ebola1717

Plus, that sentiment is only true with a narrow set of upper middle class, white collar assumptions. What about hard working retail workers or factory workers? Or look how vast the race and gender disparities are...

But the point isn’t the individual. The questions we need to ask are - why did people feel empowered to do what they did? Why wasn’t there anything in place to hold these people accountable for their actions? And what are the larger patterns and their consequences (e.g. widespread sexism and sexual harassment pushes women out of the workforce/positions of power)

I’ve found it pretty unreliable. I was researching Teflon pans the other day, and all the instant answers were myths about how Teflon pans will give you cancer. And when you click no the sites, it’s usually clear if their answer is at all reliable or not. Stuff like that means I always have to do more work with instant answers than if I just ignore it.

This is nonsense both-sides-ism. The right very obviously redacts true data (just look at Fox News re: Mueller). And the issue is not just whether people lie and omit facts. You have to consider the the magnitude and motivation behind those mistruths (Obama is a Muslim, Clinton conspiracies, climate change denialism), and what people do with that. Are they open to fact checking, or openly hostile to it?

Instagram’s CEO has said one of the most valuable parts of being acquired by FB is they could just hook into their vast revenue org (probably thousands of employees, and battle tested ad targeting tech and expertise). Twitter has to build its own, and I’m sure that accounts for most of their headcount.

Eh, conservatives have been making this complaint for ages. It’s really not new. Take the Vietnam war and civil rights protests of the 60s and 70s for example. Tech has changed some dynamics, but in this case, it hasn’t introduced something completely new.

Richard Spencer held a rally at UF last week, and they had to arrest 3 of his supporters for firing shots at protesters. I don’t have much sympathy for this “college kids are overreacting” argument these days.

Yeah, like, those are actually the extremist groups with ties to terrorism that this kind policy is designed for. It’s not Twitter’s fault that mainstream politics has gone haywire... I mean maybe it is, but point stands

> as soon as someone who's willing to consider only the rules of the game in constructing their strategy comes along, and easily crushes all their competitors

Also relevant to codes of conduct unfortunately.

* Links are 20 characters, flat (could be less, but users would spam 100+ links).

* Images aren't counted (unless they come from links).

* @handles were moved out of the text for replies.

* Threads have improved a lot over the past year.

* Thread composer is apparently on it's way.

If DAU is your only metric, sure. WeChat has a horizontal breadth that Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have been trying to copy though. The equivalent of ApplePay, Venmo, basic online shopping, etc are all in WeChat.

https://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/

China's not blocking out the sharing of ideas though. Until a few months ago, Andrew Ng worked at Baidu!

They are isolating data, but hoarding data is a competitive advantage in a way that isolating knowledge isn't.

My experience was that the top students (now PhD students at MIT, Stanford, etc) were very diligent about homework. In the honors classes, you often needed to go far above and beyond the textbook for some questions. The average students (still smart kids, many working at Google, Amazon, etc) were much more lax about it, and wouldn't work that hard to solve the hardest problems in a set.

Eh, investment banking is arduous cause of the hours, and does require you to be pretty smart, but its not as meritocratic as your claiming. It's stacked with Ivy League kids exactly because elitism at big banks works in their favor during the hiring process.

The point-free style is harder to read and reason about imo, especially since the data gets transformed in that pipeline. We use scala, and will avoid currying for this reason.

Bind is flatMap (>>=)

Confusingly, map in scala is fmap in Haskell

Monoids and posets have very little structure, so you really aren't gonna get deep useful theorems out of them. Maybe you can make some clever reductions, but those are hardly deep theorems.

I'm not arguing the underlying math isn't beautiful. I took grad level algebra and logic classes, so believe me when I say I know the math is awesome. But it just doesn't have any practical utility in programming, and more often than not just makes things more confusing.

edit: Also, since I majored in math, with a focus on logic, I don't think I'll have any trouble with losing sight of the foundations :)

Eh, as someone who works in scala day-to-day, and has studied actual category theory, I think the emphasis on category theory itself is silly. And in fact, most of the time, more category theory and more monads will make your code worse (e.g. MonadTransformers are D: )

Future, which is really a souped up promise abstraction, is the main star, and for-comprehensions are nice syntactic sugar. Being a "Monad" doesn't help you do anything with it though. And Future technically doesn't even truly obey the Monad laws, because of exceptions.

It's useful that a couple of container classes in scala use implement this trait:

    trait ChainableContainer[A] {
      def map(fn: A => B): ChainableContainer[B]
      def flatten(nested: ChainableContainer[ChainableContainer[A]]):ChainableContainer
    }

But beyond making it a little easier to guess what's going on, the underlying math isn't useful in actual programming.

