methodover

WoW Classic just came out. I’m obsessed.

Do we have any idea at all about how many users were affected?

I'm wondering about this too. The GDPR requires a public notification. Why the hell is this coming from flippin' Google?! Why don't we have numbers on how many users were affected? Why isn't there a way to see if you're the one affected?

> If alternative structures worked well then we would've seen them by now

Well let’s not go this far. Human civilization has existed for a tiny portion of time, modern civilization even less so. There’s PLENTY of time for better structures to be discovered.

Uhh, he never campaigned for a single payer model.

I didn’t realize this. Cool, thank you for the information.

I think I might be the only person on HN optimistic about WeWork.

Remote work is on the rise here in the US. Startups and entrepreneurship continue to grow. Finding traditional office space sucks and is a massive waste of money, and probably always will. Co-working spaces make sense, and it’s baffling to me that it wasn’t the default way to work in 2010, when I started programming, let alone 2019.

I feel like if somehow fast food hadn’t been invented til now, and MacDonalds just got started, we’d be reading pessimistic threads about how it’s a real estate business masquerading as a food business and is destined for collapse.

But like, it actually does work, as a business, to provide some necessary service (office space, food) at scale with a big central marketing apparatus. The fundamentals here seem sensible to me.

So something that has really confused me lately — I thought socialism had a relatively strict definition. AOC for example claims the label socialist, but as far as I can tell she’s not actually taken any socialist policy positions. It feels more like she, and others, are reclaiming the label. Basically attempting to change the meaning to mean nothing more than a liberal welfare state.

Am I on the right track there or not so much?

Plenty is said about it, you may have not been paying attention.

Take some money from everyone who can afford it, and more from the rich than everyone else. Redistribute it into education, roads, healthcare, food, research, national defense, police, and other things that benefit society as a whole (including the rich).

You might want to do some research on what socialism actually means, because though it includes the above, it is not defined by the above. You can tax and spend that money on social (and other) services, while retaining a capitalist economy. Which is what we and every other developed nation does.

Socialism is state control of the means of production, which though it does happen with certain industries in some countries (usually energy related), it's pretty rare.

We should require employee representation on Board of Directors. Germany requires half the board to be represented by the company's employees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

I believe German CEOs typically make around 1/3rd of what American CEOs make (having trouble finding the source on that, but that's the number I've seen cited before), possibly in part due to these laws.

Something that’s missing from this analysis, I feel like, is this:

There needs to be a passionate owner. A technical leader who understands customers and their needs, understands what’s technically possible, and has the imagination to connect those two things.

I don’t know what you call that person, but it sure helps if he’s got a c in front of his name. CTO, CPO, whatever.

This something the article kinda glosses over, but maybe shouldn’t.

(I’m not sure if this person is great for the CEO role, by the way, just because of how freaking busy the CEO tends to be. There’s too much for her to do to also fulfill this role.)

I work from home full time. And I’m single; and I live alone.

I often go through the whole workweek without saying more than a couple words to another person in real life.

I wonder what this does to me over time. It probably isn’t good.

It’s funny, too, I actually tend not to mind stretches of alone time. I get used to it. It’s when I oscillate between a day of being alone, and then a night out, then a day alone again, a night out, etc., that I feel the loneliness during the day. Mondays tend to suck for the same reason, since now I’m suddenly alone again after spending the weekend with people in the real world. I usually start to feel OK again by Tuesday.

I admit to in the past wanting to say no to offers to hang out just because I know I’ll miss the human contact after.

This probably all sounds crazy but (shrug emoticon was here, I guess HN doesn’t like emoticons :( )

> instead spent in memorizing and rationalizing virtually unrelated minutia about largely outdated and mostly unverified beliefs.

That’s not what my religious studies degree was about. It wasn’t expensive Sunday school. They didn’t teach apologetics. They taught scholarship, empiricism and critical inquiry. Philosophy and theology were taught from a historical/critical/contextual perspective, not a devotional/didactic one.

I remember one asking a RELS professor about his internal religious beliefs once (in private) and got a stern talking to about how deeply inappropriate that was.

I appreciate and agree with your comment generally, but your characterization of my degree is not factual.

I have a religious studies degree.

I wonder if it’s prepared me better than a CS degree for the actual work I do.

What did I learn with my RELS degree? Hermeneutics— understanding ancient texts written by lots of different authors in their original historical contexts, often which has been deeply redacted over time. Anyone who’s worked on any production code can see the benefit of being trained in that kind of thinking.

The classes I took on theology and philosophy helped train my brain to organize ideas. I had no trouble understanding object oriented programming — Plato would’ve loved it too, I think.

Classes on ethics have come in handy too.

Oh and just, we did a TON of writing in college. Lots and lots of writing, lots of research papers. I had to learn something new, read all about it, and put together a document carefully explaining the idea, with lots of evidence and citations. That skill has come in SUPER handy for everything from bug reports to API clients, to customer-facing documentation, to internal memorandums.

It's such a squandered opportunity from a product prospective.

Yes, sure, Grindr started with being just about sex. But there's a huge interest amongst gay people for long term relationships and a dearth of apps that cater to them.

OKCupid was, for a time, a go-to app for gay men interested in LTRs. But OKC never capitalized on that opportunity -- never built features, or outreach, or anything to grow that niche. Plus, a couple years ago they dramatically changed the app (in ways to address issues for straight users) which negatively affected gay LTR-oriented men.

Tinder is now the primary app for LTR-oriented gay men, and it's terrible. Filtering options suck. The matching system is terrible.

