Why is a news article about a 44 year old drug on Hacker News?
As far as I can tell this isn't about tech, tech policy, a new medication, a new discovery about an old medication, science, etc. Seems like its just fodder for a political debate that is unrelated to this site.
Instead of politicizing HN, why don't you just toot this to your echo chamber on Mastodon?
Probably because this case can have a lot of impact on HN readers lives. But I agree with you it's definitely out of scope, and seems to have been flagged already.
This has become such a common trope that I think people fail to apply even a modicum of scrutiny: the internet is not the town square and whatever your idea of the town square is likely wrong if you think its as wild-west-y as the internet is.
Firstly, try to approach children in the town square while wearing a mask for anonymity; or try to hold up images of porn in your town square. You will not be there long, you'd likely be detained, and you'd likely be asked for identification.
Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town square? I have lived in several large US cities and several small towns. In neither was there any sort of common place where we all congregated to address matters of the town. At best, there are city hall/city council meetings where the public can speak but at least in my town (and I know of many others), identification is required to prove that you live in the town!
Even the founding fathers, when writing under pseudonyms, understood that anonymity and circulation was incumbent upon them to maintain, not that they were entitled to it because "town square."
To address your last point: this is not simply some ill conceived moral panic/think of the children type moment. Go try to host - as an adult - an AA meeting or "computer meetup" with children that happens to be held in the local adult toy shop. See how well that goes for you. At this point, we know children are getting approached by adults at a large scale on instagram, we know children are getting exposed to a lot of adult content on twitter, and on the spectrum between innocent HOA meeting and damaging to society as a whole, its clearly more towards the latter.
"Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town square?"
Cities and towns in the US were once often built around town squares. Many cities have open public areas like this in Europe and South America where people can congregate. Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires comes to mind. Cities in the US haven't been designed around a central town square in a long time, but the term has stuck colloquially.
Below is a link to William Penn's original plan for Philadelphia, where the city would have a five town squares, with one in the center of each of four quadrants, and the largest in the city center.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gary-Libecap/publicatio...
My point is not that they NEVER existed, its that they no longer exist in the capacity most people mean when they use the term. As you mentioned, cities used to be organized around them. Most people now live in cities that are either don't have one at all or don't have one that is used in the way they were hundreds of years ago.
Furthermore, the behavior that was tolerated in the town square would not be close to what we tolerate online. And we don't afford kids the freedom in the real world that we do online. I am not sure why people think that requiring parental consent or age verification online is some sort of assault on personal liberty.
I think this again comes back to the idea of thinking of it as some sort of digital town square.
We don't seem to have an issue with the government requiring businesses to check ID for alcohol, tobacco, porn (in the physical world), and firearms. Movie theaters check ID for rated R movies if you appear to be under 17. In fact, a lot of online retailers of alcohol and tobacco now require ID to be verified at purchase instead of at delivery.
Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/etc are not the digital town square; the most charitable analogy for them is they they are merchants in the town square. And the rules should still apply to them.
For the most part, those real-world ID checks do not involve keeping a record, or a durable storage of what you say, or see, or listen to while you're there.
There's nothing preventing us from the law requiring the same for online verification. It doesn't have to be the case that Facebook or Twitter or whatever store any information other than at some point they did verify your age.
As to the other information, you're more making the case that online tracking should be illegal (which I'd agree with). For the majority of people, they are either unaware or uninformed about how to prevent online tracking to a sufficient degree. If you're signed into your Google and Facebook accounts and then surfing the web, theres a good chance you're getting caught up in cross site tracking. Hell, even if you don't have accounts explicitly, its not like Facebook isn't tracking non-users. In the real world, stalking is illegal.
Also, in my state (Washington), IDs now have barcodes on them. When I buy beer at the store, the clerk doesn't even look at my ID; he/she scans it and thats it. I'd hope the information about what type of beer and how often I buy it isn't being stored somewhere but I'm just hoping.
>This has become such a common trope that I think people fail to apply even a modicum of scrutiny: the internet is not the town square
Where is the majority of politics and recent events discussed? Where are new ideas shared and accepted or rejected? Where is this topic being discussed? Case rested.
>Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town square?
It's an international phenomenon, probably as old as civilizations.
If actual politics reflected sentiment on the internet, US politics would look very different. The Overton window on the internet is very different from real life, there is tremendous bot traffic from outside the US, there are people with multiple accounts, and algorithms and "trust and safety" rules that promote certain views above others. You are confusing signal and noise. The majority of politics - that matter - is not discussed online, the majority of new ideas are not shared/accepted/rejected online - even in a business sense most founders know their cofounders personally, not from online chats. Case rested.
You idea of the town square is also outdated. Do you think the municipal government in Rome still meets at the Forum? And you did not address my point that even if it did exist as it did in whatever millennium you yearn for, would the behavior that is present on the internet be tolerated the same way? Was the Forum or Copley or Dock square known for adult men showing their genitalia to underage women? Your idea of a town square is antiquated and likely would not have tolerated the behavior you think the internet should just because its the town square. Case rested.
> The rest of your post sounds like moral panic.
Nice rebuttal there. If it's just moral panic, why does the data suggest that social media use its detrimental to adolescents' mental health and well being? Why is the effort to curtail social media influence on kids' a bipartisan effort in an increasingly partisan society? Even the misguided level of libertarianism you're probably advocating for understands that short of pure anarchy, there are some externalities governments have to address, chief among them are social media platforms that are evidently harmful to certain parts of society (young kids). Case rested.
Yeah, a decent litmus test is if you sign into a service from a new device and without much effort all your chats/messages/history or whatever is there, the security is weak.
I got off WhatsApp years ago so I am not sure what's changed but back then if you signed on from any random browser, it was able to sync everything instantly and you'd see all your messages. This was after they claimed that it was E2E encrypted. What was explained to me at the time was that you share your encryption key with Facebook and hence the syncing.
False equivalency. I am not required to "walk in the city" to participate in society or the economy.
Sure, we can educate everyone on the risk of walking around the city as long as we don't require long haul truck drivers to walk around the city in order to later do their job.
I am not required to "have a drivers licence" to participate in society or the economy, therefore society can put restrictions on having one, like registering for selective service, paying alimony, etc etc.
That's one of those very technically true things, that pragmatically isn't true.
Again, this is a bad analogy. Having a driver's license isn't linked to adverse health effects.
I am not sure why people always go down these weird avenues to try to justify their convictions. If what you believe you think is right (presumably why you believe it) then you should be able to argue your position on the merits rather than trying to sneak in why your position is correct by relating it to something more anodyne as justification.
The original argument was that the vaccine was like walking around a city and we don't educate people on the adverse side effects or risks of walking around a city. This is bad because people can choose to live in cities or not - whether or not you'll have the same employment prospects or whatever, you do not have to participate in city life. Now you're trying to make the argument that we put restrictions on society based on holding some sort of identification. I'm willing to bet society would look at those restrictions differently if the mere act of getting an driver's license carried the risk of cardiovascular complications (as alleged by this report).
Restrictions on society based on having identification =/= restrictions on society based on your covid vaccination status.
Presumably, you believe the benefits of the vaccine greatly outweigh any risks, so why are you opposed to people being explained the risk before they get the vaccine? If you believe that the benefits outweigh the risks, why are you incapable of arguing that position? Why make a contrived argument that its like getting a drivers license or walking around a city when its patently not?
most of the people do walk outside of house but they are not aware of the risks. from quick googling, "The study from the National Safety Council found that, as of 2017, the lifetime odds of an individual’s dying from a pedestrian accident were 1 in 556. This puts pedestrian accidents behind heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, suicide, opioid overdose, motor vehicle crashes, falls, and gun assaults.".
given average "walking lifespan" of, lets assume, 70years, what is risk of daily walk or walk that happens 3 times in a week ? (i suck in math) ?
Having lived in all 3 of those cities, I, too, am amazed it hasn't reached that state yet either.
