More likely to help it, because it clears the cloud of an impending investigation and the outcome is a little blip.
Investors like things to be cleared up, even with damages, because the damages can be seen as a limited, tangible thing they can just write down and move past.
I think the best definition I've heard for "money" comes from Mike Green of Logica (paraphrasing): "money is that which can repay debts or be collected by the Tax Man."
I think this actually made Zuck's leadership look solid. Of course it's a little naive to say "we aren't political", but he's probably just doing that because it's the calculated thing to say. Almost every other company says things like that, except for a few ideological ones in Silicon Valley.
I don't know how anyone takes these employees at FB seriously. They are complaining about the lack of free snacks? Anyone complaining about a 'lack of free snacks' is someone you should certainly ignore.
Free snacks, and their quality, is a complex signal. They're some of the first things to go as cash tightens up, and they're a decent rubric as to how much leadership actively gives a fuck about employees. Or they're a garnish on a pile of shit.
It does definitely depend on the goals regarding company/employee relations: is this a job for which I'm paid money, or is it supposed to be more than that? If the former, how're the salaries - actually? If the latter, are they actually putting in effort to deserve it?
Like proper code indentation. Yeah, you can just fix it yourself pretty easily, but it signals things.
If you read the article, they're complaining about the lack of free snacks because they're WORKING FROM HOME. To be honest, I suspect it's a joke question.
Ehh. I could see it either way. "I joke but also I'm serious".
Food is my second biggest expense (after ofc rent) - decent lunch is $15-$20 (more with delivery) in my area. For the summer I worked in MV, it was that for a mediocre lunch (nothing good nearby).
15 * 5 * 52 = $3,900. If the company covers it, it's pre-tax to me; if I cover it that's more like $7k out of my salary.
(Plus the time to wrangle colleagues and figure out where, transit time, etc)
Having food supplied? Actually of pretty substantial value, even if it's not on the level of, say, American health insurance.
(Plus, you know, I can buy a house if I don't spend $5 on coffee everyday!)
If leadership actively cares about employees maybe they should eliminate free snacks altogether. Obesity kills about 300K Americans every year. The last thing that highly-paid tech workers with sedentary jobs need is more food.
Facebook (at HQ and some if not all satellite offices) provide multiple meals per day. When evaluating offers, I've priced similar perks at equivalent to an additional ~$10k of pre-tax income.
If I had priced a $10k perk into my salary and no longer got it, I'd be disappointed in Zuckerberg's dismissiveness here.
If you were still making an easy six figures during a global pandemic and the only cut was (temporarily) 10k in perks, complaining would not be the right move.
To take things one level higher, I wonder why they answered this question at all. Most likely it was done to add some levity to the meeting, but more cynically, I wonder if it was done to point out just how juvenile some of the concerns are.
lol, this reminds me of a meeting the department I was in at the time (tech support) had with the head of operations years ago. When she opened the floor for serious questions/comments, the first thing some jackass brought up was his disappointment in the lack of free tea in the break room. The look on her face was priceless.
Aside from the resentments of the author, I have to agree that antitrust has been weakened in recent decades. This is just simply a fact. Some of you may think that is a good thing, but you have to admit that it is the case.
I'm asking this question not to spark a contentious debate or be ridiculed. But I'm genuinely curious, as someone who has little experience with China and only lived in the US, is the US just as much of a surveillance state as China?
We often hear a lot of 'information' (bordering propaganda), about China being an "authoritarian surveillance state". I don't mean to sound absurd, but is the US that much better in terms of authoritarianism or surveillance? If so, why?
> but is the US that much better in terms of authoritarianism or surveillance?
Who knows? The last guy who touched upon it had to hide in freedom-loving Russia afterwards.
The PRC has it easy. They don't have to hide their actions behind contortions of "national security", which makes it difficult to compare the extent and pervasiveness of US and PRC surveillance.
On the other hand, people like Chomsky aren't being persecuted. Though all in all, I would also say they get ignored very efficiently, Chomsky still isn't exactly unknown either. Is there a Chinese author and speaker with decades of real harsh criticism of their government under their belt, who is living in China with their works being translated in all sorts of languages and also available in China?
You can't really draw a direct comparison between PRC and the US, and ask how China would react to a 'Chinese Chomsky'. Their respective conditions and rational incentives for population control are not very similar. The US (after the fall of the USSR) is a country who's stability has not truly been threatened by criticism and dissident voices, while China is a state which has been and currently is extremely vulnerable and threatened by instability, unrest and separatism, and is consequentially on high alert.
