Hacker News: spectramax

New comment by spectramax in "US throws out millions of doses of Covid vaccine as world goes wanting"

spectramax — Sat, 16 Oct 2021 18:09:55 +0000

Disagree. News orgs exist to inform of facts.

Positive facts allow us to double down on what works. Negative facts allow us to inspect what went wrong.

New comment by spectramax in "The reputation economy is turning us into conformists (2017) [video]"

spectramax — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 14:58:01 +0000

Don’t. Think fearlessly and don’t lose the kernel of independent thought.

New comment by spectramax in "The reputation economy is turning us into conformists (2017) [video]"

spectramax — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 14:55:06 +0000

This is a distraction and diversion from the original comment.

Hollywood is not at the scale of the internet. Some privileged people got cancelled in Hollywood, who cares. When a hard working person gets cancelled by saying something stupid, the consequences are back breaking.

New comment by spectramax in "In America’s Next War, Machines Will Do the Thinking"

spectramax — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 23:34:23 +0000

I think all wars are fucked up in unique way. I see a lot of bashing of US Military here with knee-jerk reactions based on Afghanistan withdrawal.

I'd suggest what a successful war, Operations Desert Storm, looks like from an extremely detailed perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSqKx3FG0Lw

New comment by spectramax in "It costs $438k to jail one person for one year at Rikers Island"

spectramax — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 23:22:13 +0000

Lot of discussion around here is knee jerk and not nuanced. Criminal law is complex and there are areas where it should be reformed and other areas where we need better enforcement.

We've seen the criminal justice reform as they have instituted in San Francisco city: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27216343

New comment by spectramax in "Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens"

spectramax — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 23:16:52 +0000

That's been my general observation. I see the following hypocrisy: Murderers and violent crimes should require rehabilitation, better lives in the prison and discussion here tends to be more around pro-forgiveness ideology; whilst I also see liberals suggesting that politicians and corporate leaders should be punished by prison terms.

Apart from my own observation, non-punishment of non-violent crimes is a cornerstone of liberal criminal justice reform (Prop 57, 20, etc.).

New comment by spectramax in "Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens"

spectramax — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 19:28:41 +0000

I thought we, the liberals, are mostly aligned that non-violent climes should not be punishable by prison time.

New comment by spectramax in "As a whistleblower prepares to speak out, what can be done to rein in Facebook?"

spectramax — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 18:27:37 +0000

I can digest your take. I’d say that governments shouldn’t be on Twitter. I have conflicting internal voice - on one hand, I don't want any of these social media companies to allow populist movements to rise (that includes people like AOC that are running populist movements on Instagram and social media). On the other hand, I don't want any politician banned unless they ban all of them - on principle. President Trump was violating TOC left and right but Twitter allowed him for 4 years reaping engagement revenue, but all of sudden they were emboldened as soon as President Biden took office. These are weak companies with weak ideologies.

Make Politics Boring Again, I am down with this.

New comment by spectramax in "Private jet rage grows as a record number of fliers strain the system"

spectramax — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 16:32:15 +0000

That's known as hindsight bias and if anything, you're naively glossing over. The 2008 fiscal stimulus dwarfs COVID printing machine. Here is the actual data:

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi...

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/07/10/surprising-lev...

https://www.economist.com/img/b/600/653/90/sites/default/fil...

New comment by spectramax in "Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens"

spectramax — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 16:12:47 +0000

I don’t understand HN’s obsessive love for TikTok. It’s almost universally praised here.

New comment by spectramax in "As a whistleblower prepares to speak out, what can be done to rein in Facebook?"

spectramax — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 15:53:23 +0000

Here is Twitter CEO promoting a dictatorship as a place to go for meditation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/09/latest-...

New comment by spectramax in "As a whistleblower prepares to speak out, what can be done to rein in Facebook?"

spectramax — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 15:40:29 +0000

I fundamentally disagree with Twitter's ideological position. Banning the president, allowing Taliban leaders, it is a censorship extravaganza and the selling point is ecochambered short blips of outrage. What you're pointing out is also true - there is some good stuff on Twitter just like any platform. Most political content on Twitter is horrible, left / right - both.

FB goes against silicon valley's zeitgeist and it gets disproportional hate. IMO, all social media is toxic and it has done more damage to the society than benefited ... but the biases are very much evident in how each service is perceived by the larger tech community. FB also did many eggregious things, no doubt. Election interference, etc.

Meanwhile, Tiktok is HN's darling.

Another thing is Twitter has become de facto channels for official communications of government bodies. How do you access these official channels? With a phone number of course when you try to register an account - which is required. Twitter has destroyed the world by coaslescing social media, outrage tactics, government bodies into one hot boiling soup of toxins.

New comment by spectramax in "Ask HN: Why is Node.js hated so much?"

spectramax — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 15:12:12 +0000

IMO this argument isn't all or nothing. Sure, popular things are hated but Node is especially eggregious. There is more to it than "its just popular".

In my experience, the entire JS ecosystem does not respect robustness, stability, backwards compatibility, correctness, testability, and learning from other ecosystems. It continues to erode itself with emojis in the package manager, childish schzophrenia of frameworks, complete disregard for proven methodologies and extreme indifference to maintainability.

New comment by spectramax in "As a whistleblower prepares to speak out, what can be done to rein in Facebook?"

spectramax — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 14:54:47 +0000

I’d say Twitter has done more damage to the society than FB. Twitter is a pure outrage machine.

I might be in the minority but Instagram is still awesome. It’s gotten more ads but most of them are quite interesting.

I’ve found made in USA goods from IG ads like this: https://psudo.com/

New comment by spectramax in "Private jet rage grows as a record number of fliers strain the system"

spectramax — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 01:01:45 +0000

I think the government policies for COVID which were supposed to help the poor backfired and made things worse. Those that didn't invest, got shafted as commodities are becoming more expensive but it won't be perfectly clear until the short-term shortage fog has receded.

New comment by spectramax in "Understanding Awk"

spectramax — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 02:44:27 +0000

Everytime I learn Awk, I forget it. It is an infrequently used tool for me.

New comment by spectramax in "DMV approves Cruise and Waymo for commercial service in parts of Bay Area"

spectramax — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 02:39:53 +0000

I should start paying attention to these pesky plots then ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle#/media/File...

New comment by spectramax in "Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022"

spectramax — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:56:28 +0000

Absolutely not. “Sharing resources” doesn’t work when there is not enough to share.

A civilized society works when supply and demand intersection determines the price of goods and services.

Governments should interfere for specific cases (life emergency, masks, etc) and there are laws prohibiting scalping for these commodities - rightfully so.

Your idea of government intervention would assume that government is a rational entity. The truth couldn’t be further from it. Bribes and political favors from large companies would leave everything worse than it was before.

Imagine you're a low volume medical instrument maker and you need a dozen STM32 chips for your life saving device. Scalpers make sure that these chips are available and ready to ship, albeit at a premium which the company is happy to pay for given the circumstances.

New comment by spectramax in "YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content"

spectramax — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 03:49:53 +0000

> Finally, the ban on misinformation would be temporary, because the crisis will pass.

Coronavirus is here to stay, don't get your hopes up:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/how-we-l...

New comment by spectramax in "YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content"

spectramax — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 02:47:30 +0000

Thank you for taking the time to put this all together and further your points. Jeez, the future looks dark when it comes to inquiry of truth. I've had discussions with other engineers who are supposed to be sufficiently trained about critical thinking and I see a very clear party-line ideologies getting mixed into their conscience.