What's worse is that at some point a lot of the restaurants that have made the current iteration of those cities what they are will not be able to weather the economic storm their own cities are putting upon them. Their voters will vote to increase wages arbitrarily, add on fees, regulations, taxes, etc. And then when their pad thai or poke bowl costs $27 for pickup or $38 delivered, they'll just stop patronizing that restaurant - whether out of financial necessity or some misplaced feeling that they are now getting ripped off from the price hike - until it goes out of business. I can't count the times I've heard "<insert restaurant/brewery/coffee shop> is just not worth it anymore." The bigger chains will be able to take the losses until they can absorb the entire market.
There will always be 3 Starbucks and a McDonalds in Times Square.
Correlation doesn't equal causation. Having lived in SF during that period, there was a lot of governmental policy that contributed to that rise in homelessness. Saw the same thing in Oregon: homelessness increased when housing prices increased but there was also measure 110 which decriminalized all drugs. SF's similarly lax policies probably have more to do with their homeless issue than their housing prices. If it were purely housing prices, these people would just move to somewhere cheaper. And before you say, they can't move, they surely could move into Oregon when meth became de facto legal.
For a lot of addicts, the criminal justice system is their only chance at substance abuse help (mostly because they won't seek it on their own on the outside as we've seen in Oregon).
I know, but I wasn't asked for causation or proof. I was asked for data, or evidence. Presumably, I was being asked for evidence consistent with my hypothesis and unlikely to have occurred by random chance. That's what I gave.
Besides which: I never claimed that this was the only factor. I claimed it was a factor. Elsewhere, I acknowledged that there are other factors. I'm sure the the Oregon policies you list are among them.
Everybody not-tech and many tech did move to Sacramento and Oregon. They must have missed all the locals there screaming about getting priced out over the last half decade.
Layoffs and back-to-office mandates are the best thing that could happen to SF.
And homelessness is out of control in Sacramento, arguably worse than SF. But, I'm sure that has nothing to do with the influx of people and rising housing costs
You forgot the part where a lot of these big companies are still making buckets of cash and now those buckets are distributed amongst fewer people within the company further straining inequality, especially considering investors are generally rewarding companies for their reductions in force.
10,000 software developers losing their jobs in SF or Palo Alto are not going to make either of those areas affordable. Facebook's stock increasing in value 175% in 1 year is likely going to push some engineers into home buying compensation territory and the ones that can will start bidding wars for houses.
I'm not actually taking too much of a side here but its interesting how you view the ZIRP and VC industry as drivers of inequality as if VCs throwing enough money at startups so that some late 20s/early 30s person can make 180k/yr (plus some largely valueless equity) is the real problem. If anything VCs have made capital accessible to a class of people that would have otherwise been kept out of the party. During downturns and high interest rate periods, incumbents and bigger companies do well as they can weather the storm and buy up more of the market at a discount.
Even if you could drive up the interest rates to the point that these "generous endowments from VCs" and large companies cease to exist, the restaurant worker in SF won't start thriving. VC funding subsidized a lot of people's lifestyles in SF including the restaurant worker. There is not a substitute for building more housing.
>You forgot the part where a lot of these big companies are still making buckets of cash
I can't forget something that's not a fact and wouldn't be relevant if it were. A lot of companies did make a lot of cash. Also, a lot didn't. Moreover, revenue is not profitability. Generally speaking, unprofitable firms will find it harder to survive than profitable ones will, without financing.
> you view the ZIRP and VC industry as drivers of inequality
Who ever said that was my view? I never said that. What I said in another comment is that ZIRP and VC funding are were factors that contributed to income inequality. As someone who benefited from that arrangement, I would like to believe otherwise. Unfortunately for me, I don't. Give me a good reason to and maybe I will.
have seen increased profit and profit margins over the last year as well as huge increases in their stock prices. Not sure how you don't find that relevant in a discussion about income inequality but I also don't find anything else you said very compelling.