Reaction to criticism and dissidence not really a principled stand in the eyes of a state. The way the US clamped down hard on leftist political groups and organizations during the Cold War is rather the actions of a country believing itself to be threatened by instability and unrest. Political figures who fronted harsh criticisms against the government have routinely been assassinated or framed and arrested. COINTELPRO is a program which shows how political repression works the US when it feels politically vulnerable.
I don't think any of what you say is true. The people in China would like to be free just like in the USA (although our freedoms are fading with time). People have the right to speak freely. What the CCP is doing is a dictatorship, plain and simple. They're afraid of free thought and criticism.
That's just not true. The Chinese don't consider themselves unfree, the CCP is very popular, and its approval rate has only increased in recent decades. Moreover, the US does not have a very good reputation around the world. Who envies their predatory health care system? Their high-cost system of education? Their oppressive police force? The world recognizes the failure of the US in providing for their citizens, "freedom" is ultimately just the excuse for society being the way it is.
> Is there a Chinese author and speaker with decades
This is only as I understand it, but technically, yes.
People like to think that the Chinese Communist Party is a single body with a single well-defined set of ideas.
It's not.
It's perfectly possible for academics and even party politicians to utter criticism of the current party direction. They can, for example, advocate the return of fundamental Maoism, or advocate free market mechanisms. As long as you can argue a point of view that lies within the party's tenets, there is usually no problem.
It's different when:
- you are a person of influence.
and
- you argue against the stability of the country (where, conveniently, the CCP is seen as the most important stabilising force in mainland China (by the CCP)).
I don't know if a Chinese Chomsky exists. I have the impression that if he would exist, he would be marginalised by the media, or some of his ideas would be adopted and used in some splintered minority faction of the CCP and hailed as a great but impractical thinker, and mostly ignored.
a so-called Chinese Chomsky (an academic type as you say) could indeed advocate either of those two points or variations between them from inside China but for one thing, he or she would have to couch their phrasing in very careful ways to avoid being coercively punished by the apparatus of the state. Furthermore, they'd have a harder time of doing these things today with Xinping's domineering influence at play. In 2005 or 2006, it would have been much easier.
Secondly and much more fundamentally, even if they made such arguments, at no point could they get away with simply advocating for the full removal of the CCP's monopoly on political power.
That's a no-go and it's also something that defines a huge difference between China and, say, the U.S, where an academic or media personality or pretty much anyone can freely advocate all kinds of stuff against the political system without having to phrase it in any particularly careful way.
This includes being able to state that the Republican/Democrat duopoloy is a piece of ineffective garbage and needs to be removed. They might face some social backlash from fans of opposing views but they won't have their legal, financial or human standing destroyed by the government through literal punishments.
Americans like to think they are immune to propaganda, or that for some reason other countries produce more of it than they do. What I have observed as someone not living in china or america is that they are roughly on equal footing and produce about as much deceptive trash as any other country, my own included. This means you will have a lot of americans answering your question by saying that america does less surveillance, not understanding after all the years of pledging allegiance to the flag and having armed police in their schools, that they are very very similar to china and it would be naive to assume they are not being watched as much.
It is also unlikely they even know what happens in china to a good extent because china itself is not very communicative; they still report the same covid stats since march, for example, and their government websites are full of broken links. It is hard for me to get accurate info on china even from news sites, I wouldn't trust what most people say.
All that said I think China is worse, but Americans would have you believe the difference is gigantic.
Since the first English settlement in North America, America has had one successful regime change, China has had 3. It's rich seeing people who think standing around on the pavement and waiting for the police to come beat you is rebellion try to lecture others about "rebelliousness".
Honestly they probably try just as hard to get into your email as China. The difference is what happens afterward. Even the slightest dissent in China can land you in prison and be the next one on the organ donor list for someone in the CCP. In the USA unless you're planning terrorism or some criminal act they are just going to consider you boring. I suspect it's the same in all these these 14 eyes countries as well as other technologically advanced (the 1% mind you) countries are doing the same to the limits of their technology. It's just what governments do. Whether they can use it in court if they got it illegally is another thing in the USA. It's sad to say but the Patriot Act negated a lot of US citizens rights to seek a fair trial and not be searched (digitally or otherwise) . It is the worst bit of legislation against freedom in the USA since the nation began.
China is in another league. They are using deep packet inspection to block services they don’t allow access to, they force some people to install apps on their phone that track them. The great firewall of China is far more visible and impactful than the real Great Wall of China.
