amarkov

6 ms·

1.
by amarkov 8y ago
Sure. But if European countries can insist on globally de-indexing truthful information because they feel its continued propagation is harmful, that seriously undercuts any moral high ground available when China tries to do the same.
2.
by amarkov 8y ago
There's always a reason for expanding government bureaucracies. Some worthy problem, which the government plausibly could solve if it had just a little bit more power to intervene. That doesn't change the direct consequence of t
3.
by amarkov 8y ago
Surely you understand how it creates bad incentives, if feedback about individual productivity can be delivered bluntly but feedback about prioritization can't be given at all.
4.
by amarkov 8y ago
Fingers crossed for sure, but there's such a thing as growing too fast for your own good. Github famously stopped being profitable the year after it got a $250M round.
5.
by amarkov 8y ago
I'm sure it's a nightmare for a professional journalist. And I don't mean that as an insult - it'd be a nightmare for me too. But you know what's more of a nightmare? Driving around to every retail outlet in a 30
6.
by amarkov 8y ago
Schemaless databases are good for scenarios where the database isn't a source of truth. If you have a table full of e.g. per-second heartbeats from a bunch of deployed services, there's no fundamental underlying truth anyone&#x2
7.
by amarkov 8y ago
Certainly, but that doesn't mean the schema has to be a strict validation encoded into your storage format. It's a perfectly well-defined programming model to say "well, I'm reading query X with schema Y, and if some row
8.
by amarkov 8y ago
Certainly not. But is Google planning to hand over lists of users who search for banned terms? It seems like there's a big difference between handing over lists of users and restricting information.
9.
by amarkov 8y ago
Most business ideas aren't rejected for any kind of compact reason. The decisionmaker typically has other things that are higher priority, or they just kinda avoid giving a green light until it's interpreted as a rejection.
10.
by amarkov 8y ago
There's a sense in which summary views are the real data. If I asked Spotify to share my data, and they just sent me a 250 MB file of every interaction they've ever recorded, I would conclude they're trying to obfuscate which
11.
by amarkov 8y ago
It seems to me that these kinds of authors always see the alternative as a Silicon Valley with their politics. This article describes a bunch of concrete things that tech companies ought to do: ensure the poor aren't marginalized, br
12.
by amarkov 8y ago
When you've been kidnapped, you have good reasons to think that the kidnapper might just kill you if you don't go along with what they want. I've heard a lot of abusive police interrogation practices in the US, and none of th
13.
by amarkov 8y ago
But arbitration didn't fail here. He never tried it in the first place.
14.
by amarkov 8y ago
The traditional American dream is that you change your status through making friends and simple hard work. If you're the hardest working and most dedicated Walmart sales associate, you'll quickly become a manager, and you can iter
15.
by amarkov 8y ago
Most people aren't particularly tempted to shape their behavior to Facebook. They just use other channels for things they don't specifically want everyone to see. If some people are so uninvested in their thoughts that "open
16.
by amarkov 8y ago
Sure, I can imagine a world where scooters are as common as bikes. But is that enough to justify a $2B valuation for a scooter-sharing startup?
17.
by amarkov 8y ago
If the GDPR was really intended to forbid business models which require collecting user data for ad targeting, why wouldn't it have just said that?
18.
by amarkov 8y ago
How would Heller vs. DC have incorporated anything? DC is a federal district; there were no states involved in that case.
19.
by amarkov 8y ago
That's generally exactly what they're trying to measure: statistics about people who follow the standard path society lays out for education. If something about getting an advanced degree is discouraging people from doing startups
20.
by amarkov 8y ago
Not necessarily naturally, but it's reasonably easy to learn - it's ultimately the same underlying mechanism as singing different notes.
21.
by amarkov 8y ago
Being incidentally rejected might not be worth a lawsuit. But the plaintiffs claim, in part, that Harvard is specifically trying to discriminate against Asian applicants to keep Asians out of the student body. I think that's worth liti
22.
by amarkov 8y ago
GitHub, Inc. is a for-profit organization too, as are its biggest competitors. If you're concerned about the interaction between profit and code hosting, that doesn't have much to do with this acquisition.
23.
by amarkov 8y ago
Google tried to do code hosting before, so they must see some value in it.
24.
by amarkov 8y ago
As Facebook learned recently, people aren't willing to give much benefit of the doubt to solutions involving human review. Can you imagine a creator saying "I don’t think YouTube is doing this on purpose", as they did in this
25.
by amarkov 8y ago
It's not obvious that they would have won. Zuckerberg hasn't actually forced ads into WhatsApp yet, and WhatsApp remains ad-free today. He just (allegedly, according to anonymous sources) is suggesting that WhatsApp leadership s
26.
by amarkov 8y ago
But it seems like decentralization would be a mortal blow to privacy. If we struggle to get a monolithic Facebook to treat our data responsibly, how could we possibly convince 500 decentralized Facebook nodes? (And why isn't it trivial
27.
by amarkov 8y ago
I don't like that my data is exploited to target ads. But I also wouldn't like it if Facebook charged 25 cents per friend request, or threatened to cut me off from my social groups if I didn't pay the monthly fee. Similar pro
28.
by amarkov 8y ago
But copyleft licenses do end up preventing software from running on some platforms. For example, none of the work that goes into the Linux kernel can be made available to Windows users. I'm sure the FSF sees this as a tradeoff that has
29.
by amarkov 8y ago
The question is why those are legitimate things to insist on protection against. Surely a free software license couldn't say "it's forbidden to run this program on iOS" or "nobody affiliated with the US government m
30.
by amarkov 8y ago
"Software which respects the moral positions of people like those in the Free Software Foundation" seems like an inherently complicated concept, that's not really amenable to a one or two word summary.

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