> We all know what the culture of online shaming has led to and it's all our job not to do it on HN.
This is, in and of itself, a blaming statement. Blaming statements, such as the one contained in the comment you replied to, are a result of a) dissonance and b) inability to resolve the dissonance.
It is, in fact, unknown what the culture of online shaming has led to in our society. In fact, I'd hazard "shaming" online is actually just raw blame provided by some rationalized thought process driven by Internet interactions themselves, not the people reacting. See This Video Will Make You Angry on YouTube for context. Screwing with people's Internet in contextually what could be considered "wrong" behavior becomes highly polarizing. In as much as someone coughs because they smoke, people blaming is a result of a larger problem, perhaps related to the fitness of memes and some people's weakness in being hacked emotionally by memes with higher sophistication. Again, that problem is noted by the dissonance and inability to resolve it, but the behaviors emerging from those who are "infected" by the thoughts are not exactly theirs to bear alone. We blamed the tobacco industry for smoking. Why can we not blame the employees who are providing the rationalizations for bad behavior? One might argue that they shouldn't be blamed because they have no choice in the matter. It may be their job to argue otherwise for the company.
The irony here is that vast majority of the denizens of HN are likely responsible for creating most of the "mess" we're in today by writing software without considering the long term effects on consciousness and perception of reality. That "mess" would be defined as means, by algorithms or neural networks, to attempt to exploit weaknesses in human nature to spread other's beliefs in a unnatural way. Growth hacking. In some cases, like Comcast, those beliefs are rooted in sophisticated rationalizations which sound good when limited in scope. But! I don't care what anyone says about it, changing the content of a page which, when requested from one place returns one thing and when requested from another (which ones pay for I might add) returns another thing entirely is a violation of TRUST. At least it is to me. I like consistency in my data.
If one of the "members" of this group we call HN wants to make a blaming statement against someone who is defending this irrational logic, then I say let them blame! How else are we to uncover the dissonance and solve it? Or, perhaps, that dissonance is desired to be left in place by our complicit behaviors trying to be "nice" to each other.
I've suggested before social media sites could benefit from a "this is a blaming statement" flag on articles or comments. I stand by that assertion today. Logging back out again. Thank you for all the hard work that goes into running this place.
Users of HN, please note "we" is Facebook and Facebook, or a representative of Facebook, is telling us what we can and can't discuss here.
This is why I quit posting here and use /r/hackernews on Reddit for my links. However, I occasionally make an appearance when I see patterns emerge, such as control where we didn't assume control existed.
The downvotes here indicate logic doesn't always follow where there exists polarity in a belief of "truths". While you may be correct in your assertions, you will still lose the argument because it's not what people want to hear. My own downvotes aside (within 30 seconds, no less) is the point is that some topics become "logically lodged" in a jam and cannot be freed by open discourse.
You are making a statement of surprise that someone who "didn't fit the investment world", who was "smart" and a "hustler" would not make such a mistake while navigating the interface between his personal life and his business/career. I say "personal life" given these advances indicate an IMPROPER blurring of personal need, including a physical attraction response, which was then carried over into day-to-day business. It is this response that creates a double bind for the women who are involved in situation. Double binds are bad news, whether they are intentional, such as those used by Trump, or unintentional, such as those created by those who do not manage their personal lives well.
Why is it that we EVER may assume, by someone's external behaviors including their writings, videos and interviews, that we may "know" an individual? Why would we ever assume a level of trust in how they conduct themselves in their personal lives by their outward actions? Why would we assume someone who did "fit" the investment world would be more likely to act in a similar improper manner? How is it that we actually fail to acknowledge that each of us has a line that, when it is crossed, we are capable of making horrible mistakes? Why is it that Western culture has formed a view of mistakes as something to be avoided at all cost, as opposed to an opportunity for great learning?
I came out of my self-imposed exile here to post this because I think it's important to draw a line and indicate a social community such as HN (or Twitter) are woefully inadequate to deal with these types of issues in a meaningful way and to do so without a highly divisive conversation forming. (This is not to say the message should not be delivered strongly to anyone listening, however.) All that comes of these discussions is blame and division. Evidence of that is show here, now, in the polarized comments.
