Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | 20after4's commentslogin

I don't think it'll ever recover. Partially perhaps. But we have bigger problems to worry about really.

A few years ago I heard a bang and my whole house shook. My roommate and I both thought a car had hit the house. Never did find out what caused it, I think it must have been a sonic boom, most likely a military aircraft. The way it shook the house though, it was hard to believe that something didn't hit the building.

That’s what a small earthquake with a nearby epicenter feels like. The first time it happened to me it felt like a tree hitting the house. (“Small” is circa 3.0 magnitude.)

A used ThinkPad from eBay is often the best value.

That's what I do and did through college. I didn't have a lot of money to spend so Thinkpad X series tablets from ebay were my go-to. First one I had to stop using when Altera Quartus II dropped 32bit support and the second one I used until it was basically falling apart. I bought a used max spec X280 a few years ago and it's held up very nicely, I can even play my old games on it. I don't see myself replacing it for a long time because it's mostly just used for web browsing and writing code for microcontrollers so my personal laptop needs are very minimal. It also just sits next to my bed so it's not like it's getting smacked around all day like my work laptop.

And CSMastermind is the kind of username the sci-fi AI mastermind would use.

Absolutely loved that episode. I also thought it was incredible that Amazon was the company to release this.


That Amazon releases this seems to be consistent with the trend the original linked article mentioned: these big tech companies are happy to warn people of the apocalypse they are causing.

It helps not to think of corporations as a single coherent consciousness: hypothetically everyone who works there, from top to bottom, can believe that what they are doing is harmful, but also feel powerless to fight the hand of the market.

In practice I doubt the entire management structure agrees on that, some honestly believe they are doing good, but there's nothing stopping EvilCorp from emerging from a bunch of perfectly good people who are "just doing their job".


Reminds me of the movie "Dark Star" by John Carpenter / Dan O'Bannon. The plot revolves around a talking smart bomb which is programmed to detonate and then gets stuck before being deployed. The crew spends the whole movie trying to reason with the bomb, hoping to talk it out of blowing up at the designated time. The movie is very very bad but if you like B movies it is also very very good.


One of my favourite episodes of Archer has a similar plot to this (Mr. Deadly Goes to Town). TIL this is one of the references!

https://archer.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Deadly_Goes_To_Town


Is that movie why seemingly every Linux book in the late 90s and early 2000s used "darkstar" as an example hostname?


It was the default slackware hostname, I believe slackware took inspiration from the movie

edit: I was wrong, it was from a Grateful Dead song. https://www.slackbook.org/html/glossary.html


Dark Star - Negotiating with the Bomb

https://youtu.be/_LXen-07Qds


> Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot

You cannot be as funny as google trying to be responsible! Ha! I'm still laughing at this. A person was forbidden to see humans reasoning with a computer bomb because the cost cutting computer at google want me to talk him into believing i'm a human!

(And then I got "You're posting too fast" on THIS website AFTER i've written the comment lol. It's all a joke. But i'm bored so I will keep this comment open until the computer is pleased)


There was a good star trek voyager episode, "dreadnought" that was a similar to this, maybe even a direct reference.


Is working for Wikipedia somehow a higher status job than working for Google?

edit: I'm asking because my 7 year stint as an engineer at Wikipedia hasn't provided me with an endless stream of lucrative job offers.


absolutely and i'm surprised that you don't think so.

e: and to your edit, i'm talking about social/moral status


Can you explain what you mean by social/moral status? I haven't seen a big run of non-profit workers marrying movie stars or becoming Pope.


Isn't the Pope like the canonical high-status non-profit worker?


Yes, however, my point is that the vast majority of people working for non-profits do not receive that sort of recognition. So what does "social status" mean?


Yes, but notice that the pope gets paid very well


I thought the pope doesn't receive a salary?

That's right, my bad, I just meant that he's clearly doing just fine but said something very wrong instead

Your edit is comparing opposites, basically making the ops point for them.

You work at google for money. Money is high status under capitalism.

You work at Wikipedia for status in the traditional sense - you trade capitalist status (the salary) for the higher actual status of working for a non profit.


No one thinks non-profit work is ‘high-status.’ People do it because making the world better in some way is more personally motivating than figuring out how to put video ads on refrigerators or whatever.o


Ok, I don't necessarily disagree, but it is thus living your values, which at the very least increases ones self confidence and self perception of status.

Whether one thinks that improves one's status in the eyes of others imo depends on one's cynicism. "Whatever, I'm living my values, they just don't get it. Maybe others will one day."

That's how I see it for myself anyway, if I'm being honest. But in the end I don't think there's any better path to happiness and fulfillment than living my values.


Sure, but happiness and fulfillment isn't status. Not because there's anything wrong with them but because that's not what "status" means.


feeling better because your job fits better in your moral framework that you get from society is a status-mediated effect and i feel you can usually find social scaffolding under things that are articulated as purely intrinsic.


If words don’t mean what they mean, absolutely


Given that editors are pseudo-anonymous, there are some limitations on enforcing this. Sure you could term-limit a given account but the same person could have several accounts. I know sock puppets are not technically allowed but it's not entirely possible to prevent without sacrificing the anonymity of account ownership.


This gets at one of the biggest flaws in Wikipedia, IMO. I think the notability standard is way too strict and gives way too much weight to main stream media sources as the blessed arbiters of what is notable.


The alternative is that the Daily Stormer is usable as a source.

There has to be some mechanism of determining what should and shouldn't be usable as a source.


I agree there needs to be a line, I just don't particularly like where the line has been drawn. Unfortunately I don't have a great idea for how to do it better. That is why I'm commenting on HN rather than arguing for any particular policy change on wiki.


Huh? The notability standard governs what may be the subject of a wikipedia page and what may not.

Ideological purity is enforced by the reliable source standard, not the notability standard. The Daily Stormer is unquestionably notable. And it has a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer


I think it's the parent that's confusing this:

> I think the notability standard is way too strict and gives way too much weight to main stream media sources as the blessed arbiters of what is notable.

They're saying that main stream media sources are what can be used to define something is notable or not. The question isn't "Is the Daily Stormer" notable (it is), it's should the daily stormer be usable as a source to determine if something is notable or not (it shouldn't be, obviously).


[flagged]


Are you seriously asking if a Nazi website is a bad reference?


So putting on a label makes it a bad source of information?


Reality has a well known liberal bias¹ - Steven Colbert

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Reality_has_a_well_known_lib...


From his 2006 speech/routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, speaking to then president George Bush:

> Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias...

His whole thing was phenomenal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ-a2KeyCAY


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

Search: