heartbeats

Adverse selection.

If they don't get the job, gain is zero. If they do get the job, the gain is their salary. EV = P(job) * E[salary|job]. Someone who believes there is a low probability of them getting the job will be drawn to these sorts of interviews, but the sharp people who want the job are not going to be more interested.

If you're trying to optimize for amount of good candidates, maybe. If you're trying to optimize for share of good candidates, absolutely not.

What could be interesting is a simpler test. How about the following?

* On the first of every month, the company publishes a list of random numbers.

* The job interview consists of a written test on how well you've remembered these, and them some code stuff.

Fast, cheap, efficient. Should be a reasonably good selection criteria.

Some of the rules are rather vague, to the point where two reasonable-minded people could reach two different conclusions. The parts about female ordination are, to put it bluntly, not.

Why shouldn't it be allowed?

Either people are capable of independent thought, in which case this doesn't matter. Or they are too stupid to form their own decisions, in which case democracy is a sham anyway.

It's like the people claiming the Brexit vote was illegitimate because people didn't know what they were voting for. If that's the case, why not put Elizabeth in charge and save on admin?

> My impression is that the Amish are living about 50 years behind us. They don’t adopt everything new but what new technology they do embrace, they take up about half a century after everyone else does. By that time, the benefits and costs are clear, the technology stable, and it is cheap.

Yeah, this is definitely a sensible approach to doing things. They get most of the benefits of modernity, but few of the downsides. I wish our regulators would do the same.

quasi-relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/606/

That is just a matter of basic theological fidelity; the matter is spelled out very clearly in the Bible[0]. You can't just pick and mix which parts of it you'd like to selectively ignore and claim it's 'up to interpretation'.

[0] Timothy 2:11-12

I believe the term you're looking for is 'micronetwork'[0]. This is how Wickr gained use: a certain segment of the population found it very useful, even if it couldn't be used for all their friends.

Signal misses out on this by not offering anonymous user accounts, but otherwise they would have a very clear path to mass adoption.

[0]: https://www.nickkolenda.com/pdf/viral-marketing.pdf

What about making them stick, somehow?

If I leave a negative review for a product that later gets delisted, Amazon could flag the account on basis of "deleted product with poor reviews". It could then try and see if there are any substantially similar items listed a week on. If so, ban them.

Perhaps even easier, make verified negative reviews stick to the seller's account. If you delist a product with negative reviews, those just transfer over to the seller, so you see a 5-star product sold by a 1-star seller.

What if you refund out-of-band?

One approach might be to shadowban fake accounts' reviews. They still show up as text, but they don't get counted in the average. If Amazon at T = 0 know which reviews are legitimate and which aren't, someone who consistently gives five-star reviews to shit products could have their ratings lowered in importance.

You could go all the way with this: look at my reviews, and then only show me reviews made by people with similar tastes.

That sounds extremely icky, to say the least. "Synthetic memories"?

This disregards the fact that countries' leaders have obligations only to their own citizenry and thus not to foreign countries. China is justified in their actions from their perspective, but not ours. We should never have allowed their ascendancy.

That might be the case for the companies, but what about the rest of us?

There's two ways this can end:

1. China becomes the global #1, we all get social credit scores, etc

2. Something is done to stop the ascendancy of China

Our losses far exceed the companies' short-term gains.

They're doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, of course.

Maybe we're already seeing them. Maybe that's why all the front-end React JavaScript nonsense is so terrible, while oases like this are rare.

The feedback doesn't have to be very fast. If I'm botting correctly, my accounts will almost never be banned. Even once every 24 hours will be more than enough.

IA was just an example, and Tor would be easier. But anyway, I think it shows the flaw in doing so:

> You could also shadowban IA.

If the spammer manages to get all the IPs hellbanned just by looking at things, he gets more eyeballs on his spam.

My point is, you can't get much better than normal shadowbans, which are trivially detectable for moderately sophisticated users (just log out and try to check your profile) but not anyone else. "Hellbanning" is a stupid extension of this concept which only works in video games.

Also, shadowbanning is a spineless and deeply unethical move. If I get banned, I know what I did wrong and can reflect on that. If I get shadowbanned, I'm just screaming into the ether. That is not a Good Thing™, it is atrocious.

It doesn't work for logged-out users. If I can just look at e.g. the Internet Archive's copy of reddit and see if my accounts are in there, it defeats the purpose.

Neither reddit nor HN make any attempts to make it hard for sophisticated users to figure out they're shadowbanned.

You haven't opted in. For the modern web, using it without JavaScript and the requisite accounts isn't a supported option.

> Where I grew up, teachers used to punish tellers along side the alleged offender because it was bad for society.

Absolute legend.

Where was this?

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

That is absurd. If you can't be bothered to read the comment, why vote on it? If you can't be bothered to click the link and skim it over, then how does your opinion add anything of value to the site's ranking system it doesn't already know?

It doesn't seem as if the first reply to the top comment agrees with you.

Why would you find peace with being stunted and missing out on major parts of life? To be blunt, it doesn't sound like something to be enthusiastic about.

> 1. Has your son asked you to change ISPs?

> 2. Are you finding programs on your computer that you don't remember installing?

> 3. Has your child asked for new hardware?

> 4. Does your child read hacking manuals?

> 5. How much time does your child spend using the computer each day?

> 6. Does your son use Quake?

> 7. Is your son becoming argumentative and surly in his social behaviour?

> 8. Is your son obsessed with "Lunix"?

> 9. Has your son radically changed his appearance?

> 10. Is your son struggling academically?

The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?

There's an easier solution, we call it "my friend Ivan".

I have a friend, Ivan, who lives somewhere in the world - he's notoriously reticent about his location, and only communicates over OTR at strange times. Whenever I want to get some research done, I ask him if he happens to know this or that fact about this or that copyrighted database. I then cite him as a source if anyone has any questions.

I don't see why this is getting downvoted – it seems like a materially correct claim:

> “You’re going to pay that money,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup said [to DoorDash] in court. “You don’t want to pay millions of dollars, but that’s what you bargained to do and you’re going to do it.”

There really isn't much room for interpretation, is there? Patreon is a tiny company, $5 million is ~1% of their value. If nothing else it would cause trouble with the liquidity.

What about using PGP or something? They could require as a matter of corporate policy that internal e-mails be sent using PGP, and that storage be encrypted. More sensitive stuff they could use OTR for.

I suppose it's not a good look if you're looking at an archived conversation and they switch over to PGP, but it's better than this.

Making people pay for the privilege of posting online isn't a good idea - getting people to use a forum for free is hard enough, just try getting Internet people to fork over "the price of a cup of coffee" as well.

If you want decentralized spam resistance at scale, Web of Trust is the only solution that works. To register, I contact a node that adds you for free by filling out a captcha, talking to them on IRC, etc. They add me at a trust level just above zero. If I start off by posting spam, my account instantly dies.

So I have to first post a bunch of productive comments that people respond to, and then I can start spamming.

It's a common slang term, just like how you'd say 'quid' or 'bucks'.

Fixing the bug only fixes it for Firefox users, but disincentivizing it fixes it for everyone.

For me, uMatrix blocks it; it redirects through https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers. I could disable it or go through IA or whatever, but I really haven't the patience to deal with these websites.

It would be a better idea to block ads served from such sites, or to even send punitive requests.