pillowkusis
Paid content was always for purely cosmetic changes (with some very small exceptions, removed in 2013). You could pay for items if you want, but they also were granted to you weekly entirely for free.
You could/can purchase every weapon in the game for about $5 total.
I played TF2 at a competitive level for a year without spending a cent on the game.
- You make significantly more money at a FAANG than most of the rest of the industry
- The klout of a FAANG on your resume will open a lot of doors to more interesting, higher paying, or more prestigious jobs
- You will gain a professional network that will be useful for the entire rest of your career
- Most SWE teams at any FAANG are using state-of-the-art tech, tooling, and patterns, which will be very useful experience to draw from in future jobs, even if not applied in exactly the same way
There's plenty of downsides to working at a FAANG, which every blog post can tell you. But in my experience those downsides are exaggerated and it's rarely so intolerable you can't last at least a few years.
So even if you have a terrible time, those lasting benefits are worth a lot of trouble. It could be a life-changing career move, and if you hate it, you can always quit whenever you want.
A relevant Dan Luu post: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
This happens anyway in Google's "objective" promo system. Your manager assigns your projects, gives you your non-promo performance ratings, sets direction for your team, they sit in the room with the promo committee, and their feedback is critical to the promo committee's decision. You need their help and support to get promoted. If they didn't have significant impact on your work, they're not a manager.
Ostensibly you can go try for promo even if your manager disagrees. I never had any evidence this worked for anyone and I have no idea how it would work. Sometimes borderline promo cases would go up for promo when their manager thought it was unlikely, and it would succeed. But if your manager doesn't think you should get promoted, they're going to tell the committee that, and I don't know what the promo committee would see that would cause them to overrule the manager.
The "correct" response in my eyes is to say "we are a platform, we aren't responsible for the speech of our users as long as it is legal," but that's a very expensive and profit-negative strategy these days.
Of course everyone working at a social media company has an ideological bias, and that can come out in the product. But consider also that the latest censorship controversy creates negative PR, makes people leave the platform, attracts regulatory attention, and ultimately, hurts the company's profits. Content moderators are at least as worried about that as they are about making sure their ideological opponents aren't given a voice.
Social media companies are in the unenviable position of playing referee in the culture war, and like referees in any sport, they're going to constantly be criticized for doing it, right or wrong. These companies are global and universal, and there's no way they can satisfy all parties. Sometimes, the values of left and right, or Iran and the US, or Israel and Palestine, are just irreconcilable. You're better off just trying to avoid as much trouble as possible, and avoiding negative media attention.
Reddit is probably the most ham-fisted example of this approach. Their content moderation is pretty hands off, but as soon as any subreddit attracts negative attention, it's quarantined or banned, no matter if the controversy is justified or not. When Russia invaded Ukraine and Russia Is Bad Now, they just straight up banned /r/russia and any link to an .ru domain! That does nothing to address the conflict, but it does keep those NYT opinion pieces from showcasing Problematic Russian Bot Behavior on Reddit.
I'll note that I don't think this model fully explains moderation policies at Twitter or other social media sites. I genuinely believe moderation leans left due to an ideological monoculture (I've seen it first hand). But it's important to recognize the difficult situation social media sites are in.
Surely if they can prove they didn't leak anything (or Google can't prove they did), they would have an easy wrongful termination lawsuit? They wouldn't need to sue on these flimsy grounds?
> the school can still reach profitability by enrolling 2,000 students a month while only placing less than half of its graduates in qualifying jobs.
>Class sizes are like 150 students to one instructor — I've only heard that number going up
I don't see what the problem is here. For students, the only cost associated with Lambda is the opportunity cost. The incentives are still aligned here -- the school wants people to get placed. It can't "scam" students with higher teacher:student ratios or bad curriculums without hurting its bottom line. If it's failing at teaching students, that's incompetence, not a drive for profitability. If only 40% of students get placed -- that's still 40% more than would have been placed without Lambda, right?
