pumaontheprowl's comments

"Private companies can do what they like" should only apply to companies that are not monopolies.

Due to network effects there is no legitimate competition to YouTube, so YouTube needs to be regulated as a monopoly (unless maybe TikTok has started hosting longform videos instead of just people doing stupid dances).

Ironic that you're complaining about violence in the context of a protest against forcibly jabbing people with a vaccine they don't want. The government's policy here is violence in itself.

If you truly were concerned about violence against innocent people, you'd be on the side of the protesters, not spreading unsourced lies in effort to have them silenced.

Are you sure about that Reuters? Twitter's stock is up 5% over the last five days. It seems to me that they met the market's expectation for growth. Not many people buy more of a stock after it underperforms their expectations.

This headline is at best misleading -- intended to give the impression that Twitter is performing worse than they are by ignoring the metrics in which they are excelling -- or potentially even just outright wrong.

How long does Google need to maintain your unlimited storage before you won't complain when they take it away? Until the sun goes out?

No, the First Amendment only applies to the government. Free speech is a concept that can be applied anywhere.

Well in this case he's signalling support for censorship, so you can't really call that virtuous.

Not only that, but it's rumored that Rogan negotiated significant creative freedom into the contract. If Spotify were to capitulate to Young's request, they'd most likely be breaking their contract with Rogan. In which case Rogan could just put his podcast back on all the other podcasting platforms again (or even just distribute it from his own website). Young thinking he has any leverage to silence Rogan here is laughable. I suspect he's either senile, extremely narcissistic, or both.

What a bizarre comment. He most definitely did do it in hopes of forcing Spotify to drop Rogan. Appearing on the same streaming platform as Rogan costs him nothing (neither financial nor moral). Nobody believes that he and Rogan share beliefs just because they're both on Spotify.

If his principles are that he won't be streamed on the same app as somebody he disagrees with, that's seriously pathetic. He's literally the polar opposite of the coexist bumper sticker.

These companies overwhelmingly support the Democratic party. The idea that they are deliberately stonewalling this investigation strains credulity. Poking some of their most powerful allies like this feels like a tactical error for the Congressional Democrats.

I wish I could laugh at this, but watching institutional racism come roaring back to life over the last decade has been extremely depressing. Is there any doubt that the goal of this change is to make it easier for them to reject Asian students?

The Ivy League schools haven't exactly been discreet about their desire to admit fewer Asians.

How do you know the author is insulting your intelligence and not just lacking in intelligence themself? I find the latter explanation more likely for this idiotic article.

First time I've ever seen somebody on HN request to change a neutral headline to a biased headline.

This is a he said/she said dispute. Taking either side's statements at face value is just foolish.

Because they don't discuss the methodology used to arrive at these numbers nor do they link to any sort of full report explaining these stats. For all we know, these numbers are complete bunk.

Furthermore, these sorts of wealth-inequality stats are typically used by disingenuous media outlets as a propaganda tool to support the political goals of their ownership. Reading such articles with a large dose of skepticism is a necessity.

North Korea.

You counter all skepticism the same way: by a designing an experiment to test the skeptic's hypothesis and presenting the results of the experiment to the skeptic. Name-calling, censorship, and persecution are not going to bring the skeptic to your side, but they will almost certainly discourage future skeptics from presenting their findings.

If we allow politicians to turn science into a dogma instead of an investigative process, progress will come to a grinding halt.

If Facebook is responsible for the content users see on their site, how is Apple not responsible for the content users see on Safari? I really don't see how you can argue for banning the Instagram app while the Safari app still allows users to visit the Instagram website and view the exact same content.

Ultimately, this is the textbook definition of virtue signalling. Apple was never going to ban Facebook; they just want to let people know they oppose slavery (their own factories excluded of course).

> Companies (many/most of the medium and big ones) are desperately monitoring Twitter (Reddit is gaining) because it’s the only window they have into what people say about them.

This just makes Twitter even worse. Only a tiny percentage of the US population are active posters on Twitter. If governments are using Twitter to decide public policy, then they are going to design policy that tailors to only a narrow subset of the population.

If companies/politicians want to know what people think of them, they should be sending out surveys to their customers/constituents. Twitter is not a statistically sound replacement for actual research.

Interesting. My stack ranking of unethical tech companies would have Twitter at the very top. None of the others have caused as much societal harm as Twitter. I saw research recently that as much as half of all trending topics in Turkey were manufactured by malicious actors to spread propaganda. Also, it's just an endless pit of addictive negativity. I once had a girlfriend who would browser Twitter for hours on end and was perpetually angry. Not a good way to live.

Google, on the other hand, has a bunch of products like Maps, Drive, Docs, and Meet that are legitimately helpful and useful. I would have no ethical qualms about helping to make Docs better. This is not to say Google is an ethical company in the aggregate, but there are certainly a lot of roles you could take there that would not require you to question your morality every time you start a new task.

Something doesn't add up here.

Levels is showing that the average senior engineer at Netflix is only getting $11k stock though. If employees were allowed to choose what percentage stock they wanted, I'd expect most employees to choose a larger percentage than that.

Stock is likely to grow in value over the course of the year while cash is almost guaranteed to lose value due to inflation. You'd have to be pretty pessimistic about Netflix's future to choose the all-cash option. And even if you're only neutral about it, the stock is the better choice because it's inflation protected.

If I were a Netflix employee, I'd probably choose $200k cash, $300k stock. The fact that levels is reporting such wildly different numbers tells me employees don't actually have that level of freedom to control their comp.

It basically makes it impossible to propose any new medical treatment on Youtube when their definition of "misinformation" is really just "not proven to work."

This would be more acceptable if they only banned discussion of treatments that are proven not to work, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.