skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this was my entire experience in "computer" classes K–12 in the 90s–00s. never once were we encouraged to play around or try new things. we were taught to follow instructions to the letter to use computers to complete arbitrary tasks exactly as prescribed. the closest thing to letting us "color outside the lines" was letting us literally pick the color and bgcolor attributes for the HTML4 web pages we made for some assignments in "Web Development" class... in 2008. (of course about half of our graduating class had all already taught themselves rudimentary CSS to style their MySpace profiles a few years prior!) around 2004(!!) we spent a couple weeks learning HyperCard (in the Classic Mac emulator OSX used to ship with), and while I immediately recognized the possibilities for making games and interactive stories and all kinds of neat stuff using this then-ancient software, nope, just shut up and make this slide presentation about snakes or whatever like the assignment tells you to. I've posted about this here in the past but looking back I have this vague feeling that, at least in these computer classes, the teachers like barely had a grasp on how to do anything with computer outside of specifically prescribed tasks of the assignments they had us do, and were sort of scared of anyone like me who wanted to eff around and see what all we could do with the technology. part of me has always wanted to be a public school computer class teacher just so I can instill some of the sense of discovery and creativity that access to these powerful machines grant us, that I was never given in school growing up.
How do you sync your passwords across all of your machines? Do you self host your passwords on your own server? Do you manually sync?
My impression is that most companies don't know how to appreciate and take advantage of these data science skills, so it's not so much that the skills aren't as valuable as academics think, it's more that they're not utilized in an effective manner in real jobs.
> Many liberal arts schools pay everyone like they are liberal arts professors.

Presumably, you mean something like “arts and humanities” the second time you say “liberal arts”, since the liberal arts include the natural sciences (both life and physical), social sciences, mathematics (including, among other things, computer science), arts, and humanities.
That's a nice way to say "Do what I tell you regardless of what we agreed your role would be or I fire you".

Talk about toxic, this kind of garbage is why workers need strong labor laws and unions protecting them.
Why big law will keep getting bigger in the 2020s
I have also done both, computer work is only easier when you have a short work day. Try working a gold farmers 80-90 hour week and it will quickly wreck you.
We can agree on what words mean, as long as you don’t make up your own definitions. I do agree it’s a waste of time if you can’t use something even remotely close to the agreed-upon definitions in the dictionary.

Here are some definitions that seem more reasonable:

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sell

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/buy

(Note neither of these involve use of the word “control”)

Here is the text of US copyright law, I recommend reading it:

https://www.copyright.gov/title17/
There's some amount of overlap between what workers perceive as painful or abusive practices or systems and things that are flat out wasteful or pointless. Sometimes the pointlessness is what pisses people off.
Thin clones can help: https://github.com/postgres-ai/database-lab-engine
What's your personal threat model? I'm always trying to balance the risk of a party focused on security vs the minimal effort I'm likely to put into it. I don't want to be a story about the guy that lost their password to a wallet or anything else important. I used to be able to reliably remember complex passwords reliably but finding that's no longer the case, now only shorter intermittently used ones based on how often I have to use "reset password".
We need to disentangle housing the good the thing you pay rent for, from a house an asset that produces housing.

Why would low interest rates cause rent to increase? Intuitively I would think that low interest rates would make it cheaper to fund the creation of new housing lowering rents.

I imagine the increase in rents is because we've made it more difficult to build things because of zoning, permitting etc..., and we're building better houses that are more insulated, fire proof, more outlets, etc...

We also haven't made builders that much more productive over the last 40 years.
Now that’s what I call due diligence.
> It sounds more like a Ponzi scheme in a Gold farming disguise to me.

I would agree with this if the primary income stream came directly from the increase in value of Axies as the game attracted more users. From my understanding, the income comes from acquiring and selling in-game currency rather than from the Axies themselves.

Is this a bullshit job? Maybe. Ponzi scheme? I don't think so.

If people are working this bullshit job, it means that this bullshit job is better than their alternatives. I'm not convinced the existence of these kinds of games is a net-negative.
> It would have been even better if Ubisoft didn't just delete the account

Since mistakes or malice can always occur, the real issue is that it isn't easier to seek legal redress. Somewhat tangential to this issue, I still believe it's wrong for these services to use wording and marketing that suggest you "purchase" or "buy" the game, when in reality you have no such ownership claim to the game as you would a similar, analog purchase of physical media or objects. I don't think it's fair that these companies can get away with using misleading language and obscuring the truth in legalese in a 100 page TOS document.

The "buy" button on these digital games storefront should say something like "purchase limited license," or at least something a little closer to reality.

