agar

Flipping this around, put yourself in this situation: you have five open positions, and expect 300 applicants. You have approximately 1 hour per day to interview, and need to fill the positions in 10-15 business days.

You would like to find people with the following characteristics: They can follow complex instructions with minimal oversight, they finish what they start, they have good social skills to work with colleagues and occasional outside parties, they are fully literate (i.e., spell well, read quickly, understand context), and can be trained and managed.

You're handed 300 resumes. How do you select the top 10-15 that are most likely to satisfy the requirements?

What would be your initial filtering criteria?

Have you considered that one reason businesses gatekeep based on the degree is /because/ of the well-roundedness that comes from a university education instead of a trade school or online learning?

Many benefits are difficult to quantify, but still measurable during an interview: presentation skills, discussions of how you overcome obstacles, demonstrable research into the hiring organization, insightful questions you ask, active listening skills, collaboration skills articulated through example and past experience, etc.

If an interview is exclusively writing code on a whiteboard, that says a lot of what will be asked of you during the job. Good fit for some, poor fit for others.

An official statement would run afoul of the law, yes. A concerted effort to whisper to many people in an effort to manipulate the market would be fairly easy for the SEC to uncover in an investigation.

A single false statement or two, said to a reporter as a confidential source, would be much more difficult to prosecute. The reporter might not willingly give up their source, and the company could deny everything, fire the person who "inaccurately represented our position", and claim the party acted of their own volition. Modest fine, at best.

I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Unless you know that the Parler/Amazon contract included a cure period, the specificity of that period, that Amazon hadn't notified Parler of contract violations previously (i.e., so they extended past the cure period), and also included no other relevant termination clauses (including termination for convenience), then we simply can't say that Amazon breached the agreement despite Parler removing content. There are a myriad of ways they could have fulfilled the agreement, and/or Parler breached the agreement with Amazon.

Please, separate legal arguments from emotional arguments. I'm strictly speaking legally.

Regarding Facebook, the choice to enforce, or not to enforce, a contract term is exclusively the right of the parties to the contract. Amazon may have unfairly chosen to enforce contract terms against Parler and not enforce those same terms against Facebook (for example; though I don't believe Messenger is hosted on AWS).

That's completely irrelevant; so far as I know, no law says all parties to all contracts must be treated equitably.

You will have a compelling argument when and if law enforcement chooses to crack down on child porn on Parler but not on Messenger. In this case though, you're comparing apples to baseballs: their similarities are vastly outweighed by their differences.

I don't have much to add to the sibling comment. It is purely up to the parties of the contract to determine if the other breached it. The remedies of that breach are specifically covered in the contract itself.

Nothing needs to be "proven in court, before playing any such cards." It needs to be asserted. Once asserted, there may be a cure period (the licensee might have 30 days to remedy the problem, otherwise the contract terminates).

The party may disagree, and could negotiate different remedies or timelines - again, no court is required here. However, if they can't come to terms, then they can pursue this in contract court.

Be aware that I'm not defending, or justifying, or taking a position on any of this. It's just how it is. If you don't like it, then work on reforming tort and contract law as opposed to stating on Hacker News that the basis of most worldwide commerce is "nonsensical."

Are you familiar enough with AWS contracts in general, and possibly the Parler contract specifically, to know they breached the contract? (Honest question, as you may be an employee of Parler, for example. HN is an interesting place).

I ask because contracts typically, despite their duration, contain a variety of exit clauses. In this case, Amazon could argue they were exercising a "compliance with laws" clause (if it was in the agreement) such as,

"<Licensee> will not use, or allow its products to be used, in violation of any laws or regulations."

It becomes a legal argument as to whether Parler's members that advocated violence against the government caused Parler to violate the clause, and whether that amounts to a material breach that triggers contract termination.

That is very different than a blanket statement that Amazon "breached that contract and bowed to the mob." In fact, Amazon can sue Parler for breaching the agreement and exposing Amazon to significant liability for (at the most extreme) aiding and abetting terrorism.

Note that I'm not arguing either way, simply stating what lawyers are likely discussing behind the scenes.

I'm not weighing in on Ecosia specifically (no direct knowledge), but...

It's very important to remember the legal and liability requirements associated with privacy policies. In many jurisdictions, you are subject to liability if you collect something that was not disclosed in your privacy policy.

Therefor, the default is to over-report. If there's a chance that something is collected, better to put it into the privacy policy. This is similar to the famous "California Cancer Warning" - the incentives to include everything, no matter the materiality, ultimately render the warnings useless.

Any central server will "collect" everything typed into a text box. If it allows registration, requires password verification, perhaps offers customer support, it will disclose collection of "personally identifiable information" including email, phone number, possibly computer-specific information like browser, IP, installed version info, etc. Hosting on Amazon means it's shared with a 3rd party. And so on.