The only people who can judge Dave honestly here now are the victims, his co-workers and himself. I do have empathy for those involved, but my emotional contributions here are pointless, given the scale and reach of this news.
I'll go off anyway I like. That's what the downvote mechanism is for here, after all. Hell, the main article got flagged and pulled. Something is clearly going on. Read the article. It's rational, mostly.
I will point out that large entities like Facebook may misuse this forum to their liking, and that anonymous posts who directly contradict a posting here, in this group, indicates a motive that benefits the entity doing the posting. It would be different if it weren't about something highly controversial that has no means by which a truth can be determined.
FACT: Facebook will and can do anything they like to their products to increase revenue, products of which billions of people use daily to do things they think are trustworthy, when in fact they are provably not. They can also do whatever it is they are capable of doing as a gorilla entity to silence those of us who question their motives in product development.
In these types of cases, we are actually NOT perfectly capable of "incorporating datum" into our interpretations, whatever the hell that means from your perspective.
Frankly, I find dogmatic replies such as yours highly annoying and boring. We, the members of this group called HN, are mostly culpable for making this fucking mess of this thing we call the Internet, with it's mostly viral models and broken security. We've leveraged capital to "trick" users into using our products via viral growth models, all the while to obtain higher and higher payouts. That I come in here to try to make a small dent in the effort to combat this and am colloquially "smacked down" for it is an indication my gut is right about my assertions. People are greedy and will continue to do so as long as they have the means.
So, again, I will go off how I like, when I like, and those who don't like it can do what they will to silence me. I choose to have free will, and deny those who deny that choice for myself.
> -1 points by kordless 12 minutes ago
BTW, Facebook, actively monitoring this article is an asinine approach to brand management. Get a life.
Actually, that's not technically true. FWIU, Lighting could be run on both Bitcoin and Litecoin today, but issues with transaction malleability could cause it to be less than trustworthy, for some use cases. So, Segwit, which fixes transaction mailability by moving the header in the transaction to it's own section, enables a higher trust Lightning network to be deployed, on top of a more trustworthy blockchain.
The connecting of disparate ideas is irrational in the individual. It's only when a group of people temporarily accept that those concepts may make sense that things get done. Given consciousness is directly responsible for giving us an individual's consciousness, and that consciousness (either by group or individual) must try to understand itself using the effect it is trying to describe, the concepts may NOT make sense when getting things done. This may be why philosophy is frequently taken as quackery, and non-scientific. ;)
My HN profile has carried my thoughts on Penrose and Hammeroff's theories for some time now. Good to see it posted here and debated.
I would modify that slightly and say Litecoin is back because of the Lightning Network, which benefits greatly from features provided by Segwit, and which itself leverages payment channels backed by multi-sig addresses. While Lightning can be enabled without Segwit, it's far more trustworthy with it, than without it.
> now survives as a zombie currency backed by the souls of all the bag-holders foolish enough to invest in it
Honestly, most of the world's economic trust is backed by similar bag-holders, just without the use of proof of stake algorithms. Yes, one could argue that hard goods are an amount of tangible trust that can represent value, but most of the value in today's systems comes from human backed trust, which itself is irrational. Take the Fed for example.
A bag-holder, by any definition, is simply an individual that believes a given fact, irrationally. Here, the irrational belief is that cryptocurrencies like Litecoin can give way to rational desirable outcomes in the future. This is based on a mostly rational assumption crytpocurrencies are designed to provide a rational and clear means by which value can be established among those who participate in a group using the technology. For example, if I send you 1 Litecoin, then everyone in our group can immediately come to the rational conclusion you now have control of 1 Litecoin, assuming you control the private key to that address, of course. In other words, we agree to use this thing because this thing appears to be rational.
It only becomes irrational when we start talking about adding fiat currency values into the mix. Those values themselves are based on human established trust, so must be irrational by definition. Again, I point at the Fed. The way the Dollar's value is calculated, in part, is by analyzing 100K different products sold on the markets. Who picked these items? Who decided how much they are worth? What ruler was used to measure their worth?
