abvdasker

I can't tell whether these types of guys are totally ignorant of concepts like the Nietzschean Übermensch or whether they're just careful to avoid referring to it too directly.

On immigration policy:

> Traditionally if I wanted to work at a company in another country I would have to go to that country. I’d have to be an immigrant from my country, at least for a while. In a world of remote work and Zoom and Slack, I can now work for people anywhere in the world. I can work for companies doing any kind of knowledge work. Immigration policies apply to the atoms of human beings, they don’t apply to the bits. I can go to work for some company anywhere in the world if it’s a remote-friendly company. I may never travel there, I may never have to travel there.

Marc Andreessen is getting very close to saying the quiet part out loud. This is the clearest statement I've seen to date from a venture capitalist that white collar offshoring is almost certainly going to accelerate due to the shift towards remote work brought on by the pandemic.

> We gave them a society where they can enjoy music, culture, and attempt to gain literacy and education. It didn't last, but its clearly an improvement over the 90s-era Taliban. Whether the people remember that moving forward will be another question.

This is an absurd fantasy that has no relation to the reality in that country.

Yeah I’m sure that the families of the tens of thousands of dead Afghan civilians are super grateful to America that they now have smartphones!

There was no right way. Anyone who thinks a different outcome was possible should watch the Vice documentary “This is What Winning Looks Like”. The Taliban was going to take over no matter what we did. If we couldn’t create a stable government in 20 years and hundreds of billions of dollars then it simply wasn’t possible. It was probably never possible. The only alternative was to do what Obama and Trump did which is to kick the can further down the road at the cost of more American lives and dollars. The Biden admin absolutely did the right thing and the best that can be done now is to accept refugees.

What an absurd article. The only thing to learn from Afghanistan is that we never should have gone there to begin with. The author paints a quite ignorant narrative about the collapse of Afghanistan’s government being somehow the fault of modern day progressivism when the reality is that all of this was started by neocons 20 years ago who had 0 interest in helping the people there and were only in it to line the pockets of defense contractors and oil companies. The mistake was already made we are just now living through the consequences of our collective delusion called the War On Terror.

Every overreach in surveillance of the last 30 years has been justified as a way to stop child porn or terrorism. Law enforcement deliberately chooses these issues because they know they are an easy way to manufacture consent for greater surveillance. Mission creep isn't hypothetical. Many of the provisions in the Patriot Act are now completely entrenched and still used to today for drug enforcement and petty crime.

I like this analysis because it avoids the trap of passing judgment on or revealing contempt for the high status people in question. Instead it focuses on the system that was Clubhouse and how it functioned to reinforce the hierarchy from which high status individuals benefit.

It's a feature, not a bug.

I've always felt that the introvert/extrovert dichotomy is such an oversimplification that it fails to be useful as a form of categorization. The degree to which someone is outgoing vs reserved is highly context dependent: maybe an individual is extraverted in their personal life but more restrained in a professional environment. Measuring these things is also so subjective that much of this is just a wash. Pieces of business-pop psychology like this one seem mostly designed to tell their audience wants to hear with just enough of an edge to provoke engagement.

The credibility of this source is pretty questionable. Victims of Communism is little more than a right wing think tank with strong ties to the Heritage Foundation. To me, much of this report reads as tired McCarthyist propaganda. The quote at the end in particular is revealing insofar as it shows the clear conservative ideological bent of VoC.

Some of their statistics are also pretty strange:

> Over one-third of Americans (39%) are likely to support a member of the Democratic Socialist party for office with greater support among younger generations (51% of Gen Z and 44% of Millennials). 16% of Gen Z and Millennials are likely to support a member of the Communist party for office.

What "Democratic Socialist party" are they talking about? I don't think I've ever seen an American politician run affiliated with such a party if it even exists.

> Nearly two-thirds (64%) of Americans say they are unaware that the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for more deaths than Nazi Germany.

Neglects to mention that those killed by the CCP were not killed on the basis of race, ethnicity or religious belief, but because they were landlords. I think most reasonable people would want to distinguish between that — as awful as it is — and the genocide committed by Nazi Germany.

> Over half of Gen Z (51%) think that America is a racist nation with a long history of discrimination.

Whether this is true or not, what does this have to do with communism?

If you boil this story down to its simplest form it has pretty dystopian implications. A rich tech CEO used his wealth and lynch-mob-as-a-service platform to personally issue a $30,000 bounty on a complete stranger based on nothing more than a picture. It sounds like something an ill-tempered feudal lord might have done 600 years ago. Imagine being on the receiving end of something like this.

Honestly it sounds like Citizen is already being run by a malicious actor.

The broad decline in software quality from Apple has been gradual but steady since Jobs’ death. MacOS has deteriorated severely as the video shows, but even iOS has some serious problems. As someone who switched from Android about 6 months ago it’s safe to say Android is a much, much better operating system in its current incarnation (I plan to switch back). iOS still has better apps, but I doubt that will continue to be the case in a couple years.

I think it would be fun to create a version of this which pushes writing towards other recognizable styles like Raymond Chandler or David Foster Wallace. Maybe you pick a style from a dropdown and the analysis changes. You could possibly take it even further and automate some transformations of the input to stylize a piece of writing.

This will undoubtedly feed the flames of the conspiracy theories surrounding Gates. There seems to be significant overlap between crypto enthusiasts and online conspiracy theorist cranks. I wonder if he knew this before he made the statement or just has no idea how he is viewed by some segments of the public.

I mean I did say it's only a little surprising.

This is bad code and it's a little surprising to me that a former Facebook engineer wrote it (and subsequently became the CTO).