I don't think it should be possible to "purchase" an online-only game that requires access to the proprietary game servers in order to function. You're renting the game and don't actually own anything.
>threatening to take it and go home would force concessions

Trouble is the EU laws were agreements between 28 countries and can't easily be changed to suit one odd case. That was always the situation and the "we'll negotiate a good deal" thing was mostly lies for political purposes.
Lex Fridman interviewing Elon Musk for the third time
I would look at your email forwarding filters. It's common to see compromises with this pattern where the email for your account was compromised and all the email is being forwarded to an attacker.
IMHO an important point here is that in much of the story as you've described it, there are incredibly valuable skills that just need to be re-dressed. As an academician who was lured to industry by an interesting startup and has worked the gamut of positions from IC to executive, I'm reasonably confident in telling folks that it's all about perspective. If things look upside down, then turn yourself to match! For example:

> I don't think grant proposal skills are transferable,

Well, they actually probably are. If you work as a domain expert on the business or technical side of an organization, you may need to directly engage with funding agencies, other companies, or some other agent where your ability to (a) understand the audience and what is required to persuade them to support your idea, and (b) quickly execute on the content required to generate the proposal. Extra points if you were one of those pre-tenure faculty who needed to submit a half-dozen grant proposals every quarter, because you've likely built some intuition as to where it's safe to cut corners in your writing and pitching. Sure, in most jobs you may not be writing NSF proposals every week, but the general skill of effective and succinct technical communication is beyond valuable across a wide swath of applications you'll find in industry.

> The motivations were completely different: it was to write more papers, and get the next grant

... but that's, in a sense, the same thing as the start-up hustle, is it not? Build the MVP, get that one extra client - not because this next iteration of your product is going to change the world, but it's one more notch on your belt that will look good in the next funding round. Hell, maybe the majority of what you're building on any given iteration is throw-away work, but it's towards an explicit goal. I don't really see the start-up rat race as much different than the grant rat race (for better or for worse - I'm not making a judgment call here).
Schools are absolutely a big consideration. I live in central Louisiana (schools are ok, not great). I made the move 15 years ago - sorta forced into it, thanks to hurricane Katrina, but it has grown in me. Remote jobs weren't a thing then so I started my own company!

I cannot imagine being in the rat race of big cities ever again.
In Win9x, it was c:\windows\desktop etc., before windows became multi-user, when it moved to c:\windows\profiles\xxx\desktop and later to C:\Users\xxx\Desktop. But only on US installations, in international versions it was c:\benutzer\xxx\desktop or whatever the translation of "users" was. That is until windows 7 (I think) when they moved to the English name for all systems, and had the UI (Explorer) translate it, which led to strange issues that Explorer shows "C:\Benutzer\x\Desktop" while the command prompt shows "C:\Users\x\Desktop"

On some versions it was also "C:\Documents and Settings\...", it is so convoluted that even I don't remember all the specifics, but yes, it was a total mess, especially on non-english installations
Encrypted on a server where the company running it also has the key… It is accurate to say Telegram has access to plain text copies of everything. It’s also accurate to say anyone with access to Telegrams infrastructure has access to the plain text. Encryption at rest, that is not e2ee, really will only protect you against someone stealing a hard drive from a decommissioned server.

That’s the simple difference. Telegram is less encrypted than Facebook messenger is.
LastPass doesn't store passwords on their servers, so it's not some magical breach.
I think taking this as a reliable source of info is a mistake, as it was probably all designed around how much TV time they had and worked backwards from there. There's no transparency around how finalists were picked. Hopefully, anyone really interested in the history of videogame classification will take this TV show with a grain of salt and weigh it less compared to something like EGM, Game Informer or even how the publishers describe it. Although, this is free on youtube and it might take some legwork to track down the more reliable primary sources, so I dunno...

No matter what the subject, distinguishing the reliability of sources is one thing that separates blogspam from real research though.
That is not selfhosting. Selfhosting means web/cloud applications maintained by the users. Technically Syncthing is selfhosting but Keepass variants are not. So your setup is not really selfhosting because you are not hosting Keepass in the webserver.
According to Graeber, a job is bullshit when the one who does it thinks that the job is bullshit. By this definition, chores, menial tasks don’t count as bullshit. I don’t see any quote from players who call what they are doing bullshit.
> Well, you have no inherent right to the creator's work at all, so consider it one of the terms of the agreement in which you get access to the content and the creator gets some form of compensation

True and a creator has no inherent right to my physical property or location info. If I hear a song over public airwaves and record it, or download it from a consenting party using bandwidth I pay for, the fact that I'm supposed to obey some license terms that I haven't consented to is an infringement on me. Creators can limit how things are released if they care so much. Supposedly Wu-Tang Clan did it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_Shaolin.