This isn't a thought experiment you have to run, there is actual data. All things considered VC's and high salaries for workers willing to take on risk has generally been good for SF. Look at other areas with similar politics and no VC funding and you don't see restaurant workers thriving. Portland's inequality has gotten worse and the livability for service workers has gone down even though its not a major benefactor of VC funding or ZIRP. If you removed all VC funding from SF, a lot of those restaurant jobs disappear. Tech workers making a middle class living off of investment money shouldn't be demonized. SF leadership and housing policy is your issue.
Let's put aside making and taking things personally, shall we? One way to do that is by sticking to the relevant facts, so here's a relevant fact: two of those three companies aren't Bay Area companies. All three of them aren't even San Francisco companies. I think that's relevant if we're talking about San Francisco.
> All things considered VC's and high salaries for workers willing to take on risk has generally been good for San Francisco
That's a matter of judgment. If, say, a SFUSD teacher makes a different judgment because she has to commute from Tracy, I'm not going to say she's wrong.
> Tech workers making a middle class living off of investment money shouldn't be demonized
Who has demonized them? I haven't. I haven't made a moral judgment about this at all. I'm just arguing that economic policy and conditions tend to lead to predictable outcomes, and if we want different outcomes we should choose different policies.
Not saying it’s the case here but a lot of times congress asks these questions as leading questions or to give viewers the full context of follow up questions (or more likely for easy clips).
A hypothetical back and forward might be something like:
“How does Facebook make money?”
“By selling ads.”
“Does Facebook ever target those ads to kids?”
“Yes”
“So is it in facebook’s financial interest for kids to spend as much time as possible on the platform?”
Eh the question posed by the senator was just clumsy: it was something like, "If your users don't pay you, how do actually you make money?"
Clearly the senator was trying to highlight the fact that Facebook can't have its users' best interests at heart, because its very existence depends on pillaging their data and whoring out their eyeballs to the highest bidder. But by playing the fool he made himself actually look like a fool, because he left himself wide open to Zuck's "Senator... we run ads" zinger.
I’m going to do you a favor here and be more honest than most will, please understand it’s coming from a place of good intention and trying to help you get a job: your LinkedIn reads like a crock of sh*t.
- Your tag line claims you’re an ML expert but you say you have 7 years of work experience and your LinkedIn doesn’t have any educational experience. I disagree with the necessity of degrees but 7 years of largely several month stints and no degree is hardly enough experience to be considered an expert in anything. If you’re into ML, that’s fine to put there but it’ll be off putting if there’s a stolen valor element to your profile.
- You have way too much written for some of your experiences. You were at CRATUSTECH for 7 months. If what you did was amazing enough to warrant what you wrote there, your previous managers would be knocking at your door right now. Pair things down so you don’t come off as inflating your contributions.
- You’re presenting your experiences in a confusing way. You have so much overlap that it’s hard to ascertain what your career narrative was. Most people who are experts in something weren’t able to reach expert level knowledge while jugging multiple jobs. Focus on your narrative so employers can determine if you’re the right fit.
- You’re commenting too much on stuff. No one is ever impressed by people’s comments online and the more opinions you share in comments the more liability it is for employers who already get to be picky right now. This isn’t to say you said anything wrong but if it were me, I’d just delete them to now have a busy activity section.
- Lastly, you need a better profile picture. If you want people to take you seriously put a better foot forward here. Even just a decently lit selfie. Don’t crop some photo of you and someone else out on a hike or whatever. Doing an activity is fine, but pose, smile, be by yourself.
-I dropped out of university because i wasn't allowed to take only compsci and math. 80% of my first two semesters were pointless state required classes so i left. That was 11 years ago. I love programming and I do it first thing in the morning every day for many years now. Deep Reinforcement Learning is a a very approachable field! With less than a year of full time effort somebody that has been coding for years can become an expert. There is no stolen valor here, I can read ML papers and implement their architectures from scratch. I have assisted with undergrad and masters papers. Have met RL experts who consider me to be a peer. They have been very friendly, and mostly just happy to find someone else interested and knowledgeable in the field. My DRL knowledge does not come from work. I have not really found an opportunity to use it professionally. I learned in a cabin in the woods. As for how to effectively communicate that I have this skill in a believable fashion despite not resembling a PHD I do not know.
