kisil_reboot

I came here to say just this. The pivot at "rather than fixing tech companies, we can fix the internet" makes absolutely no sense.

At least in downtown San Francisco, many shared rides cost $4 total.

Counterpoint since I only see anti-FB replies below: I absolutely love seeing OAuth login. I don't have to create yet another password, or worry about whether your site has reasonable password security. Even when I choose to create a login instead, just seeing it gives me some confidence that you're competent enough to set it up, and probably gave some thought to the security trade-offs surrounding login in general.

I've seen a lot of teams keep a shared scripts/aliases file, and import it to everyone's .bashrc or equivalent. Very useful.

[With the acknowledgement that this is a tangent from the article]: I don't have hard data on hand, but in my experience, the kind of innumeracy you point to is shockingly widespread. Many people I've talked to do not know the difference between the debt and the deficit. Some people were shocked at the election results because they conflated 85% chance of winning with 85% of the votes.

Of all the math classes I've taken, Dimensional Analysis remains the one I'd most like to see forced on every highschooler. Units matter. Unlike quantities cannot be trivially compared.

Fortunately, you don't really have to solve that problem. It would be sufficient to assess claims of actual fact about the actual world. I think the first step in writing the classifier would be to write something like

    float IsStatementAboutFacts(string statement);  // Returns confidence estimate

In general, I favor freedom of determination; if your randomly selected person wants to spend their BI on drugs or alcohol, fine. But the persistently homeless are not at all a representative sample population. There are a number of intersecting problems, especially mental health and addiction, that place them among the least credible cases for self-determination. We can argue about where the cutoff is, but there will always be people out at the end of the bell curve that need more active intervention.

And that's without even getting into the problem of perverse incentives involved in giving money to people for asking for it.

There's a wide range of moral gray area there. Imagine, e.g., a US contractor who builds converters that make dumb bombs into smart bombs. The US is going to bomb people anyway; better that they hit fewer non-targets along the way.

> If I attend a conference I have the right to stay anonymous.

Sadly, legally you have no such right. You are in a public space, and anyone can take your picture freely and do pretty much what they want with it. Our society doesn't even have coherent social norms about reasonable rights to privacy in public spaces, much less law.

I agree that it would be reasonable to expect some level of anonymity, though. Hopefully some day it will be.

This is baseless FUD; any serious objections he might have are only hinted at: "things I can't talk about". If everyone switched to Chrome, at worst Chrome would get complacent, as IE did, and at best, it would continue to be a great browser.

Use whatever browser you like best.

I agree that the uniform distribution is fishy. I could object to the binomial assumption too; it seems kind of question-begging. My point was just that the thesis "your vote doesn't matter" is not at all self-evident.

> Your vote doesn't matter - the probability of it altering the outcome are infinitesimally small.

That's nice sounding cynicism, but it's not obvious that the math actually comes out that way. Consider: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/01/yes-it-can-be-r.html

"Priced out" is not strictly accurate - San Francisco is still more expensive than the peninsula. But it's only slightly more expensive, so the cost factor doesn't provide much incentive to skip the city. If I'm going to pay through the nose anyway, I might as well live somewhere I'll like.

Yes, it's important to be articulate. But the author is talking about speaking a different vernacular. I imagine one can be articulate in Black English* without being fluent in White English. "Talk[ing] like white folks" means speaking the same language at all, not merely "speaking well" on some counterfactual continuum.

[*] I imagine because I don't speak it.

> Google and Facebook want to give everyone access to the Internet because they need more raw materials. More data. The first sentence seems basically true, but the second, and the general gist of the article, is off-base. Both companies make money, on aggregate, when there are more people using the internet. Google gets more searches, more youtube views. Facebook gets more, and more active, members. Both are monetizable eyeballs without needing any fancy data extraction.

Do we really need to posit some nefarious lust for "your data!!1" here? I don't see the need; the simpler hypothesis has enough explanatory power.