oniMaker

The point is that it would seem ridiculous to start from nothing and jump to such a counter-intuitive theory.

Occam's razor would immediately discard quantum theory. Does that make it false?

Profit and population control, mainly.

Another petty fiefdom where dissenting opinion is quashed.

Unfortunately your common sense is in the minority of opinion here. HN is plagued by overeager engineers who endlessly discuss the how without addressing the much more important why.

Why bother having a pet at all if you're not going to personally care for it?

Can you expound on that?

It's not surprising that the "educated" skew blue. The institutions in this country preach ideology in addition to teaching practical skills. We all know which direction the majority ideology follows...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/6/liberal-profe...

Is there evidence of the interview actually taking place? Why was his own lawyer not allowed to attend?

If he's alive, then someone has certainly mentioned to him that the Internet is going crazy about this. Why doesn't he simply walk a few feet and show himself on the balcony, as he has done before?

Side note: labelling something a "conspiracy theory" is a way to dismiss an idea without thinking about it. If you want to refute the facts in the thread, use better facts.

Unfortunately, yes. Most people do not understand the importance of protecting even the speech they disagree with.

That's what I'm saying. They have rights to their platform, and we have the right to use it or not. That's why I linked to an alternative.

Exactly. They get to choose what's on their platform, and we get to choose whether to use it.

People who believe in freedom of speech.

Not to my knowledge. The platform is very young though. You could propose this idea to the founder.

Not to mention the fact that Twitter will censor views that it does not agree with. Don't support companies that engage in censorship.

There's already an alternative available, and it's growing: https://gab.ai

It doesn't solve the problem of giving your data to a company, but it's a hell of a lot more open and inclusive than any other platform.

As mentioned in this thread, the temptation to ask "what if?" is huge, and we all have built-in cognitive strategies for dealing with it. If this ability didn't exist, coping with non-fatal mistakes could easily overwhelm us and paradoxically become fatal!

Imagine waking up every day knowing that you could have been a billionaire but for a single foolish decision, and having no way to get around that thought. You'd have a very poor quality of life indeed, even if you were perfectly materially comfortable. The fact that he cannot keep an Apple product hints at this; being confronted with a constant reminder would be too painful.

It's a subtle and useful lie to think of yourself or pretty much anyone else as being non-materialistic or enlightened enough as to cheerfully give up billions of dollars in wealth. No doubt if this person was given a second chance with foreknowledge, he would take the deal.

It's only afterward that we cry "sour grapes" in order to reduce our mental struggles to a manageable level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#.22The_Fo...

We need all of them. Keep going until you reach the end.

You can defeat their ad-blocker blocker by disabling javascript.

In Chrome, go to DevTools (CMD+Option+I). Press F1 for settings then check "Disable JavaScript" and reload the page. There are similar ways to do it in other browsers too.

I'd just like to note that this article has given us a fine new phrase to put on the shelf of useful business culture metaphors, right next to bike-shedding and dog-fooding.

Bear-feeding!

The code written to control the LIGO detectors was all python.

All non-Facebook jobs would allow you to say the same thing.

If you truly find it morally reprehensible, please let me encourage you to pay attention to your inner compass. There are many, many other places for a software engineer to work.

This is the most alarming and interesting point for me:

"Facebook will market you your future before you’ve even gotten there, they’ll use predictive algorithms to figure out what’s your likely future and then try to make that even more likely. They’ll get better at programming you – they’ll reduce your spontaneity. And they can use your face and name to advertise through you, that’s what you’ve agreed to."

The order in which you are presented with items in your feed, which likes by which friends you see, your previous actions (most of which you cannot likely recall, but all of which facebook has a perfect memory), and many other details are not only used to advertise to you - they're used to build you into the type of person that will be more susceptible to advertising in the future.

Molding and shaping opinion and personality is nothing new, but it has never been this precise, this interactive, and this pervasive. The stimulus, response, and reward loop has never been tighter. Those who use these services are being trained to exhibit particular valuable traits and behaviors, and the level of control over these manipulations will only improve as data is collected and algorithms are refined.

If you've been using a service like Facebook for several years, they know who you have been at each point in time. Imagine you've traversed states A, B, and C and are predicted to be moving toward D. If state F or Z is more valuable (and can be arrived at from state D), then perhaps through several months of training you can be led to it instead. If you're not continually aware of each small nudge in a particular direction, then your mind is absorbing and adjusting to these changes without you knowing about it.

I'd love to read more about this, and am sort of morbidly fascinated by the methods by which these mechanisms operate, and just how powerful these types of control can get.

"Mere" is a bit much. You're not an immortal superhero.

To answer your question: a non-technologist pays someone like you to fix it. Much like the way most people bring their cars to mechanics instead of spending hundreds of hours learning to fix the vehicles personally. This type of specialization is prerequisite to the large civilizations in which we live.

None of those technologies are bulletproof. Tor can be (and at least partially has been) compromised.

Where would you house the wireless endpoints? How would you obscure their source? These aren't magical devices. They're still real-world physical objects.

The message is probably one we can all get behind in principle.

However, the internet has a real, physical infrastructure that is definitely owned and operated by behemoth organizations like governments and private corporations. In fact, the Internet was created by a government. What makes you think they'd give it up willingly?

If you want to create your own internet, you certainly can. But even if you find the monetary resources to do so, you'll need to house and operate the telecommunications equipment somewhere on Earth (or in LEO). And if you want to protect that equipment from hostile takeover, then you'll need some form of recognized sovereignty including a real military capable of defending your castle.

Cyberspace cannot (yet) escape the real bounds of physical reality. It seems as though some people think of it as a superset of the world, while it very much is still a subset dependent on its corporeal parent.

What does that have to do with my short analysis of Amazon's tactics? It's rude to call someone heartless without basis in fact.

Many articles have been written by many outlets over the past decade on exactly that topic.

Here's one by The Post, for example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/wal-...

Remember this is being published by Bezos. It's a great tactic to frame the closing of these stores as afflicting the poor and downtrodden.

Woe to the wretches wrought by way of Walmart. But wait! Perhaps there is a way they can be saved, all without leaving the comfort of their homes...

You could buy and hold until a stock went to zero, for example.

Edit: Whoever is downvoting obviously has never seen this happen. There was just an article about it on HN the other day, describing how Dragon lost it all when the company they sold to plummeted to zero stock value.