Hacker News: livinginfear

New comment by livinginfear in "The Camorra Never Sleeps (2012)"

livinginfear — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 23:44:29 +0000

I came here to complain about the same thing. I found the writing of the article to be terrible. So many tortured and silly phrases. That one in particular. Without paying taxes, all you'd have is the Camorra...

Also...

> "It has been a part of life in Naples for centuries—far longer than the fragile construct called Italy has even existed..."

Fragile construct? Terrible writing.

New comment by livinginfear in "Former University of Iowa hospital employee used fake identity for 35 years"

livinginfear — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 02:49:09 +0000

I think I'm missing something here. What did he have to gain from doing this? I understand that he was able to incur large amounts of debt under someone else's identity, but at that point he effectively was Woods. He was married under that name, he was employed under that name... If the authorities ever came looking for the Woods that incurred all the debt, it would be him that paid.

New comment by livinginfear in "Why You're Still Single (2023)"

livinginfear — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 11:04:10 +0000

I appreciate your response. I apologise if my initial response seemed too hostile. I've seen the claim made a handful of times on Hacker News that Tinder somehow games the results to maximise engagement. Admittedly I've been waiting since the last thread about Tinder to refute this point. I apologise for targeting you in doing so.

New comment by livinginfear in "Why You're Still Single (2023)"

livinginfear — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 22:16:29 +0000

Your conviction is in contradiction with perhaps the most strongly held compulsion of everyone, everywhere, or that has ever existed. That alone should give reason to question it. You sound like you're motivated by spite.

New comment by livinginfear in "Why You're Still Single (2023)"

livinginfear — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 09:39:42 +0000

No one hoards women. If the top 10% of men had sexual access to more than one woman at a time, without committing to any of them in a monogamous relationship, that alone would be enough to change the dating landscape significantly. Assuming that the women involved weren't in a different relationship at the time.

New comment by livinginfear in "Why You're Still Single (2023)"

livinginfear — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 09:26:22 +0000

Social customs surrounding sex inside marriage, or even sex inside a relationship have changed over time. Successful men have sexual access to more than one woman (If that's what they want). Sure, eventually people settle down and pair off, but before that happens the market is completely different.

New comment by livinginfear in "Why You're Still Single (2023)"

livinginfear — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 09:20:11 +0000

Have you considered talking to a therapist about this?

New comment by livinginfear in "Why You're Still Single (2023)"

livinginfear — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 09:17:53 +0000

> removing all incentive for the platform to function correctly in the user's interest, much like any big platform nowadays.

People keep saying this, but it's just not true. Tinder does function in many people's interest. I had a lot of success using Tinder, and eventually met my wife on there. People keep implying there's some kind of hidden algorithm at play that somehow pairs you up with people who are "Okay, but not great" to keep you hooked on the app. How the hell would it manage such an amazing feat?

New comment by livinginfear in "Why You're Still Single (2023)"

livinginfear — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 09:13:11 +0000

Lots of tech people seem to dislike Tinder. I want to present an argument in favour of the 'swipe and match' model: If your personality is 'stronger' than your appearance, in terms of attracting a partner, this model is actually highly optimal. Think of optimising a database query to maximise selectivity: You want to narrow the search space as quickly as possible. If finding a partner who is physically attracted to you is hard, then everyone who actually does match with you has cleared that hurdle. Lots of tech people seem to idealise OkCupid, but it's really a better use of your effort to swipe/match than sending personalised messages to many people on OkCupid, only for a large amount of recipients to reject you on account of your appearance.

New comment by livinginfear in "Personality trait recognition using ECG spectrograms and deep learning"

livinginfear — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 22:05:30 +0000

Can anyone predict a potential benefit to society that might come from this research? I can only think of bad things coming from this. It's like a major step down the staircase towards dystopia.

Everyone was up in arms the other day about a developer who had to take a personality test for a job at FedEx. Imagine what this leads to.

New comment by livinginfear in "USCIS announces strengthened integrity measures for H-1B program"

livinginfear — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 01:38:25 +0000

When I looked into who is actually hiring H1-Bs, I was shocked to see it was mostly bodyshops. See: https://www.mbacrystalball.com/blog/2022/02/07/h1b-visa-stat...

The majority of "Top H1-B Recruiters" are in the "Professional and Technical Services" industry. I think people imagine that most immigrants on H1-B visas are being paid princely sums directly by FAANG companies. Instead the reality looks like they're being exploited by the same Indian bodyshops like Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra, etc. Of the companies in that list that aren't bodyshops, the majority aren't in IT.