> If you have something better to suggest, then by all means do

The sustainable path is commission-based works which could extend to patronage. I want something from an artist, I ask them to do it, then pay them for it. Musicians are already doing this with concerts.

For things that are beyond the reach of a single person, there's no reason why this can't be done group-style a la Kickstarter-type services. If the artist wants more money, they can make more works.

The mass-market motion picture and TV industry might collapse, but with the advent of streaming services it doesn't matter anymore.

FWIW I do think trademark and patents are needed and do benefit society.

> Right, but traditional economic models also don't know how to deal with a situation in which you can buy a car, never have it wear out, and create an infinite number of exact duplicates for free that you could keep for yourself or turn around and sell to anyone else, which is basically the situation we have with digital works.

That's because an economic model resolves scarcity and is the wrong tool/framework/mindset when scarcity doesn't exist. If the above existed, then everyone should have as many cars as they want.
I'm not super well versed on this topic. But the basic physics of photon and electron make light a poor source for computing compared to electricity. Photons don't interact with each other much when crossed, while electrons interfere each other greatly. It's really difficult to build logic gates out of photons while electrons work great with semiconducting materials to build gates.

Light is good for communication due to its non-interfering nature to pump up the bandwidth. There's a saying light is great for data transmission while electricity is great for computing.

So when people claim making supercomputer out of optical computing, take it with a grain of salt.
Ah sorry I thought we were talking about untranslated original texts. Translations with a lot of notes are surely more faithful to the original than a random summary, but there is still plenty of room to interpretation.
A spokesman said, "This is the one thing we didn't want to happen."
David Graeber is an anarchist, his criticism of bullshit jobs is about sustaining the centralisation of power, not techbro idealism.

There is no reason outside of power dynamics why airline desk staff need to exist to comfort disgruntled passengers, because the existence of disgruntled passengers who need to be shooed off is a consequence of the airline industry.
> I could walk just a block or two into downtown. It was a wonderful, vibrant city. A ten minute walk to Lake Calhoun

Based on these data points, I estimate that you walk at least 15.6 mph.
Slightly OT, but for the historical record:

> People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005.

I saw it happening at least as far back as ‘98 in DragonRealms, a MUD and (when it moved off of AOL) one of the first online games with a monthly subscription.
Nobody reports this stuff, but exploit kits like blackhole have completely disappeared. (Sure, maybe technically not “0click” even if delivered via an ad on nytimes.com)

The situation has dramatically improved during the past 30 years, but so has reporting. It’s the improved reporting that makes it sound like as if the world is on fire.
> If the database is too big, just use last N amount of rows from the database instead of a full dump.

For SQL optimization purposes, you cannot do that – there are high chances you'll get different query plans.
The Ambiguity of Real Work
1password has been audited a bazillion times. They're E2EE. They're cheap. Your master passwords aren't stored on their servers. Neither is your key information.

The only thing I pay for is the managed hosting, but in theory it's not much different than anything else properly designed (e.g. bitwarden) aside from the obvious things, such as OSS-ness.

The only relevant CVEs are relatively mild compared to LastPass.

Give them some credit.
Technically, I do not see why eSIM cannot be even easier than SIM swapping.

I go to a conference or hotel, and they can figure out how to have me login to the wifi and pay them. Or not pay them if I am a certain level member of their rewards program or part of a certain group of people attending the conference.

Other than legacy business contracts or lack of will by mobile networks to allow easy switching, it seems it should be just as easy to change which mobile network you are using.

As a side note, I love the cash grab by ATT/Verizon/Tmobile right now where changing your device entitles them to collect an extra $30 "activation" fee from you. Zero labor cost, almost zero compute cost other than changing IMEI in their database, and you still have to part with $30.
I think there’s something to this comment and the one from zzbzq about Graeber’s “canonical bullshit job.” I’m also drawing some threads from Goedel Escher Bach.

Perhaps the growth in the administrative sector is a new class of job, that results from
scale, coordination costs, Metcalfe’s law, and Goodhart’s law.

The job is to combat the diminishing returns on communication decay due to scale by measuring the system as a whole or in part and attempting to optimize that part.

There is no “product” other than the change in metric selected. There is no external or intrinsic value other than whatever 2nd, 3rd, nth order effects the measurement focus has on actual observable inputs and outputs of the system.

The job, in a GEB sense, is just a theorem that references some or all of the system itself, and which may not mean anything whatsoever outside the context of the system.
You've moved the goalposts, as your earlier question asked how much they'd pay if it was proprietary - that is, in an alternate reality with everything else the same.