Also, this seems crazy to the privacy conscious, but many consumers want Facebook integration. They ask for social logins, and easy ways to share via social media. Once those features are enabled to satisfy their users, they're subject to all the cruft that comes with those APIs - and need to disclose those in their privacy policies.

None of the above means that a site is nefariously using the data it collects. Nor does it mean they do not take privacy very seriously.

The interconnectedness of the web, legal requirements, litigious privacy advocates, and overarching privacy regulations (none of which are bad on their own) combine to make the Privacy Policy an almost useless signal of a company's actual privacy posture.

That's why it's highly unfair to Ecosia for OP to so strongly imply they lie (or are, at best, misleading and hypocritical) and use your data nefariously, simply by excerpting a few lines of the Privacy Policy. The scare quotes, italicized "may"s, rhetorical questions, and other devices written to instill doubt and distrust makes me wonder about the agenda behind the message, frankly.

Privacy is extremely important, but so is customer service and a viable business model. Suggesting that any product that collects data to run the business (and properly discloses it, as Ecosia does) will "do so for nefarious purposes" and does not "take user privacy very seriously" ("Right.") is unfair and undermines the work good people do to craft a viable balance in today's difficult tech ecosystem.

Thank you for that link. A very interesting story, with surprising philosophical depth given its brevity.

Not if Windows includes source code purchased or licensed from third parties who contractually prohibit MS from publishing their source code.

Which it probably does.

That we have not looked long or hard is why we have not (yet) found a signal. Interacting with an ETI will be much more problematic than finding a signal, given speed of light issues.

Or did you misread the OP? He believes ETI is pervasive, which seems a reasonable conclusion to extrapolate as Kepler fills in the F(p) and N(e) terms of the Drake equation.

Maybe the scene was switched because two of the three cameras in that view had...just blown up?

You're 100% right, that if I had better language skills I likely wouldn't have felt as isolated. I did try, and picked up some phrases, but intermittent trips rather than a contiguous multi-year stay made it more difficult.

That said, the difference between Japanese and Latin languages does play into the "foreign-ness" I mentioned. My very bad high school/college French is enough to feel comfortable deciphering a lot of Spanish and Italian, both written and spoken. Needless to say, that skill didn't transfer to Japan.

Again though, I love Japan because you truly feel as if you're in another culture. When I step off the plane in most countries, the first impression is sameness: same brands, same clothes, same affectations and language cadence. Flying to Japan truly feels like travel; I imagine it similar to going anywhere 100 years ago, before globalization (modulo British colonialism, of course).

It would be a heck of an adventure to commit to a few years' stay and really explore the country. I'd just want to do it with a partner to share the adventure with me.

I'm very happy you've had a great experience. I'm sure you will carry this with you regardless of where life's journey takes you.

The receipt story made me laugh. Trying to decipher receipts for expense reports was not the most fun part of business travel to Tokyo!

(Though Japan on an expense report is really the best way to go, unless you're fabulously wealthy. I can't say I'm complaining!)

This is very true. Connecting with other expats is easy and fun, and I spent plenty a night in the "gaijin ghetto." I'm not sure that that would scale for a multi-year stay though; like you say, it's a pretty transient crowd.

I'll admit to only having been to Tokyo about a half dozen times, for up to two weeks at a time. It remains one of my favorite cities, but at the end of two weeks I was ready to go home. I don't usually feel that way when traveling.

I found it lonely for the same reason I loved the city: it was so familiar, and yet so different at the same time. I felt like gears that were slightly out of mesh, not enough to snap, but enough to wear away the edges and cause subtle damage over time.

Making friends as an adult is always hard, but being a transplant into such a new culture is even harder. Everyone was friendly, but finding true connection is difficult: language barriers, cultural differences, biases (on both sides), and perhaps the transitory nature of my stay meant there was always a constant difference.

I always felt like an outsider, even when welcomed warmly. Maybe this was me, but I always knew I was being accommodated: "he's a gaijin, he doesn't know better." This was absolutely kind, but I also knew that I didn't know better, and didn't know what I didn't know, and that created a subtle tentativeness and friction in social interactions.

The classic scenes of Tokyo streets with tall buildings filled with small shops and laced with vertical signage is an apt metaphor for living in Tokyo. There is so much hidden behind the facades that it takes a lifetime to know what's really there, unless you have a guide with infinite patience.

Maybe other cities, or towns, would be different. Maybe it would be much easier if I was fluent, or planned to stay for years. Maybe someone without tendencies towards introversion, or who went with a partner to lean on, would have a very different experience.

But like I said, many small factors just wore on me, and I was happy to return to the warm embrace of home.