Aside from all of the obvious problems with the system, and the political implications, I think many people really have the wrong impression about who the real beneficiaries of the H1-B visa system are.

New comment by livinginfear in "WWII heroics of 'Bazooka Charlie' doubted until daughter sets record straight"

livinginfear — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 21:22:13 +0000

Thank you for sharing that link, and your story. Your father led an extraordinary life.

New comment by livinginfear in "Things are about to get worse for generative AI"

livinginfear — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 21:17:42 +0000

> George Lucas didn’t have billions of merchandising revenue in mind...

Doesn't copyright stop other people from making billions in merchandising revenue off of George Lucas' ideas without his consent?

> We don’t really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by those extra profits.

Without a copyrighted C3PO, he could start turning up in just about anyone's derivative works. There could be horrible Star wars sequels forever, or TV ads with C3PO selling household cleaning products.

New comment by livinginfear in "Are EU banks just mass surveillance devices?"

livinginfear — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 21:44:22 +0000

I feel like this post is the truth of the matter finally coming out. What other outcome did you expect? You've just received a large sum of money, from an indeterminate source, for an indeterminate reason. From the bank's perspective, how do you look any different from drug dealers, or human traffickers? Elsewhere in the thread you said:

> I would expect this to be something that law enforcement would do.

If the bank didn't tell law enforcement about money moving around in strange ways, how would they ever find out?

New comment by livinginfear in "Are EU banks just mass surveillance devices?"

livinginfear — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 21:09:09 +0000

The first thing that springs to mind here is "Betteridge's law of headlines". As others have noted, the bank is just complying with governmental regulations. What I'm curious about is what you've done to make the bank so curious about you. Banks are generally much less paranoid than you'd expect. It's not in their best financial interest to scrutinise everyone to the highest degree, and performing this due-diligence on customers incurs significant costs. For 99.99% of customers, all the bank wants is some proof that your income stream doesn't come from crime, and that you are who you say you are. What is the bank so curious about in this case?

New comment by livinginfear in "It's All Bullshit"

livinginfear — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 12:18:56 +0000

Yes, they should be class compliant devices. When I mentioned drivers I was talking about the possibility of an alternate driver that would simulate the 'jiggling'. I was just throwing one possibility out there. Mainly just to illustrate the point that anything running on your PC would be subject to some scrutiny from the bank.

New comment by livinginfear in "It's All Bullshit"

livinginfear — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 11:05:56 +0000

I know. Some people have bought "Mouse Jigglers", and so on to do this. I cringe when I see people buy weird USB devices on eBay for this purpose. Who knows what lurks in the firmware of those things. Some people even buy little hardware turntables that physically jiggle the mouse every so often. On an SOE laptop with all kinds of corporate spyware, you'd have to be pretty game to install a driver to automate the task.

New comment by livinginfear in "It's All Bullshit"

livinginfear — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 10:57:47 +0000

> Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days?

I am one of these people. While I do earn a stupid amount of money in the financial sector, the reality for me isn't really that enviable. I do about 3 hours of honest work per day, but the other hours of the day aren't spent with my feet up on the beach. They're spent waiting. They're spent negotiating with pointy-haired managers to unblock me, or arguing with peabrained bodyshop engineers about the utility of totally uncontroversial concepts like unit-testing. They're spent jiggling the mouse every few minutes so that my status doesn't go yellow on Microsoft Teams. If I got to take my '3 honest hours of work' in a single block, and then log off, I'd be content. Except that the few honest hours of work the bank wrings out of me are spaced out over 9 agonising hours a day, interspersed with pointless corporate garbage like "Agile"(tm) cargo-cult meetings.

I pay my mortgage, but I hate my career.

New comment by livinginfear in "The dark side of social media on youth mental health"

livinginfear — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 02:05:38 +0000

> For every oddball who found their community online...

I felt very sympathetic to this point in the past. Now I'm wondering if this might actually be a bug, and not a feature.

New comment by livinginfear in "The dark side of social media on youth mental health"

livinginfear — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 02:04:18 +0000

> Good luck finding a furry community in the 50s.

I don't think anyone needed to. My personal theory is that this kind of paraphilia is an indirect consequence of the kind of media saturated environment we live in. I don't think that being a 'furry' is an expression of some intrinsic personal quality. It's a disorder of the modern world.