"Have you?" doesn't make sense, as we're not in that reality.

Imho, the question about donation comes across as implying the person is dishonest about being willing to pay if it was proprietary, unless they have donated when it's free.

But it's perfectly consistent for a person to be willing to pay for something if it has a price and happy to take it for free when it's offered for free.
The “if you’re straight and white and normal” sure doesn’t track with my experience. I’m a software engineer in Overland Park, Kansas, and live in a middle class neighborhood in the suburbs. Cows a mile one way and IKEA the other way. It’s the “American Dream” town, and it’s MORE diverse than when I lived in the city. My neighbors are Indian and Jordanian, Kenyan, Chinese, Vietnamese, Pakistani, African American, Caucasian (some from US, some from other countries). I bought this house from a Nepalese couple based on their names.
I can't say I like the post.

>Users must also devise a master password to unlock the encrypted passwords stored by the password manager. This is similar to a master key. It is generally accepted that master keyed locks are less secure than non-master keyed locks. If the master password is exposed, then confidence (in all the passwords that it unlocks) is lost.

1. In a perfect world, having a master password is worse than having independent passwords. However, realistically you can't remember that many passwords, so in practice you end up reusing passwords across sites. Using a master password in this case is a worthwhile tradeoff.

2. on most password managers, you need access to both the database (either through the web, or as a file) and the master password to compromise its contents. Even if your password was "hunter2" or something, your accounts would probably be fine.

>DPG

Deterministic password generators/managers have problems of their own. Their main draw is supposedly the lack of state to keep track of, but realistically you still need to sync stuff (eg. usernames, site identifiers, password formats, counters), so that dream is never realized.

>1. Never store passwords. Rather, generate them as needed based on user input. The need to backup, synchronize and properly encrypt passwords is removed. There is no master password that immediately unlocks all of the other passwords. There is nothing to become lost, stolen or corrupt.

I can't tell whether this is satire or not. The author dunks on other password managers for having a "master password that immediately unlocks all of the other passwords", but his program literally has the same flaw? At least with traditional password managers you need access to the database and the master password.
Airalo sounds interesting. I'm a bit suspicious of the offering though after studying their website. No business address, no mention where it's based, privacy policy is not GDRP compliant. Not sure if this is a serious business.
So... I think a lot of people (not you) missed the fact that graeber writes from what I think is a traditional anthropological perspective, as opposed to other social philosophy traditions.

Bullshit jobs described as such by the worker was a very big part of his definition. I think the definition has to drift, since an anthropologist won't typically want to impose a typology.

In any case, if medieval monks themselves considered monkery bullshit... there are snug places in Graebers' typology for them. In fact, I believe an average monastery could man every type of bullshit job category. It would depend on whether or not they themselves believe in the monastic institutions... and I would not necessarily assume that they did.
I think that's a really great idea. In Germany we have a fairly strong 'grey collar' culture and this was one of the things I missed most in the UK. (and I think the US is similar in that regard).

The huge division between 'service workers' and professionals I think is not good for companies but much more importantly it's bad socially. People lose empathy for the day-to-day problems of what is probably the majority of employees in numbers and it creates a class of people living in a bubble. You learn a lot of humility pretty quickly if you go from management work or coding to carrying packages around and having to deal with angry customers.

I wonder what changes you'd see at companies like Facebook if the management had to sit in one of their outsourced content moderation centers for a few weeks.
This is what people don't seem to understand about BitCoin. It is cashflow negative, Money has to keep coming in to keep the price up due to paying miners. It is totally fine if you think BTC is better than the USD or Gold for whatever reason. But Bitcoin is still cashflow negative. You have to keep pumping money into it to keep up its value. Where is that money going to come from? Is it coming from Tether? Is it coming from people looking to make quick money? And when BTC hits 1M/coin, then what? You still need more money coming in to keep it above 1M.
Same here. It appears(?) that my account got deleted.
I'd say no.

This might just as well be an "emperor's new clothes" situation, in which a significant number of people are either deluded in thinking there is something of value or heavily invested in making others believe so. Neither of which means there is actually anything "real" there.

Shared delusions are a thing.
I live in Madison and believe it or not we have coastal VC-backed startups (including my own and a SoftBank-backed unicorn or two) and lots of professional engineers. A lot of people on the coasts are frankly just not that knowledgeable outside of their bubble and that’s okay, it really doesn’t mean that what the Midwest has isn’t significant. I have actually grown to quite like being an under the radar city for all the benefits that brings and having a different perspective on America