Either we can continue down the path of handling irrational beliefs the old way, by electing group leaders (or leaders electing themselves) to speak for the group and it's collective value, or we can adopt new ways of instantiating trust by letting computers do it in a way that can be proved to be almost, but not quite, completely rational.
> Can we all just agree that Litecoin is a way over-hyped and silly excuse for a cryptocurrency?
No. As I've pointed out now, the belief that our current economic systems "make sense" is irrational. I think it's far better if we all agree that something needs to be done about it, that something might be slightly irrational in the short term, and that cryptocurrencies, like Litecoin, may present a rational means by which we measure value in the economy of the world, moving forward.
As is clear from its current market cap, it would seem others agree with me, and disagree with you.
Note: I use the terms rational and irrational frequently nowadays. When I use the terms I am referring to the concept of either an "unknown amount of work ahead" or a "known amount of work ahead". Programmers may liken this concept to the the P versus NP problem. While not equivalent, they both represent an idea that an unknown or overly large amount of work can be "collapsed" into a known amount of work, and thus calculated at a given cost.
Speaking from observation, the claim may be considered true if the primary purpose of investment firms is to exit the position as either a large gain in value, or a complete loss. In other words, investment strategy today causes the outcome of the company to avoid finding a "happy medium" where the company is able to just make enough to pay the employees that work there to build a good product the customers like and which serves those customer's interests, even at the expense of additional revenue.
VCs don't invest in breakeven, or slightly ahead of breakeven companies. They would rather force a product move by the company to try to make more money for the stakeholders, even at the risk the move kills the company OR hurts the customer's privacy/UX experience. Case in point, Facebook.
This is not a throwaway account. Anyone can look at both my comment history and profile to determine identity.
You, on the other hand, represent yourself under the guise of anonymity, yet with purported knowledge of Facebook internal processes and discussions. The ramification is that, we as a group, must now take the irrationality of "your" identity and match it up with a rational "truth" presented which is "the level of rejection between genders is the same" (at Facebook).
The act of anonymity is likely rationalized as required to avoid judgement. Alternately, the act may be rationalized as an act by the company to avoid judgement, which means you aren't you, but someone posting on behalf of the company. Third, you may be an irrational actor who is posting this to troll us, which is to say an irrational desire to spread irrationality further into our group.
In all cases, this comment is highly irrational. If it's a troll, it's an objective of the troll to seek to spread further irrationality (additional unknown work). If it's a real human, who works at Facebook, posting this information is irrational because we have no way of knowing the context of the conversation, i.e. why did such a topic come up to begin with, who discussed it, who wrote the tests for it, and who conducted and analyzed the test results? Third and finally, if it is the company itself posting it, why is the company posting it? From an irrational standpoint, keeping this information "unofficial" makes it more likely to spread as a "truth" coming from the company, which means they are acting more like a troll with a purpose. (Which is not to say all trolls do not have purpose.)
If the company was ever to make this a public statement, I'm sure more work, or irrationality would come of it, given the questions I raise above about whether testing for this is done in a logical and fair manner.
Side note: I don't believe we should allow anonymous accounts to post because of the work required to untangle the logic. This is currently not possible to do with the HN software, so it's a moot point, and remains a source of dissonance for us.
Edit: Hello Facebook. Streisand effect, anyone? Getting about 1 negative downvote every 2 minutes. Fascinating.
This is a company we're talking about here, not an individual. That is true even if an individual of our group envisioned an important technology. Pulling punches, as it appears that you are asking us to do, is irrational, especially given this latest move is likely to take the company public. I think it's important to note that maybe investments like this in infrastructure are not so great for users or the Internet as a whole, given company's objectives (especially public ones) has always been to dictate how technology makes revenue and how people must conduct themselves when using that technology.
I think it's important we see all sides of it and if Docker happens to be controversial, well, that's their problem to solve, not ours. That's why they get the big bucks and we get to sit here and say what we want about it, at least for the present moment.
I would note that you have just as much right to say what you think here as anyone else, and saying otherwise is "speaking" for us as a group. I appreciate your comment and your presence here in this group.
