billwilliams
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4 years ago
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on: Feynman, Harassment, and the Culture of Science
Why is there only one comment on here about Feynman's pretty obvious sexism? Why are the rest attacking the author or anti-sexism in general? Or commenting on how his actions or similar action push women out of STEM fields?
billwilliams
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9 years ago
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on: The idea maze of personal logging (2016)
This is great. The structure and simplicity is bomb and the data will be easy to mess around with while still being easy to clean up even if you mess around with verb usage like "scarfed" instead of "ate".
billwilliams
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9 years ago
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on: Libreboot is not GNU Libreboot anymore
No comments yet supporting the maintainer? She experienced real prejudice from issues at these orgs. No matter what the cause likely needs to be changed. But of course, I'm sure the super diverse community of core fsf and gnu did nothing wrong.
billwilliams
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9 years ago
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on: The Relation of Toxoplasma Infection and Sexual Attraction to Fear, Danger, Pain
So uh, no actual experiment here. Even with the methods they're using we're not really getting causality. Seems like they're just saying cat people (or raw meat eaters) are more into BDSM.
billwilliams
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9 years ago
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on: WikiLeaks offers $20,000 for information on former DNC staffer's murder
It is straight up weird that Assange is going after Hillary because he's a bit butthurt about her. Its funny when a whistleblowing body is explicitly partisan for personal reasons. Don't have strong feelings one way or the other
billwilliams
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9 years ago
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on: Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage
Weird metaphor. 1 Billion people on Facebook daily. Most of twitter's interactions are read only. So according to this idea Facebook is a nightclub the size of china and twitter is one of those weird sex clubs where you watch people behind one way mirrors.
billwilliams
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10 years ago
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on: Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841) [pdf]
Build yourself a hut. Pretend to live off nature while women from the town one mile away bring you pies. Thus is self reliance.
billwilliams
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10 years ago
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on: Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
Awesome, great work. This is one of those situations where I wish massive bribes were part of the open source ethos.
billwilliams
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10 years ago
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on: Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
Any easy way to run remote kernels?
billwilliams
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10 years ago
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on: Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
Thank you for bringing us the future.
billwilliams
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10 years ago
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on: Internet.org Is Not Neutral, Not Secure, and Not the Internet
This article is straight up more nuanced than I was expecting.
billwilliams
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10 years ago
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on: Internet.org Is Not Neutral, Not Secure, and Not the Internet
Usually I'm very pro internet.org with the basis for my response being "people who can't afford internet don't care about your politics, why should we get to deprive them of useful services based on a message only we care about." And I still feel thats true.
But your response is definitely the best argument against it I've seen.
billwilliams
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11 years ago
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on: Advanced R by Hadley Wickham
None of the comments here really capture the importance of this book in my mind. Hadley-headed projects have dominated the data-science space for years - defining how open source and commercial platforms are expressing data processing + visualization.
This book gives you the tools to compose your own data tools using the building blocks Hadley uses. That is a big deal. Everybody should buy 5 copies.
billwilliams
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11 years ago
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on: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers
Also, am I the only person in this thread who actually works in ads? Ctrl + F did nothing to answer this question
billwilliams
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11 years ago
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on: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers
I like how much heat this topic on the hacker news. I wonder if its extra touchy given how much "hacker" culture overall developed with online advertising - the big tech successes often depending on sweet sweet ad money. Everybody likes react, hadoop, chrome, mozilla etc, but the truth is that a huge proportion of development on the web was due to ads. And this feels ugly to people. Hackers like to believe their beautiful meritocracy was independent of the advertising bureaucracy. The privileges of the tech elite were made by ads, but now that we're all here in this beautiful (and fully deserved) technological enlightenment, we think we're somehow above it.
billwilliams
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11 years ago
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on: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers
Its disproportionately high for the publisher. Niche sites with demographics that overlap with adblockers demographic get hit harder than other sites. The ad company will find other places to serve their ads (unless its a product catering to the same demo). (Full disclosure, I work in ads and ad blocker has never cut into our cash money. That being said I'd be interested to hear from another advertiser who has been affected)
billwilliams
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11 years ago
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on: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers
To continue said yelling, a point that I haven't noticed mentioned on here yet - since when do consumers get to decide how much they pay for a service? Or how? If I want to sell you x for y - we don't live in a society where you get to decide what y is, or how to pay it. I think capitalism is dumb - therefore I won't pay in money but I will pay in labor I do for you. And you have no choice in the matter. I will take your hamburger and be in your house at 8am sharp. I will rake your leaves. Your yard will be the envy of the whole neighborhood. This is my anarchism. I will inflict it upon you, you cursed content publisher.
billwilliams
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11 years ago
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on: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers
While I like your poetic verve, this isn't true. Ads were always garbage. Old ads lied just as much and tried to instill the same feelings. They just had less direction since they didn't know how to measure and optimize on outcomes.
billwilliams
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11 years ago
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on: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers
And as long as we're all whining in one direction or the other, the average U.S. citizen still watches more than 25 hours of tv per week. So we're all just yelling into the ether of the tech-haves for the next 20 years while that number slowly drops.
billwilliams
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11 years ago
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on: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers
More importantly, no big publishers / ad networks really care about adblock. A vocal minority use it and think their convenience is socially progressive. The only people feeling the burn are niche sites that happen to have a core demographic which overlaps with adblocker users. Big companies don't care, and the second they do - they'll just block people from using their service who have adblock until its disabled.
