Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | danaris's comments login

> Scaling is not a right.

God I wish this could be plastered in letters 1000 feet high above Silicon Valley.


And while it's not quite the same kind of CAPTCHA, I've not infrequently run into Cloudflare "prove you're human" screens that just...never let me through. I click the box, it loads for a second, turns into a nice checkmark, and then...reloads the "prove you're human" page. Infinite loop (as far as I can tell, anyway, not having infinite time).

I forget what extension was doing this for me, but I think this was down to an extension blocking autoload/play. Try disabling your extensions down to ublock and slowly adding them back.

Firefox RFP? That sometimes does it

If you expect 99% of normal internet users to maintain a crypto wallet of any kind just to access certain websites—even leaving aside the actual cost—you're going to be sorely disappointed.

I was moderately into crypto, i mined coins including BTC; and i'll be damned if i am gunna connect my wallet to a browser, or put crypto in an escrow to pay out to avoid captchas. I'm being as polite as reasonably possible, here.

the only way this makes sense is you convert the entire planet to renewable or non-polluting electricity generation, and then when a user is on facebook, youtube, (or watch ads!), a core or 2 of their machine/phone will "mine" crypto, that can then be used somewhere else. The crypto can't be transferable - it must be "burned". Defined: When the site requests some crypto for proof, it says "send to this non-existent address" and then waits for the block to show that your wallet sent crypto to that address. This "burns" the money. In fact, a couple of cryptocurrencies tried to enforce this, as well as "proof of stake" - where if you had enough coins you could "mine" by merely having your wallet "logged in." The former is called "proof of burn"

another thing, no blockchain block publication is fast enough for this. so now we gotta rope in lightning or some other "hack" on top. I knew when i first heard about bitcoin that there was no way that anyone was going to wait 10 minutes for any payment to go through, especially if it's under some moderate amount of money, like $20.


But a very large percentage of the "high stress/pressure" of being a police officer in the US is literally manufactured by the police themselves.

For instance, several officers have been treated for severe symptoms after coming into contact with fentanyl. Except that there is no way, biochemically speaking, the kind of contact they had with fentanyl could have produced anything resembling those symptoms. It was an entirely psychosomatic reaction, brought on by the police's own utterly false propaganda about how terrifyingly dangerous fentanyl is.

Similarly, so much of their "high stress" is because they expect to be attacked/shot/killed at any given moment even when, by any reasonable analysis, they are 100% safe. Furthermore, a lot of the actual danger to them is manufactured by this exact phenomenon: they expect a physical confrontation, so, in order to ensure they "win" it, they create it, striking preemptively in one fashion or another.


> But a very large percentage of the "high stress/pressure" of being a police officer in the US is literally manufactured by the police themselves.

This is conjecture with no measurable basis.


....It is supported by specific facts in the rest of my post.

I'll grant I didn't cite sources, because this is HN, not a scientific journal, and if you're interested enough you can Google it (or DDG it, or Kagi it) for yourself, but the basis really is right there in my post.


None of your "facts" support your claim that the large majority of stress is manufactured by the police.

It's interesting when the common wisdom is that you cannot do X without Y.

No the common wisdom is that you should not...

So should we apply this logic to other areas where one person's "gut reactions" can have a huge negative effect on someone else's life?

Should we not require any due process under law, because the officer "just knew" that it was that brown guy who stole the bread?

What's being asked for is accountability for decisions that can literally result in someone ending up homeless—and that are hugely subject to bias, both conscious and unconscious, in a country that is currently riven by divisions of race, gender, sexuality, and class.


I would be very surprised if there is anyone who would become homeless if they were fired from their tech job at the New York Times.


> So should we apply this logic to other areas where one person's "gut reactions" can have a huge negative effect on someone else's life?

Maybe we're balancing the wrong side of the equation? Expanding teach-to-the-test across the economy strikes me as the wrong move.


> Should we not require any due process under law, because the officer "just knew" that it was that brown guy who stole the bread?

This is a bit fallacious and a false analogy. Due process under law exists because it's definable. We have standards for evidence, burden of proof, reasonable doubt, etc.

The challenges in cleanly defining what it means to be a "good employee" don't somehow mean other aspects of society that can be defined shouldn't be.


Whether or not removing features might be "more efficient", in nearly all cases, if you remove a feature that's been part of a software package—whether external or internal—some nontrivial fraction of the people using it are going to be angry, because you just broke their workflow.

The only way you can possibly avoid this is if, in addition to removing that particular feature, you add a feature that does the same thing fully automatically, and does so correctly in every instance.

(Even then, some people will complain about it, but at that point you just have to accept that as a cost of progress.)


Maybe you don't.

I've never had any trouble having real conversations on online platforms, whether for work or otherwise.


Research shows, that is about as accurate as saying a Twinkie is real food.

Not completely wrong, but…


[Citation needed]?