There are three somewhat current reports on there. One comes from the US State department, one from an organization started by Eleanor Roosevelt with strong US ties, and one lists both China and the US as "enemies of the internet."
The US and EU countries have processes, checks and balances on those powers (though not always enough, I think they need more). These checks keep abuse low and keep mass surveillance limited to national security domains. This is in stark contrast to China where this power can be used/abused with almost no oversight or limitations.
The right to bear arms. The right to free speech. States rights. Hundreds of years of common law precedence. The 4th amendment. The fact that if a piece of evidence is acquired against you in an unlawful way it cannot be used against you in court as a US citizen. The right to a jury trial, etc etc.
Individual rights are not processes of checks and balances. Those rights can be withdrawn in a jiffy, whenever required or convenient. What good does the right to bear arms do you as an individual when you're deemed a dangerous criminal, or as a group when you're deemed a terrorist organization? What good does the right to free speech do you if your speech is inconsequential?
> The fact that if a piece of evidence is acquired against you in an unlawful way it cannot be used against you in court as a US citizen
The US has repeatedly manufactured and framed political dissidents when it has felt politically threatened historically. Those rights you're talking about were useless to them.
No they can't. It's incredibly hard to amend the Constitution of the United States. That's by design. You need 2/3 vote in both the House and the Senate and 3/4 of all states to ratify an amendment in order to change it.
You can't be deemed "a dangerous criminal" without having actually been convicted in a court of law by a jury of your peers. And even then, there's appeals, pardons, etc.
> What good does the right to free speech do you if your speech is inconsequential?
Speech is never inconsequential. Even a one on one conversation can have a profound impact on another person. It's up to you to get your ideas out there and to compete in a diverse marketplace of ideas. That's the way it works.
> The US has repeatedly manufactured and framed political dissidents when it has felt politically threatened historically. Those rights you're talking about were useless to them.
Not generally, no. But sure, there are corrupt people in Government, no doubt. And that corruption has even been levied against a duly elected president of the United States (Trump vs the Obama FBI/CIA spygate). The existence of imperfection in the system is not proof of the system's uselessness.
Look up COINTELPRO. They used a combination of framing, deceit, labeling people terrorists and criminals in order to systematically undermine a political movement (and still do, covertly). That's not even talking about how they operate abroad. Individual rights means nothing when the state deems you a threat of some kind.
>You can't be deemed "a dangerous criminal" without having actually been convicted in a court of law by a jury of your peers. And even then, there's appeals, pardons, etc
"On August 31, 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested with four others on charges of kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom, and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. military attaché.[50][80] He was imprisoned in 2006 and 2007.[56] He was interviewed around September 2007 by two FBI agents with regard to the 9/11 attacks and other subjects. John Negroponte, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, told Yemeni officials he did not object to al-Awlaki's detention."
"n December 2008, al-Awlaki sent a communique to the Somali terrorist group, al-Shabaab, congratulating them."
"In March 2010, a tape featuring al-Awlaki was released in which he urged Muslims residing in the United States to attack their country of residence."
Look I'm no fan of drone strikes in general, but if you leave the United States to go join a terrorist organization and incite violence against the U.S. and other innocent people in other countries like Somalia..you clearly have lost Constitutional protection. We don't give trials for foreign terrorists or armies, that's a given.
>Look I'm no fan of drone strikes in general, but if you leave the United States to go join a terrorist organization and incite violence against the U.S. and other innocent people in other countries like Somalia..you clearly have lost Constitutional protection. We don't give trials for foreign terrorists or armies, that's a given.
So if I accuse you of a bad enough crime due process doesn't matter? Seems like a pretty easy loophole to exploit. And even if you can justify stripping al-Awlaki of his rights, it's pretty hard to justify killing his US citizen 16 year old son.
He wasn't merely accused, he was living with Al Quaeda in Yemen. If I move in with Al-Quaeda in Yemen and incite acts of terrorism against America and other civilians in Yemen and Somalia, yes, it doesn't fucking matter. Any Navy SEAL is free to kill me if I ever do something that stupid and criminal. In fact, I'll even pre-posthumously thank him for his service.
>He wasn't merely accused, he was living with Al Quaeda in Yemen.
Without a trial this can only be considered an accusation. The US government claims this, many other people claim he was never part of a terrorist group. Living in Yemen is not a crime.
>incite acts of terrorism against America and other civilians in Yemen and Somalia, yes, it doesn't fucking matter.
Not only are the claims that he "incited terrorism" overblown, his right to free speech allows him to make such declarations.
This is exactly how I learned to code. Started with simple coding projects online then built a personal website now building web apps.
