he clearly lives for it, and when anyone makes even reasonable points against him, he loses his mind on a Twitter. That is after all what happened with “pedo guy” re the Thai cave rescue. Musk made an ass of himself by trying to inject himself into a potential tragedy for some PR and a man who actually helped to save the day called him on it.
I’m also not sure that it would be hard to idolize a group, people manage it for sports teams. Maybe if Musk put the effort he spends into grooming his ego into promoting his team he wouldn’t need to be the center of a cult of e-sychophants.
There seems to be a demographic shift happening on HN, away from rational and genuinely interested technologists and business people, and toward college kids who haven't done anything and don't know anything, trying to sound smart and then throwing a temper tantrum whenever anything political comes up.
How a community in aggregate behaves when certain topics are brought up is more than just an isolated event, it's a litmus test for what kind of community it is and the kind of people it is attracting. I think I'm done participating entirely.