>"Those students that are in the bottom 10%, why would they invest resources into helping those students succeed? Just let them fail out after six months"
...exactly? You are going to school for free. The school is not obligated to waste resources on students falling behind, because those students aren't paying anything.
If you think 6 months of wasted time is a bad deal, just wait until I tell you about this other educational program that lasts 4 years, costs over $100,000, and has a much lower placement rate: Your local university's liberal arts degrees.
Still, it's unfortunate to hear that Lambda is playing the same placement-rate games as bootcamps. I'm surprised they have to do this at all; if I was running admissions, I would be extremely selective, only accepting extremely bright students that I feel the university system had "missed," to get placement rates as high as possible. Maybe they try to do this, and this is just a sad sign of the state of non-college education opportunities?
This is a common complaint with the phrase "virtue signalling" -- signalling virtue isn't a bad thing if you're actually virtuous, after all. But it's clear from context that when people say "virtue signalling," they mean it in a negative sense, when the signal is dishonest. Nobody has ever used "virtue signalling" as a compliment (in the field of public discourse), so the distinction isn't all that useful IMO.
I think in the age of Twitter, having a phrase for "dishonestly raising a moral issue for personal gain" is helpful. It seems the hive mind has chosen "virtue signalling" for that purpose, so while another phrase (I like "moral grandstanding") might work better... oh well.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory#Honest_signa...
"Second, we were unable to assess whether the observed increase in youth suicide rates was attributable to the portrayal of suicide in the series."
This is so intellectually dishonest. It feels like a Motte and Bailey[0] argument. Scientists go around parading a correlation as causation. The title of the paper implies causality. They speculate idly about the causation in public. They make no effort to correct media sources suggesting a cause. And then, when challenged, they fall back on "well, nobody can establish causation here..."
I'm not even sure there's a correlation, let alone causation!
The breakdowns by age and gender make me suspicious of p-hacking. It seems this journal does not require pre-registration of studies so it's hard to know if the study was pre-registered. It very likely was not.
Note that the only statistically significant finding was for boys, ages 10-17. No other category had a significant increase. That sounds like a negative result across most dimensions of analysis to me.
>There was a 28.9% increase in suicide among Americans ages 10-17
>The study found that boys were far more likely than girls to kill themselves after the show debuted. Suicide rates for females did increase, but it was not statistically significant
This is an enormous effect size. What exactly is the supposed method of action here? So only boys, who watch netflix, only ages 10-17, who decided to watch a show about a girl committing suicide (teen boys do not usually watch female-led dark serial dramas), account for the majority of the 30% increase in suicide across their entire age group?
>The spokesperson noted that the study conflicts with research published last week out of the University of Pennsylvania. That study found that young adults, ages 18-29, who watched the entire second season of the show "reported declines in suicide ideation
Now we have two seemingly "significant" studies with opposite conclusions. It beggars belief (if either of them are even representative of a real life causative factor at all).
Girls, older teens, and adults are completely immune from this effect. What possible method of action would affect such a specific demographic so disproportionately, with absolutely no spillover to any other demographic? How can it be that teenage girls, who watch more dramas and presumably empathize with a female lead more, show absolutely no effect? Or could it be that the researchers had an expected result, broke down the data until they found a dimension that had a large enough increase by chance, and submitted it to a journal full of peer reviewers who would find the result plausible and prestigious to their field?
The line of reasoning that “this investment has a 1/10000 chance of going huge, and a 9999/10000 chance of being at best a waste of time, so I should invest” is not a rational strategy by itself. If you applied this logic to every moon-shot investment you came across you’d barely break even between the few winners and thousands of losers. You need to know something more interesting about the investment than “this could go to the moon”. Otherwise you’re spending all your time buying and then losing money in penny stocks.
You also have to hold onto Bitcoin much longer than seems rational. It’s rare to find that someone buys Bitcoin at $1 a coin, and doesn't sell at $1000/coin. A 1000x return is the definition of moon-shot. Scott claims that “most people” agreed Bitcoin had a more than 1/10,000 chance of achieving $10,000 a coin — but this is a totally non-obvious result to me. Maybe it’s 1/1000 chance of a price of $1,000? A 1/100,000,000 chance of $100,000? In 2011, how could you reliably make such a precise prediction? For a community centered around epistemic modesty, such a finely calibrated probability like that seems unreasonable.
And for the record — Bitcoin was expected to grow in price proportional to its value as a currency, tool, technology, etc. Nobody said “I’m going to buy Bitcoin because it’s going to enter into a giant speculative bubble and I want to be on the bottom”. Nobody seems to know why Bitcoin has exploded in price, so I’m hesitant to award points to rationalists. Seems more like a case of “correct by coincidence”. You made statistical inferences and acted on the result, and ended up being right, but not for any of the reasons that your statistical inference is based on.
That said, don’t discount your ambitions — sometimes a poor, unsuccessful life spent in pursuit of something beautiful is more happy than a traditionally successful life in pursuit of nothing at all.
I’ve seen this opinion, especially in the post-2016 world. I’m not sure I agree completely. I think it totally misses the core issue, which is that somebody was incentivized to be paid to do this work. If you’re an engineer at Facebook who thinks the News Feed algorithm is tearing people apart, quitting is not going to solve the problem. Facebook has an incentive to make the algorithm the way it is. Your refusal just leads to your replacement with someone who will do the work (and get paid well for it).
That’s not to say that you don’t have a moral responsibility to stop doing work that makes the world worse. But “all software engineers in the world should refuse to work on bad things” is hopelessly naive. If you want Facebook to stop showing people crappy news, find a way to stop Facebook from getting rewarded from it. Write laws. Raise awareness. Write a competitor that does better. But refrains like these, I worry, are just hoping that everyone will commit to doing the right thing 100% of the time. There are better solutions.
I am glad to see someone definitely smarter than me find this opinion too. As far as I can tell the only value in twitter is network effects and the total removal of nuance.
Let’s imagine that, actually, deer don’t have any form of consciousness and cannot suffer. Imagine a deer critically injured in a hunt — nose flaring, eyes open wide, struggling to stand up, screaming maybe. This feels like a reasonable way for an animal to respond, backed by evolutionary reasons, even if its a mindless automaton.
Now imagine we magically imbue that deer with a consciousness in this situation. What measurably changes about their behavior? They still scream, try to run, struggle to survive — I can’t think of any way the situation would be different. Conscious or not, the deer behaves the same.
Thus, the claim “deers have consciousness” is non-falsifiable — the claim does not provide any way to be disproven, since there is no difference in measurable characteristics if the claim is true or false. One day, we might have a way to quantify consciousness. For the time being we are not even close.
Claims that are non-falsifiable are not really worthy of scientific inquiry. My personal conclusion, then, is that the question of consciousness is not a useful one. Any animal measurably displaying pain is in pain, in every useful form of the word, and we have a moral obligation to prevent it. Fish included.
I don’t know to what extent this is true, or even how to measure it, but it would help explain why “diversity” initiatives seems so illogical some times, which has perplexed me too.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
Ludwig’s life was tragic largely because he was so far from society’s norms and expectations. Gay, uninterested in his family’s court, definitely not neurotypical (his brother was likely schizophrenic) and unquestionably nerdy; in the early 1800s, he defied basically every expectation society had of him and paid the price by being deeply unhappy, getting overthrown, and dying in his 30s. He’s a patron saint and martyr of Nerd-dom, almost, although of course the history is more nuanced than that.
His story serves as a reminder of how good us nerds (and anyone outside the “norm”) have it now. Being obsessed with art, opera, science, or computers just makes you a super-fan — there’s a website, subreddit, and convention just for people like you. Computers and the Internet made nerds like Bill Gates cool, and enabled all of us outside of societal norms to find and accept each other. I’m sorry Ludwig never got to post at wagner-fan-forums.com. He would have liked it there.
They won't for exactly the reason the lawyers do this. This is a trendy, hot topic (look how many comments it has on HN so far). This is "news" fodder for media outlets. They don't mind that they're being taken advantage of as long as they get a non-zero amount of ad views out of the deal. Win/win for the lawyers and the media, although definitely a loss for those reading.
Of course, this ignores all the people who dropped everything to pursue something and failed, catastrophically too, because they let everything else suffer in pursuit of this objective.
It's like singling out big slot machine winners and saying, "look! the common thread among all these people who won it huge is that they spent thousands of dollars, all day, every day, playing the slots, and eventually they made it. So if you want to make money playing slots, you have to just keep at it!"
- What you do is totally opaque and requires a massive amount of context to explain. Yes, it’s 5 sentences, but only after both you and the user are in the same context trying to solve the same problem. Try to explain a randomly-selected B2B company’s model to your grandma. Impossible. Instead let’s focus on company branding and positive sounding platitudes.
- Once you’re selling to businesses, you’re selling to VPs and C-level executives. They don’t care about the problem you solve. You're solving some lower-level employee’s problem, or a systemic problem nobody experiences directly. Since the buyer (the VP) isn’t feeling any of the pain, the only way to justify the purchase is to focus exclusively on the high-level benefits of your service. They’re in charge of marketing. promise them perfect marketing. They’re in sales. Promise them better sales. Focus on the outcomes, not the “how”, at all costs.
- A lesser factor might be that companies love to align workers with an affirmation that the work these employees do 40+ hours a week is making the world better. B2B organizations have an especially hard time proving this because there’s no clear evidence their business does make the world better. No consumers who sing your praises or products that solve a problem the worker can empathize with. I suspect the large amount of mental gymnastics needed to justify “our company is a net good in the world” sometimes leaks into to marketing material which leads to weird-sounding empty affirmations that are more suited to internal employee “values” documents than actual marketing content. (“We make people’s lives easier”, for instance.)
The problem, of course, is that trait X could be anything. Technology, trivia, personality, Microsoft Excel Whiz, X years of experience, Causation, correlation, it doesn’t matter. “Reasonable” does not mean “fair” or “logical” or “causative.” It’s just a statistical trick.
I suspect that the “CS Trivia Interview” is just a more nuanced version of this. Knowing now to invert a binary tree doesn’t make you a better programmer (no causation). But many good programmers happen to know how to do it (or want the job enough to learn it just to please you). So it’s an easier metric than trying to define what “good engineer” means.
The tl;dr being in the mid 1900s when somebody actually DID try to measure the results of a mentor program for at-risk youth, they found the impact was slightly negative.
Actually fixing societal problems is a really hard problem and what actually works is often very counterintuitive. I think the whole field could do to let the data guide them better (also difficult because so many outcomes are "make people feel better", and most people are pretty bad at actually knowing how they are or will be feeling).
I’ve thought about this for a long time. I think the trick is to realize that most people DON’T want to have a debate. It takes a lot of self-control, forethought, and careful speaking to actually sit down and rationally argue. Realizing you’re wrong is really hard and painful, and most people don’t intentionally seek it out.
If people wanted to have productive debate, that’s possible on virtually every communication platform (except Twitter due to its word count). Tumblr, Facebook, HN, Reddit — they all have public posts and a reply system. It’s all about the context and goals of the people debating. Do they genuinely want to learn, or are they here just to argue?
The best quality debate can be found in places where people actually want to change their mind (some subsets of the rationality community like LessWrong). My favorite layman’s version is /r/ChangeMyView which does a tolerable job. I think the goal should be to build a debating community, where the technology underlying it is only a small piece of the overall construction.
this is the dangerous part. No, they can't, even though it seems like they could. If they could, they would be used by people to make money and deflate the bubble that would have caused the crash in the first place. That's the theory, anyway