I'm afraid I don't know enough about the startup scene to do more than speculate. I was there representing an enterprise software company, which has very different dynamics - especially in Japan.

A colleague took me to Tamahide restaurant in Tokyo, which opened in 1760 and is known for creating oyakodon, a chicken and egg rice bowl. (Oyakadon translates to "parent and child donburi" which somehow makes eating a combination of chicken and egg a little less appealing).

Looking at reviews today, people apparently see the food as a mixed bag - some are clearly disappointed. In my opinion, it was excellent, with the signature dish having balanced flavors that seem to have been refined for generations. I found it endlessly fascinating that a humble lunch place with a simple dish could survive for 250+ years - but it also makes perfect sense that simple things last.

My colleague (a local in our Japan office) told me that emperors of old had ordered the dish to be delivered to them, well before Japan had even been "opened" to the world. Perhaps the stories were apocryphal (he was a sales guy after all), but still entertaining and gave a sense of the history behind the meal.

Tokyo is an amazing city, though it can be very lonely for an expat.

You certainly express an unpopular opinion, and at first glance you are right: secure backups should be a priority for any IT organization.

However, not all backups are continuous and pervasive. There are often backup windows, gaps, and processes that halt with no one noticing. Ryuk also actively disables and deletes backups to maximize impact, while also seeking out mount points that might be backup targets - and encrypts those as well.

Of course, we're also talking about hospitals here. Even a well-managed system with hourly differential backups leaves plenty of time for radiology data to be lost in the critical hour before life saving surgery.

More realistically though, how long would it take you to discover and remove a sophisticated penetration, then restore every device, ensure none of the restores are also infected by the malware that had probably been there for a while, and bring a hospital system with thousands of impacted systems back online? 72 hours? A week? A month?

What happens to the patients? Admissions to the emergency room? What if adjacent hospitals are also hit, or are already impacted by the COVID spike and have no open beds?

People literally die due to hospital ransomware attacks. No one deserves that.

Ransomware is akin to kidnapping, it's just the data and customers that are held hostage, not kids or loved ones. Always blame the criminal, never the victim.

I would counter-argue on three fronts:

1. A lack of variation, even skin deep, is even less interesting than only skin-deep variation. That is often the norm in large "open world" environments.

2. Much of what we find most interesting about the world is, in fact, skin deep. Take humans for example; all fit the same mold, but the range of human variation is endlessly fascinating to artists and audiences alike. Similarly, the layout of the Prati region of Rome and the Marina/Cow Hollow district of San Francisco is not wildly different. However, both are distinct, worthy of visiting, and unlikely to be confused with each other.

3. Current methods of procedural generation, without AI/ML, already result in fairly interesting maps. Could "true" AI do better? Perhaps, but I'm not sure that the delta is so great that the results would be noticeably better than a well constructed procedural algorithm (play "Tea for God" if you have a VR HMD and a lot of space). I could be wrong though - the gold standard remains hand-placed, human-built worlds filled with little surprises. If an AI approach resulted in a level design competing with the best of bespoke worlds, particularly at a lower development cost, then I'm all for it.

Thank you for the links. These projects are fascinating, and precisely what I was thinking about. I wish I had more time, skill, and knowledge to delve into ML and GANs.

Perhaps a dumb question from one fairly unschooled in ML: Can't ML be used to augment traditional procgen methods to create unique ornamentation and art styles on top of traditionally procedurally generated level layouts?

IMO, despite how interesting procgen levels themselves can be, they ultimately suffer from "sameness" - similar looking building facades, trees, stonework, etc. become boring fast. Couldn't one create separate training sets such as plants in varying biomes, unique architectural styles, and divergent cultural artwork, and then apply these sets to create new textures and primitives for decorating levels? This would keep different levels/environments/dungeons/whatever feeling fresh while saving on the laborious work of drawing "stone texture #43" or having the same painting in every tavern in the land.

Obviously I'm thinking of graphical rogue-lites like One Must Fall or In Death, or RPGs with procedurally-generated elements, not classic text-based games like Rogue or Hack.

Which is much better than the precedent since the 1950s, that fusion was always 20 years away.

Wow, this jogged a memory from when Brad Fitzpatrick (bradfitz on HN) had to write a utility to ensure the hard drives running LiveJournal didn't lie about successfully completing fsync().[1] IIRC, the behavior caused fairly serious database corruption after a power outage.

Went back and found the link. To my surprise, it was 15 years ago. To my greater surprise, the original post, the Slashdot article, and the utility all remain available.

And hard drives (or their NVMe successors) still lie.

[1] https://brad.livejournal.com/2116715.html

A few points to consider:

1. Facebook funds many of these games; think of it like a first-party game made to drive sales of a new console. The developer gets paid up front, Facebook recoups the revenue via incremental sales of HMDs and software on their store.

