digbyloftus

This has always been my take on the privacy issue as well as the related advertising issue. People freely connect to and send data to companies servers and then get mad that the company has and uses the data? What? People send requests to servers saying "send me whatever it is you have sitting in this location" then get mad when the company dared have a link to an advertisement sitting on their own damn server? What? You're the one that asked for it! You didn't even have to do anything with it! You could be running an ad blocker, left the ad link as a link, and consumed the content you want which the company still sent you simply because you asked for it! How cool is that? Free fucking data from someone's computer when they don't even know or have business with you.

But no! Apparently if you blindly connect to other people's servers, send them all of your personal details, ask them to send you effectively whatever they feel like, and then you executive that code indiscriminately, it's on them! Fucking ridiculous.

>I do not have to remain silent, and you just contradicted yourself when you both said that someone had to debate if they disagreed but at the same time had the option to be silent. Did you ever take a class in logic? It would serve you well to study it.

I said it was required to settle the matter. I didn't say the matter had to be settled. Have you studied reading comprehension? It's incredibly useful!

>I provided evidence showing that Eric wrote a dictionary of jargon including the term "hacker".

He wrote something and called it a dictionary. Great! I can do that. Anyone can do that. It's not a credential. It's enough to garner interest, and like I said, I read the entry, but writing something and slapping Dictionary as a heading is hardly evidence of that thing being true. That evidence is what he fails to even try to provide. I have provided a definition of both the word hack and how the suffix -er functions. Neither seem to be in dispute so the idea that there's disagreement over the combination is frankly nuts.

I appealed to the history of it! If Eric and friends arrived at the term "hacker" through means other than the word "hack" i'd honestly love to know how, but like I said, his writing doesn't touch on it at all apart from to say that him and his friends started as a bunch of hobbiests. The best I can do is surmise that as hobbiests they believed they were crudely cutting and shaping software. What else would be it be? An Acronym? Happy Automation Creation Kids?

Discussion with someone who disagrees requires debate to settle the matter. We apparently disagree. Either debate or remain silent on it.

None of his article seems to try to defend his assertions at all so it seems odd to link to it unless this is an appeal to authority. In which case, what makes Eric Raymond an authority on the English language?

"-er" is a suffix used to turn verbs in to nouns. A kicker is one who kicks, a stabber is one who stabs, a hacker is one who hacks. While you can certainly create a stereotype of the general "stabber", it shouldn't and doesn't really come in to whether or not a specific act was a stab. If most people who stab others are large, hooded men, but a petite, bow tie in hair girl thrusts a knife through someones torso, she stabbed them. Talking about the incident? She was the stabber. She does it regularly enough for it to be part of her general description as a person? She is a stabber.

Now, seeing as two very common definitions of the word hack are:

A: to cut or sever with repeated irregular or unskillful blows

B : to cut or shape by or as if by crude or ruthless strokes <hacking out new election districts>

it seems both odd to take people whose relationship with programming could be describe this way and not call them a hacker, and to call people who program out of a love of freedom and voluntary mutual help hackers. How the hell do freedom and voluntary mutual help relate to the word "hack" at all other than just by correlation?

People who made programs in a non-professional environment were and are more likely to hack together their programs. This group of people historically has had some values as mentioned in your article there. But to say those values are now the requirements or the defining characteristics of the term? Ridiculous.

Most people who bowl do it for the fun of it. If bowling suddenly becomes a lucrative sport and I take it up simply to chase the money and don't intrinsically care for rolling a ball at some pins, am I not a bowler? One who is partaking in bowling? Who goes to the bowling club to bowl?

It's an opinion piece by a guy who spends his time pumping out listicles and great journalism such as "How the Hunger Games Can Help You Stop Procrastinating". I don't think it's one of their main articles/something that would appear in print.

That does seem very flawed. If there's a strong correlation between gender and age in the field then why would that be not accounted for? I can definitely see people assuming the older person was the brains/leader of a project.

I mean, if all you do for a living is email spam then I wouldn't call that hacking, but seeing as this is a programming based startup and the marketing attempt required programming skill, I'm imagining this was put together by the same guy/guys that are on other days making new product features. If slapping together a marketing scheme that quickly lets you reach a lot of people without you needing to spend a lot of time optimising or upkeeping it isn't hacking then I just straight up don't understand how the day setting up a new feature and a day setting up the new spam bot are different conceptually.

I don't think being an unsophisticated asshole and a hacker are mutually exclusive. Plenty of hacking is unsophisticated and most people are assholes, hacker or otherwise.

Plenty of what programmers are doing isn't hacking. A team of top cs men making some process in google 0.1% more efficient doesn't seem very hacky even if it results in oodles of profit. What's more is this type of marketing is very much the result of hacker programming. Scraping social media profiles and then automatically email spamming the recipients is a system that was programmed, they aren't manually doing it (I hope!).

>Oh, but we do. We install ad blockers. That's the best way to exert that pressure from our side :).

That's exactly what I meant haha. I find the constant barrage of news about how terrible ads are baffling. There's a very simple solution for end users and it's been around for a long time.

