It would be technically trivial for a forum built with the typical MVC architecture with data backed up in a relational database - just change some templates, point the user ID to a global 'deleted' user, and done, or something like that.
But Hacker News is a project site built in a custom Lisp variant that runs on one core, mostly in RAM from what I understand, with all of the data in flat files, and I don't even know if they have a development server. Obviously, they can do it, but it may not be that trivial.
Or maybe they could bang it out in an hour, I don't know. It would be nice if they put up a devlog and talked about some of the issues they have with updating the site and what their future plans with it were. Maybe talk up Arc and Lisp development a little.
A particularly ugly thing happens if the HN mods for some good or bad reason decide to ban an account: their contributions will be there forever, with no ability to append explanations to previous posts.
This will after May 25 be illegal for services offered in the EU, but I kind of think that the same courtesy should apply to non-europeans.
I feel like Hacker News should auto-delete threads that old, anyway. Chances are there's nothing there people will care about, and if they do, they can make their own archive.
Not to devalue privacy (at all), but if the GDPR is so far reaching that anonymous posts are expected to comply with this, that destroys much discussion. Don't see why that's a reasonable expectation. That's no longer private but public data.
If you contribute to public knowledge/discussion, then taking your ball and going home leaves huge gaps in history, the same way you see [deleted] throughout many Reddit threads.
At a previous temporary job posting in northern Europe/Scandinavia I worked with some Japanese men and women (three individuals in total) - all fantastic people by the way, I still regard myself an active/actual friend of all of them - who all basically first went there as part of a student exchange program and then realized/thought they would be happier there than back in Japan and then made an explicit decision to stay and try to get jobs.
I discussed this topic in varying degrees with these people. The message was relatively uniform: they didn't think the Japanese work culture was healthy and what they had witnessed studying in Scandinavia encouraged them to stay there. After a while they made an explicit decision to try build their life there. They had been there for like 5-10 years already when I met them; two had families with young kids and one was still dating.
This kind of "escape" requires quite strong language skills though. And social skills.
Of course these individuals were preselected in various ways, like
1) attempting to go study abroad in a Scandinavian country (that in itself is a fairly extreme decision in Japan, I have been led to believe)
2) deciding to stay
3) getting a position in the multi-national company I was temporarily working at
So I'm definitely not saying all Japanese people feel this way. But still I feel it's relevant to note this kind of escape for Japanese people who feel they are not cut out for the traditional way of doing things.
For some reason the byte counter represents number of saved files when you do a "Save complete web page" in Chromium. It still displays like "4/53 B, 5 secs left". Weirdly sloppy.
The author of this piece really should know and understand the basic scientific concepts that are involved here. I suspect he may just be doing a dumb-it-down thing that goes a bit too far .
When i visited the Computer History Museum in MV a while ago there happened to be a live play session going on with the original hardware, with a bunch of excited people in this little room (the door had to be closed to create enough darkness to make that old screen visible).
I didn't get to play, but that was okay. Watching a bunch of (really polite) strangers huddled together, all excited about playing/watching this first graphical computer game was reward enough.
When I wrote the original Restoration Proposal for the CHM's pdp-1 in 2003, along with Ace engineers Joe Fredrick (h/w) and Eric Smith (s/w), we envisioned Spacewar! running and being demonstrated to ever-new generations of folks. Hearing your story is heartwarming, as we were hoping others would be similarly rewarded. Come back again and play some.
Not well-publicized: Every 5th Saturday of the months that have 5th Saturdays we hold a Spacewar! Tournament, and the prizes are Spacewar! T-shirts signed by Steve Russell and Peter Sampson (Steve wrote the main game and had help from Shag and a few others; Peter added a realistic star field, showing what one would see outside in Cambridge MA).
We ran Spacewar! for the first time during the restore on Feb 29, 2005. So we're coming up soon on 13 years...
I was involved in one of the non-FB companies who pushed for this weirdo program.
If I were to guess the stats: I would guess FB got 99% of the traffic, even though wikipedia was the key thing of the marketing message, at least in the west.
The basic FB setup was to target key people in african and south-east asian operators and after a while of the usual kind of negotiation say: if you'll set us up with this zero-rating program in your company, we'll get you a cushy FB job + visa to the US.
It was an open joke in the business at the time. People in every part of the industry (including myself!) were scrambling to get an FB job offer. These were the kind of things we were discussing after drinks when meeting with mobile operator customers.
It got to the point where operators were restricting the people who were allowed to meet with FB.
I am not joking. I witnessed (on FB!) several people from these mobile operators who I had previously worked with later move to California for FB jobs.
Yes, I am aware that this is likely illegal under US law. No, I don't have proof.
As I wrote, I don't have any solid proof for why they hired those people. I suppose the counter-case is that the FB partner program people could just have been very impressed with their negotiation counterparts? I am merely pointing out a direction for investigation here.
Basically, if I read dang correctly it is not possible to disagree, because a) she identified as being female, and b) said it was gross, c) it was mentioned in the context of abuse.
No, what dang said was, "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." No reasonable person could possibly interpret this as meaning, "it is not possible to disagree, because a) she identified as being female, and b) said it was gross, c) it was mentioned in the context of abuse."
You are just trolling, and I am only responding because dang's comment may not be visible to other people reading this thread.
Ok, humor me. What is the strongest plausible interpretation of:
"One that had a referrer as a thread on Hacker News kept insisting I couldn't be a real person, and wanting me to do basic math like 2+3 "before he would talk to me." It was gross."?
(I am not trolling. Disagreeing with your point of view is not the same thing as trolling.)
A stronger plausible interpretation is that the commenter has indeed seen many instances of harassment like the ones in the OP—which was obviously her main point; that as a SaaS founder she knows about chatbots, and would have no problem with a prospective customer who just wanted to make sure a human was at the other end (obviously it would be in her business interests to engage with such a user); and that she had additional reason to believe that the person asking her "2 + 3" etc. wasn't doing so in good faith, since she wrote "kept insisting" and "it was gross".
Now obviously I don't know what happened there, but the above interpretation is not only plausible, it's almost inevitable if you begin by assuming that the other person is just as smart as you are. Instead you began by being a jerk, assumed stupidity on the part of the other, and threw in additional insults. If you behave like that on Hacker News again we will ban you.
I'd like to point out that using this word to imply certain traits (commonly stereotyped to male behaviors) is not much different from calling someone a pussy to imply weakness/sensativity/etc.
I don't want to touch the flamebaity aspect of this but the word 'dick' was too harsh and not one I usually use in moderation comments. I changed it to the slightly more modulated 'jerk'.