Grindr could've been more than it is. It could've had a monopoly over the entire gay men dating app vertical -- for short term and long term relationships. But they squandered that opportunity. If the software had been better, and if the management and community side had been better, I think we'd be talking today about Grindr as a successful model for a startup. But nope, we're reading articles like this instead.

Scott Chen should've been fired a long time ago.

Given his actions on these issues that we know about, what about all the stuff we don't know about?

For all we know, they've had tons of data breaches and covered them up. I wouldn't put it past this guy.

Is it okay for a CTO to give HIV data, photos — probably explicit photos given the nature of the platform — to China’s government, without permission of the user? I don’t think so.

> Starcraft 2 is as much a strategy game as a mechanical arcade game, different mechanical restrictions change which strategies work well vs which other strategies.

This.

Show me an alpha star with robotic arms and camera eyes using a mouse and keyboard. Then we’ll be playing the same game.

Or, I suppose, give humans a non-physical neural interface.

We do yeah.

Here's the text: "This password has previously appeared in a data breach. Please choose a more secure alternative."

This is a good article. However, in regards to credential stuffing:

> Some guidance says to ban all passwords on this list. Try that and see how successful your users are at choosing passwords at all.

We're doing that. We don't let you choose any password that's been discovered in a prior breach.

Did Microsoft implement the same thing and discover a high rate of users bouncing off the registration page?

You know what, as I think back to that night it’s possible the lady did receive a citation (a ticket) and I didn’t notice it. I was there the whole time, and listened to everything, but it’s possible I missed it. Also, the cops didn’t say they gave a citation when I talked to them, but perhaps they were following a privacy policy or something.

Also the young lady who was struck turned down an ambulance ride and got a ride home from another bystander. Injuries were not apparently life threatening. (I’m also betting the girl didn’t have health insurance.)

“Given New York’s lax enforcement record, the Freakonomics podcast described running over pedestrians there as “the perfect crime.””

I was driving in Oakland when the car in front of me didn’t slow down for a pedestrian in the crosswalk. The pedestrian disappeared in front of the car. I stopped my car, got out, found the struck young woman trembling and bleeding in the street.

The speed limit was 30 miles per hour. I don’t think the driver was going quite that fast — maybe 20, 25 at most.

The woman driving the car was elderly. It’s tough to gauge her age — pushing late 70s, maybe 80? She said she didn’t notice the girl in the crosswalk.

I was upset. I stayed the entire time, talked with the cops at length, gave a statement. I wanted to see the lady’s license taken away. Or a ticket at least. Or heck, even a talking to about if maybe she’s no longer fit to drive.

The cops let the old lady drive away. No ticket. No talk. I was stunned. Surely if you hit someone with your car at that speed, in fucking crosswalk, you at the very least need to prove to the DMV that you’re safe to drive. Especially if you’re an elderly person. But nope. They said they had no grounds with which to take any action at all.

Still bothers me. I hope that lady hasn’t killed anyone.

I choose white for mine! It matches better I think. :)

Ding ding ding. The entire article hangs on “imply”.

The question of where data is stored for an object is far less important than how to access data in a data structure. Like, the whole reason the data structure is designed the way it is, is to access it in particular ways.

I liked it. The clickbaity title leads the reader to learn what a barycenter means.

What if I don’t know what couch I want?

I spent like 2 months going couch shopping every other weekend. I couldn’t decide. Whatever I bought I’d own, and be tied to forever, it feels like. Selling shit is time consuming and annoying. Moving it later or donating it is annoying and maybe been expensive. And the damn couch itself was expensive too. It felt like this big decision that I had to get right.

I didn’t end up buying anything.

I’d have much rather just picked out something interesting to rent for a while, see if I like it. If I do do, great. If not, it’s easy to change it.

China is a threat to freedom everywhere.

I know games seem like a tiny thing, right? But it matters when a government suppresses freedom of expression, even when it comes to a silly video game.

China sees it as their prerogative to do whatever they want to their people, including, by the way, detaining hundreds of thousands without charges in re-education camps.

The New York Times’ podcast, “The Daily” covered this today:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily/id1200361736...

If you’d like to listen rather than read the story.

THREE hours? What the heck do you do for that nearly 20% of your waking life?

I guess you buy a lot of books, or visit the library a lot. I personally like reading but not so much that I want to do it for three hours every flipping night.

Credential stuffing is a huge problem.

I am not sure if allowing users to use non-email addresses as a user-name helps solve that problem, though. I would be interested in reading research on the subject.

Let’s get one thing straight: If your company is saying they use AI to solve their customer’s problems but they do not, that is lying. 100%. It’s fraud. You are absolutely right to be concerned.

I would argue that you have a moral obligation to do something about this while bearing in mind your own needs and obligations (e.g., as a breadwinner for your family).

Others have been in your situation before. Try seeking advice from Tyler Schultz, one of the first Theranos whistleblowers: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-shultz-450923126

There may be others, I’d love to see comments giving other suggestions.

You could also get in touch with the Wall Street Journal— tip line is here https://www.wsj.com/tips

You could send a message directly to reporter John Carreyrou, the WSJ reporter who worked on the first big Theranos story.

Going directly to the press has some serious risks — legal risks especially. That’s why you might first begin by merely seeking advice and input from people who have worked on this before.

Many people will tell you that the legal risks mean you shouldn’t do something. I understand that position. At the same time, I believe we human beings have an obligation to each other to deal fairly and honestly, and to help bend the world in that direction. It’s not an easy position for you to be in. Good luck.