- That is largely due to other people revising my resume. I admit I don't like the tone. It was very dry and literal before, but a lot of people made me rewrite it in this value-added tone that seems popular nowadays. I did not get employment attention when it was dry before, or with any of the other variants I have tried. This was me succumbing to lots of advice.
- I do not have a career narrative. I struggle to get a jobs and take what I can get, usually small companies looking for a deal on me.
- My wife took that picture. We got married this year. I could change the picture.
It gives me an example of how I am being perceived, but I don't think it will help. I don't think most companies are even reading my resume or linkedin. I suspect my application is getting instantly thrown away.
Yes of course I have. I always tell them im looking for work lol. They just arent in a position to hire me. I had a meeting four days ago with one, who has a small startup, but very low funds. He said he will check back with me in about a month, theyre doing fundraising now.
Seems to me like nobody has money. A couple of these small companies are telling me theyre hiring over fiver. Remote devs in the Philipines. I've been able to scrounge a few hours of freelance from them here and there, and some ludicrous offers of high equity, and basically no pay.
You’re either too young to remember or creating a non-existent history of what life was like before same-sex marriage was legalized. This is not a comment on anything to do with gay rights but more just a matter of fact: pre-Obergefell life was VERY similar to life today. Gay people still lived together, still went on dates, and held hands. They weren’t run out of town for being gay. There wasn’t rampant homophobia everywhere you turned and anti-gay gangs roaming about enforcing the social order. They just couldn’t enjoy the legal benefits of marriage.
If anything, things are probably worse from a sentiment perspective for gay people now because a bunch of heterosexual liberal white women use pride parades to act completely shamelessly under the guise of being warriors for a movement they aren’t otherwise a part of.
Except even now I still get harassed for holding a guy's hand. I still look over my shoulder.
Because people will give you disgusted looks when lots of other people are around, maybe they'll be brave enough to attack you. But when it's just them and their mates around, they _will_ attack you.
Exactly this. I think people are willingly blind. It can be hard, because you don't see what others are claiming they're commonly victims of. You don't want to admit that something bad is happening right under your nose and worse, that you've been unable to see it! I'll admit, when I was younger I also believed the problems weren't as large as they are. Not gay, but did experience far more racism than I expected (experiences in sibling comment). Truth is that the world is complex and that your single experience is nowhere near enough to make good judgements about how likely events are. There's far more going on than what we see, and we're sold on simplicity and that if we don't see it that it doesn't exist despite overwhelming evidence.
If you are implying that in the recent era - we'll look at 2013 leading up to same-sex marriage being legalized - that there was rampant homophobia, the data does not support your claim.
According to the FBI, in 2013 there was 334 hate crimes committed against LGBTQIA+ people [1]. The US population back then was 315 million [2]. In 2013, according to Gallup, 3.6% of Americans identified as LGBTQIA+ in 2013 [3]. Which means the crime rate was 1 per 33,952 persons, or normalizing to per 100,000 as crime is usually reported is 2.94 per 100,000 which is on par or LOWER than any other category of heinous crime for that era. In fact, 2013 has one of the safest years on record [4].
Furthermore, public sentiment had already switched in favor of same-sex marriage before it was even legalized, according to Pew research [5].
> Gay people still lived together, still went on dates, and held hands. They weren’t run out of town for being gay.
Are you sure __YOU__ aren't the one creating a non-existent history? Talk about calling the kettle black.
Either you've forgotten the past or more likely were just never exposed to those things. It is important to remember that our lives are not always identical to others, even those in close proximity.
I am definitely old enough to: remember my gay cousin having to hide any notion of his sexuality, and trying to deny it himself; the secret shame my aunt and uncle had for having a gay kid, never talking about it and doubling down on religion; the protests in 2008 where people said that gays had all the same rights but it was about the "sanctity of marriage," and how a "no" meant that they were going to teach children gay sex in schools; I'm old enough to remember it being a big deal that our president got a blowjob from someone that wasn't his wife, that such a shameful act was enough to impeach him, where saying "I didn't inhale" was ghastly let alone something like "grab 'em by the pussy"; I'm old enough to remember getting smog poisoning; I'm old enough to remember waking up early for cartoons, knowing where my friends are by finding the pile of bikes, and having the dad answer the phone when I was calling to ask a girl on a date.