> I'm not even sure what "defining it as a tuple" is meant to imply

Yeah, in a computer science situation it's needlessly obfuscatory. It's literally just an interface with a "plus" method and an identity value.

This is a shallow reading of Zeynep Tufekci's work (which I agree is among the sharpest analyses out there). She very explicitly calls out sites like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook for not doing enough to curb hate speech and harassment. Some quotes from her latest book:

"I later realized that the attackers had also been organizing online, using the same affordances as other activists for positive change—but only to attack female writers who touched upon gender-related topics. They were using Twitter’s ease of organization and willingness to let them operate freely to target the freedom of speech and assembly of others. Like many platforms, Twitter had wanted to remain “neutral” but, as is often the case, rights of one group—the group who wanted to silence women or minorities—clashed with rights of women or minorities (especially outspoken ones) to freely use the site to speak and assemble. A stance of “neutrality” meant, in reality, choosing the former over the latter."

"As with many of the issues I study, it is difficult to have a coherent and unified normative view or a simple rule that would apply in all cases that all doxing is good or bad by itself. There are always trade-offs. These judgments have to be made in the context of whose rights are allowed to trample whose, what ethical values will be protected and which ones disregarded. Will we protect children’s right to be free of sexual exploitation, or the rights of adult men to anonymously gather and exploit? But will we also protect the right of dissidents around the world to be able to post pseudonymously? There is no single, simple answer that covers all ethical and normative questions that come up for platforms and their policies, without the need to judge many of these cases individually, rather than applying blanket rules."

All of chapter 7 of her book on this is good: https://www.twitterandteargas.org/downloads/twitter-and-tear...

That's exactly how we got to the situation we're in with climate change. The fact that corporate money can hold so much influence over what we research, what we say, and therefore what we know and believe, is and has already proved itself to be dangerous.

> “We are in the process of trying to expand our relationship with Google on some absolutely key points,” Ms. Slaughter wrote in an email to Mr. Lynn, urging him to “just THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others.”

That was a real kicker for me. This seems like pretty blatant corporate censorship. Unfortunately, it's hard to make the public care about a situation like this that's so out of view.

This misunderstands the way technology, social media in particular, have exacerbated problems with misinformation. No one is claiming the media was perfect before. Obviously hoaxes and false rumors have always been a thing. But social media has made disinformation scalable.

Protests aren't meant to persuade - they're meant to draw attention. Persuasion is a separate step in the movement. Look at BlackLivesMatter. The initial protests drew attention to issues of police brutality that most Americans had little knowledge of. Then, journalists contextualized the history of police violence and attempted to persuade readers. Protests also help frame a narrative, which make people more amenable to persuasion.

The poorest people in this country are black and brown. The first people impacted by environmental disasters (and soon climate change) will be black and brown (Katrina, oil spills, [1]). That's why the people you decry as focusing too much on identity politics are at the forefront of pushing for universal healthcare, broader safety nets, and environmental regulations.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/529137/environmental...

That went to some weird places

- Modern protests have largely been peaceful. There's a protest every week nowadays, and the only violent ones I can recall in the past few years were Baltimore and Charlottesville. Smaller scale violence does occur at these protests, but it's usually a few bad actors.

- It's a common and well documented tactic for governments to send provocateurs to delegitimize protests

- Protest organizers know better than anyone the importance of getting out the vote, and are often part of that effort. Also, the midterm elections are still a year away.

- Uh not even gonna touch your identity politics rant tbh

Zeynep Tufecki's boom Twitter and Tear Gas argues this exact point very thoroughly. Would recommend to anyone interested by this discussion.

I mean, it's all interconnected, so yes.

- Activists who lead protests often work with writers, journalists, and professors

- Protests also draw attention to otherwise less mainstream issues - just look at how we talk about income inequality today vs before Occupy, or prison reform and police brutality before BlackLivesMatter

- There are feedback loops. Successful protests draw more protesters in the future by drawing attention to and legitimizing grievances.

- yes, changes in technology or the economy also matter

I'm confused why you think protests aren't a huge part of all those zeitgeist shifts. Even today, look at BlackLivesMatter: people are talking about police brutality and prison reform now - that was not even close to being a mainstream topic 10 years ago. People didn't just magically change their mind overnight.

As I understand, the question wasn't the veracity of the claims - I'm not sure those were contested. The question was whether they warranted his removal, and that comes down to how much you care about the Code of Conduct and believe team members are responsible for upholding its legitimacy, even if they disagree privately or internally.