2. Note that many games are VR offshoots of existing IPs. This means the opportunity for asset re-use and consequently lower costs.

3. "High quality" and "big budget" are not equivalent. There is a huge spectrum between a tech demo and a flagship title with 400-500 people working on it (as is the case of AC). AAA-caliber, lengthy games can be made by teams of 50-75.

4. Again, those revenue numbers are on Quest only. PSVR is an even larger market, and PC VR (Vive, Index, WMR, Rift) is probably about the same size.

The most important point though is that if your entry point requires Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, or The Last of Us, then it is indeed too early.

However, the two hottest non-VR games right now are Fall Guys and Among Us - great, high quality games come in all sizes.

Others have said this, but I'll reiterate: your description of mass market is precisely what's happening with Quest. Your view of VR seems rooted in pre-Quest (i.e., exclusively PC-tethered) VR and not the stand-alone world.

In fact, so many people literally went to Best Buy or Walmart to purchase a Quest that it has been sold out since the beginning of the year, online and off, with eBay pricing at 50%+ premiums.

You literally open the box, run an app on your phone (for configuration), put the HMD on your face and you're in VR. People not only tell their friends, but buy multiple versions to give to friends and family.

With Quest 2 at a $299 price point, the non-nerds saying "maybe I'll try VR" will happen even more often. The OculusQuest subreddit has a constant stream of questions about this very behavior. It is currently the ~2,000th most popular subreddit, with an impressive growth curve[1]. Some are literally buying the Quest 2 instead of the PS5 (though clearly a small number).

So far, 35 games have made over $1m on Quest alone, with one clearing that figure in 4 days and another in 8 days. Top games have made over $10m, not even including revenue from Steam, PSVR, or the Oculus PC VR platform. These aren't Epic / Apple level mega-wins, but many mobile developers would be happy with $5-10m revenue figures.

Upcoming VR games are coming from top tier publishers like Respawn (Medal of Honor), Ubisoft (Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell), and Rockstar (unnamed AAA open world game)[2], Crytek (The Climb 2), and EA (Star Wars: Squadrons).

Additional games include Sniper Elite, Warhammer 40,000, Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge, Jurassic World Aftermath, and Myst. And this is just the tip of the iceberg from brands/publishers you may know.

Point being, stand-alone VR has really addressed many of your (and the market's) concerns.

And, to be fair, in your linked video Linus was trying to use optional, expensive peripherals for full-body tracking while streaming - not exactly a mass-market use case.

[1] https://subredditstats.com/r/oculusquest

[2] https://uploadvr.com/rockstars-new-vr-game-guesses/

As I'm sure many will jump in to say, "ough" is an unfortunate example.

"A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."

I can't weigh in from personal experience, but I look at it like a marathon. One set of runners face a first half of the race with mud, crushed glass, vertical climbs, and other obstacles, while other racers had a nice tailwind and extra drink stations.

Regardless of the obstacles faced in the second half (which are still more numerous than the competition's), can't you understand why runners would still look back at that first half to explain their fatigue, anger, and feelings of injustice? Particularly when looking ahead and thinking, "Oh God, this crap /again/??"

The marathon in this example actually spans multiple generations, but even the horrible segregation of the 50's was experienced first hand by the parents of black people still in the workforce today.

Sounds like you came into the race halfway through. As an immigrant you're still facing those unfair obstacles in front of you, but just remember that you don't have the fatigue of carrying the baggage from the first half.

I like your framing, because it provides an opportunity to "judo" some of the institutional resistance to change.

Loss of power is a huge motivator for the status quo. Are there ways to facilitate institutional change that do not weaken the power structures with the most influence?

It's an interesting thought experiment.

That's a good quote (or sentiment).

Relating back to technical systems, it reminds me of implementing a CRM (customer relationship management) or other collaborative data system. Higher difficulty of use translates to lower participation, which leads to lower value, which leads to lower use...and so on.

Hmm, this kind of snarky response doesn't really add to the discussion. Why slam humanities programs now, when it's those very skills that will be needed to address many of the societal issues we face today?

Do you disagree that social workers, therapists, child care advocates, educators, economists, and yes - even historians, writers, and artists - will be arguably more important than scientists, engineers, and mathematicians when it comes to issues like stemming racism?

Maybe you don't like the word "systemic." How would you describe fundamental issues that cross economic, social, political, and legal lines?

Based on the current gray color, this response has seen quite a few down votes. I wonder why?

It essentially restates the premise of the article, and is reasonably accurate from my experience. ("upset the apple cart" may understate the risks of a "ground up" rewrite, but there are plenty of "bold approaches" that are less dramatic).

It would be nice if down voters replied, it could be an interesting discussion.