Although, I do think it is important to learn React now a days. I started teaching myself React a few weeks ago via this same process. Incredibly powerful for web dev
>I’ve reduced my information consumption to free up brain cycles.
This is so important and not discussed very often. It's so easy to get caught up with the insane amount of information distractions. It is pivotal to narrow down your focus and attention on the really important things (deep work). Eliminate and minimize the pointless information hysteria.
I've worked with people who claim they 'work 12-16 hour days'. Yet, watching them work, they spend most of the day reading news articles and on Twitter. It is easy to get caught up in all of this, and it gives an illusion that one is "working" as it is very stimulating to your brain.
The only answer I've found to remaining positive about the world and staying productive has been to ignore >90% of the information out there. Very little news. No social media. I even ignore most of the things people say, unless I know that they are knowledgeable on the topic. But I guess this is what HN is for... One of the only places for decent information.
The most productive and successful individuals I know oscillate between multi day 16+ hour sessions of hyper productivity and multi day sessions of total procrastination.
It’s never chugging along at a consistent marathon pace. It’s always a series of sprints.
The dumbest thing you can do is try to be hyper-productive when you have no idea what you should be doing.
Of course, there are always five other things you know that need to get done besides the problem in front of you, but it can be a challenge to find the correct level of engagement, versus just sitting and 'marinating' in the problem in front of you.
I think the paradox is that if I spend all day doing nothing but reading documentation and farting around on Hacker News, nobody really notices. Not in the same way they notice if I spend a day on 'the wrong thing' (because I know for certain what needs to be done on this other thing). It's seen as wasting resources, because certainly I could have put that energy into the 'right thing'.
Yep. Over the last two years i've been fortunate enough to have a lot of time on my hands. In that time i've built 3 and a half successful products. 6 days of (thinking mostly, some research) about what to do. 1 day of actually doing it. It's so easy to spend that one day completely and productively - I already know what i'm supposed to do, I just have to sit down and do it.
The 6 days (not always 6 - maybe more, maybe less) let me come up with and throw out stupid ideas before i've coded them. By the time I come to build something it's a carefully considered thing that'll actually be useful most of the time.
It's not just feature ideas either, it's code design, data design, anything that might be complicated enough that I used to spend multiple days experimenting. It doesn't always work out, but when it doesn't, i've thought it through enough that I have a head start on coming up with a better design.
I'd rather not, only because they're in a market that relies on the good will of the users (who usually think that people should build these things only because they're passionate about it) and they kind of play off each other. Nothing unethical, but i'd rather not link them together if I can help it.
Oscillating between high distractibility and hyperfocus rather than fluidly directing attention is essentially the core symptom of ADHD.
As someone who has inattentive-subtype ADHD, I must say that this sort of pattern can result in a great deal of loneliness. It is far better to watch the course "learning how to learn" and use something like the Pomodoro technique to explicitly decide whether to be in
- focused mode
- exploratory mode
- actually relaxing and paying attention to your relationships mode
Okay, I've got a month of procrastination pent up, now if I could only release the hyper productivity!
When I did my last masters, I somehow managed to get into a hyper-productive state, hacking on an app to collect participant voice data for a fews sessions close to 20 hours straight. (much to the annoyance of the guy who slept in the graduate lab) I don't think it was healthy, but it sure felt good at the time.
as an ADHDer, one thing I've found key is figuring out what things in my environment and mind are the things I want to signal "you're doing the right thing, keep going."
A dopamine deficiency will cause you to seek out more frequent reward. So if you find a way to make your brain recognize reward that is on your intended path, you win.
I've found the same. When you have things to done you get them done. When you don't, you can sit around browsing the internet all day. It tends to be when things pile up that you are most effective at getting through them!
This is me but I'm totally procrastinating on code so I can hang in my garden as the sun goes down learning about myself through other instances with different circumstances in this thread. I need a break from the physical work to try to get my head space back to thinking about computers.
My sprint is not now, my sprint starts later.
The sprint toward my spirit starts now. Reading this comment, reflecting this thought. And another is below.
Upvote the comments that you can relate to and see what bubbles up
I'm trying to build something which tackles this problem. The idea would be delegating the decision of what you consume to an algorithm (that you can control), and you'll be delivered a subset of news/content daily.
Basically a giant filter through which you consume the firehouse of FB/reddit.
Although it works for me, I've no idea how practical this is on a wider scale. Would you use something like that?