Yes, it was that prop 8, and I did grow up in California. Not a rural part, all this happened in Orange and LA county. This isn't an uncommon thing.
But to catch you up on some things, here's some other things you might not have experienced. A little over 5 years ago I dated a black girl (I'm white) in a major Southern city and we both got looks, comments, and overall different treatment, especially when we weren't out with a group of white friends. This is something I, or her, didn't realize was as bad until it happened. A few years back (on the west coast), when I dated a South Asian girl I got comments asking why I don't date a "real" Asian, "one of the better ones", accused of liking submissive women (clearly they never met an Asian woman), being a colonizer, and other such comments. I had "shame" to tell my parents about the fact that I'm currently dating a Korean woman because I get accused of having "yellow fever," since they just ignore all the other women I've ever dated. The white women, the Latina women, or others I've chased or had crushes on (which btw, still got racist comments for any non-white girl). That I was actually introduced and set up to those last two girls rather than actively seeking them out. That this is just how the dice fell and it is probably unsurprising given that I'm in grad school in a west coast city. That I still get some of the same comments as before, that there's pressure on her for not dating a Korean, Asian men (even non-Korean) give me comments about how I'll never fit in and heavily imply only Asians should date Asians. Or again how people think I want to just dominate this woman, who is undeniably fierce and independent. All this still fucking exists.
You're not wrong about people virtual signaling. It annoys the fuck out of me too. You may notice some of those comments above aren't things a conservative would say... But you're swinging the pendulum in the other direction rather than dampening it. That's not any better. You can call out hypocrisy without perpetuating a fictitious dichotomy. By the very nature of only complaining about white liberal women you actively are perpetuating this dichotomy. Taking us further down the rabbit hole. I'm sorry, the world is complicated and it wouldn't be better if you just made all the liberals disappear (and similarly wouldn't be better if you made all the conservatives disappear). It's not a bunch of wizards lording over, pulling magic strings in the sky, it is because the world is exceptionally complex and we're all fucking idiots barely able to comprehend our small little corner.
To also help, let me explain the differences between conservative and liberal racism, with an example from my Muslim friend: Liberal racists randomly walk up to her and tell her how brave she is for wearing her hijab, conservative racists tell he to go back to where she came from. No, neither is great, but I bet you can tell one is preferred over the other. The real truth of the matter is, is that a lot of people are the same, they just ascribe to different tribes. They sing the same songs and dance the same dance, but pretend they're fundamentally different because it is in a different key. I have a lot to say about all this, but I don't want to start my morning angry.
Wow! They could still hold hands in public. Who cares if they weren't afforded the same legal and financial rights, they could go on dates! Pretty crazy comment man or maybe I'm naive as a straight dude.
I don't think the comment is crazy, and I'm going to afford you the grace you didn't afford me in the reading of your comment. My comment was not about the significance of being able to marry or whether or not same-sex marriage was a huge milestone. My comment was simply about the public sentiment around same-sex relationships and that 2013 wasn't some bigoted era where people only changed their mind because of a single supreme court decision.
Reading the past by todays standards are why social progressives are starting to lose ground. They just can't accept their win.
Except this isn't true. You're right that in 2013 we weren't burning gays at the stake like some imagined Victorian era scheme. But thinking I suggested that is putting words in my mouth. But in 2016 it was definitely a national conversation if a bakery was allowed to deny service based on the sexual orientation of the purchasing party. No, we weren't roaming the street mad max style hunting down gas, but neither was it all rainbows and lollipops where no one gave a shit if two men held hands in public.
As far as I can tell this isn't about tech, tech policy, a new medication, a new discovery about an old medication, science, etc. Seems like its just fodder for a political debate that is unrelated to this site.
Instead of politicizing HN, why don't you just toot this to your echo chamber on Mastodon?