It's been a while since I wrote any Rails but the offenses that jump out just from a cursory inspection:

- large raw SQL query which could almost certainly be accomplished in a more idiomatic way with AREL or ActiveRecord

- no user input sanitizing

- using a regular string literal for a large text block instead of a Ruby here document

- leaving a mess of commented-out code at the bottom of the method

Apparently Gab isn't exactly hiring the best and brightest.

The only thing the CEO of SolarWinds is telling us by saying this is that he's a terrible leader. We don't even know that the hackers used the exposed password at this point. But even if they did, this is an obvious process failure and by blaming an individual intern, Sudhakar Ramakrishna is loudly demonstrating his own hopeless incompetence.

I find it funny and irreverent. There probably never will be an IPv8 so there's no need to worry about a naming conflict.

It's incredible how defensive the comments on Hacker News seem to be about this article given how moderate and dry its tone is. Seeing people on here so bent out of shape over such a relatively pithy article is a bit telling frankly. I have to think the article wouldn't have made such a splash if it didn't touch on something deeper in the SV/Rationalist crowd.

I think you're largely correct, but sometimes corporations can end up doing the "right thing" in the pursuit of good press or to serve brand marketing. I would say that IKEA doing environmental conservation is a good thing in this case, despite the company's motives for doing so being transparently self-serving. To me IKEA's reason for doing this is less important than the positive impact it will have.

What is the purpose of the NSA and FBI if they can’t prevent something this obvious? Wasn’t the supposed bargain that nearly unlimited surveillance of Americans would prevent terrorism? What should be done with agencies incapable of fulfilling their most basic functions?

I think it's also that unmoderated forums become a magnet for people who want to spew hate, rather than anonymity inherently leading regular people into such behavior (though maybe the former causes some of the latter).

Incredible that you've found a way to blame Black Lives Matter protesters — who were not present and whose protests were overwhelmingly peaceful[1] — for the actions of a right wing mob. You've completely ignored the difference between the actual goals of the "far-left extremists" and those of these Trump supporters. You've completely ignored the difference in harm done by a protest turning violent and damaging a business and a group storming the US Capitol to overturn the results of a democratic election in the most powerful nation on Earth. The details matter and to simply throw up your hands and kvetch about vague "extremism" deflects responsibility from the individuals and ideologies which promote attacks on democracy.

This kind of cowardly equivocation in the face of fascism is exactly how the events of yesterday were allowed to happen. Your attitude — sadly held by too many Americans — is pathetic and it will not solve the problem of right wing extremism.

1) https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/

> "There was a meeting in a small conference room with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. And Steve never, I don't think, ever thought it was a good idea. There's a story I've told where I was standing in line in the cafeteria with Kevin, and Steve Ballmer snuck up behind us and yelled in my ear, making me throw my food: 'YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE ALL OUR MONEY!'”

Steve Ballmer might be the funniest dude ever to run a tech company. Every story with him is absolutely golden.

Anyone calling for war between the the largest nuclear power and second-largest nuclear power is insane or ignorant. To even suggest something like that is obscene given the incomprehensible loss of life it would entail. I think most people who can remember it would agree that it's a good thing the Cold War stayed cold.

> SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll is signed by SolarWinds, using the certificate with serial number 0f:e9:73:75:20:22:a6:06:ad:f2:a3:6e:34:5d:c0:ed. The file was signed on March 24, 2020.

The “Delivery and Installation” section covers this. It’s a very short section, the subtext of which is that there’s basically no defense for malware delivered with a valid signature from a trusted vendor.

It’ll be pretty interesting to find out what happened at SolarWinds in the coming days: whether this malware was smuggled into the update via employee collusion with attackers or a hack of SolarWinds itself.

Yes, that was also the blog post which first raised alarm bells for me. The whole time I was reading it I got this sinking feeling. I couldn’t help but wonder to myself, why is PG being so coy here? What is it that he really wants to say but is afraid to? The fact that he thinks it would be too socially costly for him to say it means it might be pretty bad...

I had my guesses then, and as his posts have become increasingly conservative I’m more confident than ever that I correctly identified the subtext of his words.

More absolute garbage from latter-day Paul Graham which further confirms how profoundly out of touch he is with the current political discourse around wealth and inequality. He demonstrates a baffling level of ignorance concerning the actual criticisms at play.

> The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there's nothing else they'd rather do.

Here he completely misses the point, which is that exploitation has very little to do with an individual's intention and everything to do with systemic dynamics and incentives in the way these companies operate. It was probably not Travis Kalanick's intention to exploit drivers, but Uber's business model incentivizes the company to pay drivers as little as possible, which they do. A similar dynamic plays out with nearly all capitalist enterprise, which makes the intentions of founders mostly irrelevant.

"Their exploitation usually begins with their own cofounders, which is disastrous, since the cofounders' relationship is the foundation of the company. Then it moves on to the user..."

At no point in this entire post does PG address what "exploitation" really means in the Marxist sense — Marxist economics being at the heart of most of discussions about wealth accumulation — which focuses on the exploitation of labor and the ways in which technology can enable or accelerate capital accumulation to the detriment of regular workers.

What's so startling about PG's posts on these subjects is how unseriously he takes the opposing view. He clearly hasn't done any work to understand people's concerns about income and wealth inequality (which is not just coming from "politicians" as he characterizes it). There are probably better arguments in favor of billionaires, but Graham doesn't know enough about the ideas he's arguing against to imagine them.

If this is the level of intellectual rigor governing Silicon Valley today, it's no wonder we keep seeing boondoggles like WeWork and Theranos propped up by silly investments. Disgraceful.