Isn't that pretty much what all platforms these platforms do these days, with algorithmic feeds? What level of control do you plan to add on top of it? And more importantly - how do you plan to monetize a model that's pretty much dependent on dopamine hits, without making it _more_ addictive/a time-waste?
Well, I've been building algorithms which explain _why_ something was surfaced, not just being a black box. Everything is controllable from data sources, ranking/filtering weights and a feedback mechanism to tweak this.
As for monetisation, I've thought about this a lot - and I don't think the time wasting is needed to create a good product. Google Search certainly isn't fueled by dopamine hits, and from an ads standpoint, our users are saying exactly what they want to see every morning.
Some platforms like Facebook and Twitter do, but HN and Reddit are (outwardly) based on votes, so you're seeing what the community thinks is important, not what you yourself do.
Mind you, there's a lot of people (myself included) who want to keep up to date on what others find interesting at the moment.
Reddit is arguably the original “algorithmic feed” - votes + the decaying algorithm make it way more “addictive” than if it was just a chronological series of posts, ordered by number of votes.
The popular/news sections of Reddit are also more heavily based on non-vote signals, like FB.
I also think that allowing the user to track the changes made to this algorithm along with some metrics ( like how much time user spent on topics, time wasted etc) would provide a helpful feedback loop.
sometimes a person seemingly doing unrelated things is still 'working'. i know at least for myself, i run through various scenarios of the outcome rather than staring at the code before i make my decision to implement.
edit: and i'll typically run through those scenarios while doing seemingly unrelated stuff, like shitposting on reddit or sitting in a blacked out room.
In a similar vein I often like to try out a few avenues, because thinking about them won't get me any further, i need to interact with them to build meaningful scenarios.
Of course if you try three ways to get the right way, you've "wasted" time on trying to two wrong things.
E.g. when selecting a library it's often hard to find the one case that breaks, just from reading documentation, instead playing around with the library can get you there faster.
Maybe... but as an ADHDer, my experience is that the bigger problem is thinking "I have this problem" but hearing from others "you're overthinking things" or "you don't need that, just get started" and consequently:
1. Never becoming confident enough in the problem to start solving it.
2. Never getting the rubber-duck collaborator to help you even imagine how you would solve it.
I agree - I have to consciously choose what I want to feed my brain. It's so easy to choose things that don't align with my goals, whether that be family, personal or business goals.
Do I find the non-stop inexplicable US politics fascinating? Yes. Is it helpful to my business? Nope.
Every week i have to revisit my goals, decide whats important, and remind myself that I don't need to learn everything, be all things to all people. It's okay to choose and to say 'no' to distractions, information sources and people.
The tough thing is figuring out what's the right stuff to filter out.
We all have had conversations with coworkers about some manager who just doesn't 'get it' and is out of touch. One way or another they are filtering out a bit of reality that it turns out is very important to us, or someone in the chain of command is filtering it out before they ever hear about it.
I wonder if the right solution is to 'audit' the information. Spend most of the time in your information bubble, with brief excursions in alternating 'directions' just to make sure that you aren't overfitting. Regular sanity checks where you turn on the firehose for a moment to see what comes out.
I think technically you have to ignore more than 99.99999% of the information that's out there.
Because I mean, realize how big Twitter is. Its much larger than the Twitter that you are generally aware of. The popular stuff for your language and interests is a tiny fraction of the total number of tweets.
Likewise, every subculture has thousands if not millions of web pages or whatever. Every city, state, country has their own news.
Depending on what you are interested in, there may be decades or even centuries of interesting things to study or play with just in that area. For example, if you are into C64, there are thousands and thousands of games, applications, demos, magazines, etc. You could literally spend 20 years exploring it if you were motivated. That is just one subculture.
If you are interested in world history then there could be thousands of years of documents and artifacts to study. Or maybe to understand some ancient literature you need to become fluent in written Latin. You could easily spend five years learning Latin to a high level.
I just feel that if you were to really give all of the interesting stuff that's out there a chance, it is many many lifetimes worth of information.
Which is to say that the number of potential distractions is actually effectively infinite.
agree with everything but havent gotten to know people who work 12+ hours but spend a lot on news sites
i have worked these hours in the past, plus my colleagues, and when there is so much pressure the least we wanted to do, and the least we did, was spending time on news sites because we were constantly tired and would rather choose to spend half an hour more on sleep
HN is hit or miss. If you believe everything said here you’d reach the conclusion that only today in 2020 can we finally build websites all thanks to microservices, kubernetes, react and rust.
tbf you would also believe all this micro service, kubernetes, react, w/e is just another fad that will fade away and that “real engineers” know better. I see both opinions here.
