roc

14 ms·

61.
by roc 12y ago
Honestly, that could be it. Signalling isn't always about showing off -- many times it's just about signalling a willingness to belong . Even signalling a willingness to belong to an objectively undesirable group. So it could be
62.
by roc 12y ago
Social signalling. Like every other human expenditure beyond absolute utility.
63.
by roc 12y ago
It's not about CGI. It's about practical effects; set and setting -- to convey the emotional feel of hope, safety, plenty and beauty. Utopia requires verdant green lawns, large old trees, calm ponds or slowly flowing water. Bi
64.
by roc 12y ago
> "how can Google use this data against me" I look at it the other way: What do I gain from allowing Google to build this profile of me, including information from potentially multiple accounts, devices, location history,
65.
by roc 12y ago
It gets a little cumbersome to hedge casual conversation the way attorneys do, but sure, it would have been more accurate to have said: "might not, under the current rules, which are always subject to change"
66.
by roc 12y ago
A notable difference is that a compromise of Cloudflare's key wouldn't [edit: might not] require the bank to notify the Federal Reserve. It may be pretty cynical to call that situation a "feature". But I'm sure it
67.
by roc 12y ago
There's not much one company can do about the standards. [1] They can only control their own output. Apple asserts that Facetime and Facetime Audio are end-to-end encrypted. And Google claims Hangouts are encrypted as well. I don'
68.
by roc 12y ago
Delaying having a child for ten years also implies that the associated costs of having that child will have continued to climb over the intervening ten years. As many of those costs (healthcare, childcare, education) have been growing at si
69.
by roc 12y ago
The UX on the Watch. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8297652
70.
by roc 12y ago
I honestly think it was accidental. It looks like a classic case of a simple executive decision that appeared so trivial as to skip a careful consideration of the implementation. Which isn't to excuse it: it was very un-Apple-like. A
71.
by roc 12y ago
> "I think that Apple actually took the easy way out here" They took the "Microsoft" route. They refused to make hard decisions about what was right for users and use of this unique platform and it's all pointe
72.
by roc 12y ago
> "It's an entirely different statement." Which is the point. The character limit creates miscommunication because people wind up submitting something other than what they set out to communicate. > "Those are si
73.
by roc 12y ago
The 140 character limit and general focus on brevity encourages people to drop specificity and shift to bold proclamations and absolutes.[1] This is guaranteed to cause miscommunication and hurt feelings. The resulting arguments are impos
74.
by roc 12y ago
> "why not make an operating system that has only 45 syscalls?" Because much of Microsoft's licensing revenue is contingent upon continuing to support the edge cases that are inevitably not part of the set of programs th
75.
by roc 12y ago
Both the possibility that corporations may not come to the US market, or may only come to the US market after having expanded into other, more-profitable markets require an assumption that the US would (substantially) raise taxes above th
76.
by roc 12y ago
> "the flip side the alternative is that they don't sell their goods here" That's a silly concern. Businesses do not forgo profit simply because they'd prefer if there were more . They always prefer if ther
77.
by roc 12y ago
The identity of the poster is recorded as a core conceit of the system. The app/network is explicitly for sharing secrets between friends . It has to record and store who the secrets came from, in order to determine who their frie
78.
by roc 12y ago
One quibble: Metadata is facts about people. Logging meta-data isn't a slippery-slope toward also catching facts. It's a problem from the jump. "Joe goes to the gym three times a week" is a fact. "Joe's n
79.
by roc 12y ago
It was suggested that dual incomes were a cause of increased inequality, not a symptom. And that's wrong. The inequality that's an economic problem is not between those earning more than 100k and those earning less [1]. The pr
80.
by roc 12y ago
> "I'm not sure why the article is so obsessed with this "six-figure salary" thing" Because people ascribe meaning to "large numbers" that are unmoored from the actual objective context and meaning of
81.
by roc 12y ago
> "the growing number of dual-income households has been suggested as an exacerbating factor in the growing income inequality in the U.S." That's a red herring. When people talk about inequality as a serious economic pro
82.
by roc 12y ago
I'm not sure this isn't satire. It reads like you did a search/replace on a defense of Blockbuster against the upstart Netflix. To your specific points: 1. Locality is a huge competitive disadvantage. Real-estate, staffing,
83.
by roc 12y ago
I wonder if "3" isn't an unspoken reliance on self-driving cars for true profitability. If you can be the "Amazon" of delivery the day courier costs drop from $20/hour to $.56/mi, there's an awful lo
84.
by roc 12y ago
The irony goes so much deeper. While "extreme sports" types may not themselves drink Red Bull, the "non-extreme" people who do drink Red Bull are very sensitive to the notion that Red Bull is authentically associated
85.
by roc 12y ago
> "and yet we still try to understand them and talk to them" For certain terrifyingly-narrow definitions of "we". Compare the number of researchers puzzling over sea mammal communication to the number of fishermen i
86.
by roc 12y ago
We know dolphins and whales speak and think. We are not "all over it". We could barely agree to a modest effort to reduce incidentally slaughtering some in our quest for other fish. We can not remotely agree to stop* directly sl
87.
by roc 12y ago
Home loans would be a terrible example for your position. Mortgage interest is paid off disproportionately sooner than the principle and the bank still has a claim on the property until the last penny is (re)paid. So long as they didn&#x27
88.
by roc 12y ago
Legislation is not unlike programming. Programs and legislation both have bugs. Many government assistance programs currently have bugs. But bugs can be fixed. And sub-systems can be refactored. Sure, at some point, a program can become
89.
by roc 12y ago
This is actually a notable problem with the BIG, as presented. As it includes Medicaid spending as federal benefit spending (and likely PPACA subsidies -- but I haven't gotten that far in the footnotes) the $10k would seemingly amount
90.
by roc 12y ago
I guess I didn't recognize your point, because I don't see a huge discrepancy in ability-to-demand overtime, between cleaning people and technology staff. Tech workers are more-well-paid than the cleaning staff and generally bette

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