No sane investor is going to invest in Ethereum because that's not how Ethereum or its derivatives raise capital. The way they raise capital is by taking individual's existing irrational trust (fiat) and exchanging it for what appears to be rational computationally driven trust. Except nobody is using that computed trust for anything worthwhile (a use-case), but then they (the Ethereum fans) all spout that its "killer use-case" is trusted transactions.
This is, at best, a chicken and the egg problem, given trust is built over time by most cultures and people don't trust things they don't understand, even if those things are rational. Saying it's rational doesn't convince the group aggregate mentality (the thing that defines a killer use-case) so we sit here as individuals speculating about how great is is and they (the Ethereum group aggregate) sit here trying to convince us how great it is. By actual use adoption standards, used by VC firms to establish value, it has none.
You stated Bitcoin dominance plummeted. My observation is Bitcoin's dominance has increased, by way of it's increase in market cap compared to the fiat by which it is measured, US dollars. Bitcoin's overall value, like any startup or company, is determined by far more than it's comparative value to all other cryptocurrencies, who's numbers are increasing with Bitcoin's value. It's like saying, because new startups are being formed at an increasing rate to write mobile apps, Apple's "dominance" in the market is falling. That would be a flawed argument with Apple, and it's a flawed argument with Bitcoin.
That is especially true given Ethereum doesn't have a viable use-case anyone is using it for right now, and most of the trading is simply speculation of future value, which isn't really value, or a right to "dominance", whatever that means when applied to speculation.
And yes, people can cherry pick numbers to rationalize their arguments, and then vote down people who they "prove" to be "wrong" when the person is just asking to clarify what something means because there is CLEARLY more going on here than what meets the eye. I'm growing bored of the HN audience's dogma.
Features are not use cases, contrary to popular belief. A killer use case is where everyone uses the technology, not where the technology serves a use for all people. Speculation on the value of Ethereum is irrational, at best, even if it has a feature people think others will use in the future.
This is, in and of itself, a blaming statement. Blaming statements, such as the one contained in the comment you replied to, are a result of a) dissonance and b) inability to resolve the dissonance.
It is, in fact, unknown what the culture of online shaming has led to in our society. In fact, I'd hazard "shaming" online is actually just raw blame provided by some rationalized thought process driven by Internet interactions themselves, not the people reacting. See This Video Will Make You Angry on YouTube for context. Screwing with people's Internet in contextually what could be considered "wrong" behavior becomes highly polarizing. In as much as someone coughs because they smoke, people blaming is a result of a larger problem, perhaps related to the fitness of memes and some people's weakness in being hacked emotionally by memes with higher sophistication. Again, that problem is noted by the dissonance and inability to resolve it, but the behaviors emerging from those who are "infected" by the thoughts are not exactly theirs to bear alone. We blamed the tobacco industry for smoking. Why can we not blame the employees who are providing the rationalizations for bad behavior? One might argue that they shouldn't be blamed because they have no choice in the matter. It may be their job to argue otherwise for the company.
The irony here is that vast majority of the denizens of HN are likely responsible for creating most of the "mess" we're in today by writing software without considering the long term effects on consciousness and perception of reality. That "mess" would be defined as means, by algorithms or neural networks, to attempt to exploit weaknesses in human nature to spread other's beliefs in a unnatural way. Growth hacking. In some cases, like Comcast, those beliefs are rooted in sophisticated rationalizations which sound good when limited in scope. But! I don't care what anyone says about it, changing the content of a page which, when requested from one place returns one thing and when requested from another (which ones pay for I might add) returns another thing entirely is a violation of TRUST. At least it is to me. I like consistency in my data.
If one of the "members" of this group we call HN wants to make a blaming statement against someone who is defending this irrational logic, then I say let them blame! How else are we to uncover the dissonance and solve it? Or, perhaps, that dissonance is desired to be left in place by our complicit behaviors trying to be "nice" to each other.
I've suggested before social media sites could benefit from a "this is a blaming statement" flag on articles or comments. I stand by that assertion today. Logging back out again. Thank you for all the hard work that goes into running this place.