I've not heard of any research that shows that it's impossible to have meaningful conversations on these platforms.

And please note the distinction between "it is impossible to have such conversations" and "some people (especially less tech-savvy people) have a harder time having such conversations" on these platforms.

Teams/Slack/Discord/etc is just another communication medium. Once our society has, collectively, had more of a chance to get used to them, and once we're no longer dealing with an entire generation who were bad managers before the personal computer even existed (</hyperbole>), I wager you'll see a lot less complaining about the medium itself.



OK: all three of those are specifically about "Zoom fatigue".

None of them in any way address the issue at hand, which is the ability to engage in meaningful conversations over online platforms such as Teams and Slack.


You’re moving the goalposts quite a bit.

I said they weren’t the same as in person.

The reason for zoom fatigue, as the papers call out, is because zoom or similar is fundamentally different than actual in person conversations.

They are missing something important. Several things which are important, actually.

Just like twinkies vs ‘real food’.


Your post that I originally responded to:

> Except you don’t actually talk (as in have a real conversation) with anyone on Teams.

That is the specific argument that I am refuting: that your experience of not being able to "have a real conversation" on Teams, etc, is universal, rather than just being your experience, which cannot be extrapolated from without gathering significant extra data.

"People get Zoom fatigue from having too many video meetings (especially in the first 2 years of regularly using video meetings after never using them before)" is not the same thing, and does not prove that these technologies are impossible to use as a replacement for in-person meetings on a wide scale.


Did you read the papers? That is literally not what they are saying.

If I have one twinkie, that isn’t a problem - because I have other ‘real food’ to compensate. Same with someone doing zoom periodically.

If all I have is twinkies, that is a real problem, because I don’t have enough real food to compensate. I’m missing some essential vitamins, minerals, and macros that will eventually hurt me a lot. Plus a lot of sugar that causes a lot of load in my body we really don’t handle well.

‘Zoom fatigue’ is exactly because people aren’t having enough real in-person interactions anymore and it’s causing numerous real psychological issues in people because of it.

Because there are actual necessary things in real in person interactions that are not present in video conferencing. And real effects of doing video conferencing our minds don’t handle well.

The insistence on ‘but it’s not impossible!’ is tangential to the fact that it isn’t a good idea to do long term or exclusively.

And depending on the individuals environment or makeup, it could be an immediate major problem, or it could be a slow burn. Everyone will have a different tipping point.

I’m sure there are some 1-in-a-million outliers out there that could stay pretty functional literally eating just twinkies for a decade (somehow).

But either way, having the social interaction equivalent of an all-Twinkie diet is a bad idea.

Near as we can tell.

But ‘this is America!’, with an ongoing obesity crisis, so not like I expect people to just listen.


Blaming this on the tech workers, or the automation technologies themselves, misses the true source of the problem: the business owners who take the profit all for themselves, rather than allowing it to be enjoyed by all.

The promise of automation is that people should be able to work less and still be paid enough to live comfortably.


> the business owners who take the profit all for themselves

When has this ever not been true? And how would it be fixed?

"it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism"


When the incentives aligned. Pretty sure during the 90+% tax rate era offered insane incentives to reinvest into the business and employees.

I don't think we need to get rid of capitalism. The controls around capitalism like taxes, social safety nets, could use a little fine tuning.

Capitalism at its core is still pretty efficient compared to everything else. The hyper efficiency needs to not throw the baby (regular folks) out with the bath water(cutting expenses), that’s all.


While there have certainly always been greedy people, and greedy owners, there has been a very visible shift within my lifetime (~40 years).

Previously, the general rule was that a business was there to produce a good or provide a service, and the profit they made (if any) was the reward for that. There were some businesses that acted much more greedy, but overall it was clear that this was how business worked.

Now, the rule is much more that a business is there to make as much profit as possible, and the good they produce or service they provide is purely a means to that end—and, in many cases, largely an undesirable one. Again, there are still some businesses that operate based on the older philosophy, but overall this is the prevailing atmosphere.

This is what I would describe as the dividing line between "capitalism" and "late-stage capitalism".

As for an end to capitalism:

"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."

― Ursula K. Le Guin


And even more so profit from the operating company is not a goal. It is profit from market valuation of the company. Which when you really think about obviously only can lead to some sort of failure or catastrophe.

Ofc, HN with VC funded companies love this model. Generate "wealth" from essentially imagination. Throw more money in and number goes up, end goal find someone to dump whole thing on. Be it public or some established company that found extractive niche.

I find lot less wrong in traditional capitalism. Start making something, sell it for profit, build a factory to sell more. Then use proceeds and possibly loans to build bigger factory. Rinse and repeat. At least you are generating possibly something useful for eveyone and getting money as part of process is not unreasonable.


Recent reports have shown that the EV sector, as a whole, would be growing if you took Tesla out of it.

People are abandoning Tesla in droves, presumably due to the spectacle its owner is making of himself publicly.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: