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I don't mean to speak for the OP, just to relate my own experience. I grew up extremely disadvantaged - bottom 10% - and that's manifested in a few ways throughout life (ie. it took 7 years to get my bachelor's due to needing to work to support me + family members).

Nevertheless, I was recently told by a progressive regarding a tech conference that I was too privileged to offer a diverse perspective ('cause I'm a white guy, you see).

From the article:

"Sean Reardon of Stanford University has calculated that the race gap in student test scores has diminished, but that the class gap has widened. A half-century ago, the black-white test score gap was 50 percent greater than the gap between the richest 10 percent and the poorest 10 percent. Now it is the other way around, with the class gap almost twice that of the race gap."

But for whatever reason progressives (broad term I know) seem to be happy to talk about anything except class and income equality.


"privileged" and "diverse perspectives" are terms from recent "social justice" theory -- which is newer than "progressive".

It's of course very slippery to try to attach labels to any informal political groups, and probably better to discuss ideas, not people's labels.


They gave us* another season of Community, so that was cool.

*Although what they gave me specifically was "Geo Restriction - Sorry! The content provider has not given us the rights to play this video in your location." It's the thought that counts I guess


> Either way, it's another data point for "privacy vs. progress of mankind, pick one".

I read The Circle recently and thought "no one could possibly go for this". And yet here we are already in 2015


I don't want to spoil the book too much for myself, but from a cursory check I infer that this comment was meant to be a criticism.

My point is, if one stops treating the vague notion of "privacy" as some kind of end-goal and focuses on costs and benefits, it seems reasonable that we might be losing more than we are gaining as a civilization by fighting for as much "privacy" as possible.


Pretty much, yes - if there's a buck to be made and the law isn't being broken (in a way that will be meaningfully prosecuted), someone will do it.

To answer your first question, someone from HN should surely about this given: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20130115/y-combinator-is-fu...

Extensive commentary at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806


Yeah, pg even defended a YC-backed company that had built a business model around exactly this kind of bundling, saying that it wasn't a big deal because their installers always asked for permission before installing the bundled crap. (Which they did in exactly the same way as these download.com installers - by making the prompts look like EULA acceptance screens.)


pg "investigated" that crapware company a couple of years ago [1], but they still apparently exist, and continue to collect MAC addresses.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062133


What was the result of that investigation? Can't find any info in the original thread.


I don't know, but I'm guessing that the comment solved the PR problem, so there was no need to do any investigation, or to act on the results of one.

EDIT: pg's response was basically "suck it": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711


Yep. I rewatched Office Space recently and found myself envious of their working conditions (!). That's what 5 years of open plan does to you


I just replayed Space Quest 3. In the game, Roger Wilco visits ScumSoft, a dystopian software company. Check out the ScumSoft office layouts:

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/spacequest/sq3-15.png

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bp3Emd3jJVo/T7wcdqFTM_I/AAAAAAAAAu...

The layout is nice, notwithstanding the whipping.


Honestly I'd take the whipping to have full-height cubes like that.

My office is half-height cubes, but apparently there's a redesign in the works that's going to give us "friendly clusters with low partitions" (kill me now).


It is possible however for abusive user to be detected and removed, at which point their abusive voting will be reversed - see my own reputation page for an example: http://stackoverflow.com/users/1000900/guy-cook?tab=reputati...

Apparently someone was just upvoting everything they saw, hence I lost rep when they were deleted.


The moderators do not control this process. There is an automated serial vote detection algorithm.

AFAIK, under no circumstances can a Stack Exchange moderator reverse a vote.

More info on the serial vote detection process here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-seria...

edit: I just looked at your profile and the deletion/banning of a user account will remove rep too, so I suppose in that manner a mod can "reverse" voting, but it's all or nothing. They have no way to flip individual votes.

edit2: Moderators are not employees of Stack Exchange, they are volunteers elected by the community. Of course employees can change whatever they feel like. This discussion is about the moderators.


Moderators can ask someone from the SE community team to look into it, and they can see individual votes and invalidate votes between certain users. The only cases where this actually happens are users using sock puppets to upvote themselves, colleagues/friends/family going through every post and upvoting everything or users targeting a specific user with a large number of downvotes.

The one thing they all have in common is a larger pattern of votes. SE does not act on individual votes, and emailing them about those is a waste of time.


I'm going to guess that anyone with access to the database can do a whole bunch of impossible things.

Such as, I dunno, the people who work at StackOverflow HQ.


Whoops. goto fail indeed


I'm still working on getting QML [0] running in the browser because I think it should be the write-once run-everywhere language of modern UIs. https://github.com/guycook/HQML

[0] http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.0/qtquick/qtquick-application...


Working on a QML runtime for browsers. It's cool for all the reasons QML on the desktop is for describing UIs. Still early days but there's a prototype at http://ivorydungeon.net/HQML and code at https://github.com/guycook/HQML


How are you planning to do animations?


Just a heads up, I went to fetchnotes.com in Firefox (23) and got nothing but a blank blue page with the following errors: http://i.imgur.com/zjBXqSx.png

Nevertheless, I checked out your site in Chrome and I'll send my application later today :)


Are you using Ghostery or something else that blocks Mixpanel and other things like it? We noticed a bug surface like this when people use those add-ons.

Looking forward to your application! Already a good impression by finding one of our bugs :)


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