>They're not, dogs don't have money.

We do have money. That's what they want from their ads, our money. Don't view ads -> don't click ads ->don't spend money on advertised products -> problem solved.

Hacker in this context means someone who quickly and cheaply creates new things, as in "it's hacked together". Like how we're on Hacker News, it's not a security website, it's a website for people interested in startup news. Growth hacking basically means any form of growth that doesn't come from a fat marketing budget or traditional brand growing methods. I definitely think their method counts.

Ultimately the buck actually stops with the end user. They're the ones who decided to ask a server outside of their control for any and all data it has stored at an address and then used it in a way harmed themselves. It very much is us who can and should exert market pressure on ad networks to change. The publisher, ad network, ad creator, any and all business, only exists to satisfy our needs and wants. We are the market not publishers.

Even very early on though the plan revolved around there being no real natural barrier between couches and commercial property no? It's in the email exchange released by PG to show how people can miss the idea. If someones plan involves starting with X because it's a good stepping point to Y, I don't think it's fair to say "oh but they were only found success with Y".

"Internet they might not have even heard of with millions of websites?"

If they haven't even heard of it then it doesn't sound like its a viable alternative does it?

Solution to what? The profit margins the article quoted seem fairly reasonable, for all we know the Government is already willing to deal with others and no one else can compete. Seeing as the Government is the customer I don't really see why they would want to move purchasing power over to the refugees. There's no reason to assume they share goals.

"Reviewers often are in competition with the authors of the papers they're reviewing, hence the term peer-review. They have an incentive to prevent publication of competing work."

This seems backwards to me. There isn't a fixed amount of interest in a field that is captured by peers. If others in your industry are getting attention then it draws attention to your industry as a whole. I'd think reviewers would be biased towards having competing work published not against.

I don't see how that's relevant. They weren't valued at the time. Later they were. $ being a flawed measure of value doesn't make any sense. $ IS value.

Isn't that effectively a problem for any hourly based service? What's the incentive for a lawyer, accountant, developer, anyone to be as cost effective as possible? Surely the answer to that (happy customers, repeat business, referrals) would apply here as well. Even if hypothetically it wasn't as efficient as possible yet they still managed to deliver quality results, whats the problem? You're paying for results not effort, no?

If what creators are making is so great and they have an audience that loves their work then they wouldn't be "scraping by". You can have all the free users in the world but if people aren't willing to pay you for your work then I'm sorry but the conclusion isn't that you're valuable. Some guy earning $20k/year on patreon and someone founding a multimillion dollar startup are not even in the same ballpark of creating value. In a market economy you get rich by giving people what they want.

This whole rant is poorly written and riddled with obvious holes. Twitter is full of ads BECAUSE users don't value the service all that much, not the other way around. If people were willing to cough up as much cash as they spend time on Twitter and demanded an ad free one then that's what they'd get. People value a free ad supported Twitter over a premium one though. Just like with most other web apps they use. So that's what the market gives them.

Did the author stop to think that people might actually want smart luggage, valet dry cleaning, or weed delivery? On face value those all sound like the kinds of things people want to me. Drinking water to Africa? I know far more people that smoke weed regularly than I do people that care about how Africa is doing. Perhaps the author is just misinformed as to how self interested people are and is confusing business accommodating that as forcing it? Shooting the messenger so to speak. The day people start caring about Africa more than they do about getting high, YC will be full of a ton of startups to that effect.

YC invested in 5 different career websites and the author claims this as evidence that PG thinks we need 5 competing career websites. I can't read that as anything other than disingenuous. Even the most casual reader of PG would understand that he expects most startups to fail.

All taxation is already robbery. That doesn't get taken in to account when deciding what to tax and at what rate for any other source, I fail to see why inherited wealth should be the exception.

Hedonism is as true as any other. Plenty of people, even if they are not familiar with philosophical terms and wouldn't self describe as such, are living according to hedonistic values. Plenty of people are living according to all sorts of different codes. Any system that defines value in a way that doesn't allow for these people, for example by saying that coffee doesn't have value, is a faulty one.

Economically, if a person is willing to spend $5 on coffee then coffee is worth $5 to them. Trying to attach solid philosophical reasoning behind that may be a fun thought experiment but it's hardly the solved one your responses seem to imply that you think it is.

Didn't the rest of the EU agree to that when they let Ireland have the tax code that it does and still be part of the EU? It doesn't seem outrageous to me at all. Stupid on their part maybe, but they're the ones that write the tax codes. They wrote books on who needs to be paid what to be able to sell in the EU, handed them to Apple, Apple read them, and then has gone about abiding by them.

Apple doesn't write the rules. It's ridiculous to criticise them for them.

It would seem like fixing that problem directly rather than using a roundabout system of taxing corporations, which comes with its own set of problems, would be the better way to go about things.

"Their share" is exactly what's up for debate. You make it sound like the US Government has a number and they're failing to collect because Apple is strong arming them. The US Government has the largest military in the world by a far margin and Apple has roughly zero physical might. If the US wants Apples money they can easily take Apples money. Until that point they're just talking.