I think the author dismissed that too casually. Anything that makes the three less valuable will result in less space around the hoop. That's not necessarily a bad thing if we want to reemphasize the mid-range shot. The only way to tilt the game back that way is to change the math on the current dunks/layups & threes meta.
The Facebook aside was interesting. I've been back on FB periodically this year to try to sell some stuff after years off it and it cannot be overstated how terrible the basic experience of browsing the feed is, at least on mobile. It's a minimum of 3-4 ads per actual post from a human I chose to friend, and the ads are just the stupidest, trashiest stuff imaginable.
Just wait until your account gets hacked and you realize there's a bug with the "click here if you didn't make this change" links in the security email making it impossible to get your account back.
Then navigate to Facebook.com/hacked as directed by the help docs and have it reject any attempt to recover your account because it only works with currently used email addresses and phone numbers which the hacker has removed and updated to a value which you cannot know.
Does anyone work at FB or knows if they have a public facing bug tracker or ability to contact their developers? This is a pretty bad bug.
This, on top of how frustrating it is to report the hacked account to Facebook. Several family members have had their profiles compromised, including the email and phone number updates you mentioned.
Myself and many many other people attempt to help the situation by reporting the old profile as a hacked impersonator, only to be promptly closed by Facebook, as they cite they see no rule breaking. They reach this opinion despite the profile being massively changed, from an English speaking father of two, to a woman persona now posting obvious scam links and new family photos in a different language (and country) entirely.
Even as we admit defeat on recovering the old account, often tied to a small business page, and eat the cost of starting over, the old profile still masquerades under the old name, but with reputation damaging and clearly fake content.
I wonder if the BBB can be leveraged. I can't find Meta on there but I did find an Instagram entry and they have a rating of F [1] Maybe we should post the BBB page for Meta to the front page of HN and let people voice their frustrations?
While I definitely am in favor of having businesses listed there if nothing else to let other people with the same issue feel some solidarity, doesn't the fact that Instagram already has such a low rating not motivating any changes make it unlikely that anything would change if the parent company were listed as well?
Hasn't Yelp mostly replaced the BBB as the standard company that aggregates reviews of businesses? You could try leaving Facebook a 1-star Yelp review.
I use the web interface and it's also surprisingly bad, e.g. basic HTML bugs that interfere with engagement, e.g. text editor selection and editing bugs.
I'd say Craigslist has even less authentication for sellers and it's pretty solid most of the time. I've sold a ton of things on there and honestly never run into scammers at all.
Also, I quit Facebook before they added marketplace so I can't make a comparison. I'm just going off of this thread mostly. I also know people who sell things on marketplace fairly regularly / successfully.
Weird, I've had lots of success with Marketplace as both a buyer and seller. I only do local transactions, which is the same I would have done in the past with Craigslist, but I think Marketplace is miles-better than Craigslist.
Exact same thing here. Had to sell some stuff, hadn't done it in years, and was told Marketplace is the thing these days. Within 5 mins I have half a dozen messages all following the same format and all saying they would send x relative to collect. Took all my ads down and went back to Gumtree which has been flawless so far.
That aside it's funny because I have the exact opposite experience. It's the best place to buy and sell locally. Not every place has Craigslist (for better or worse) so it's good to have at least an OK digital alternative. I use it pretty much every day.
Yeah here in Baltimore Marketplace is definitely the place to buy and sell used stuff. It's like a mildly less annoying Craigslist. Except for the peppering of ads to buy shit online. No, Facebook. I came to you because you're Craigslist now, if I wanted Amazon I would have gone to fucking Amazon, you lost this fight, surrender, please for the love of God. Just show me shit I can drive and exchange cash for today!
Fwiw, I think this is somewhat of a self-reinforcing phenomenon. I go through periods of actual interaction with others on Facebook (for various reasons) and the feed seems to improve when I’m interacting with posts I actually want to see. But, when I’m not using it all that much, the feed devolves back into noise.
Also the ease with which you can get banned from the marketplace is ridiculous, with no way to appeal. We ordered some new kitchen cabinets a year ago and due to some very annoying shipping hijinks the shipment got lost. They made a second batch and sent them to us, and the initial shipment got miraculously found, so we had a second set of kitchen cabinets.
I made a Facebook account solely for the purpose of selling this extra set of cabinets on the marketplace, made no other posts about anything anywhere on Facebook, and my account got banned within a week. They asked me to send them a scan of my id to get it unbanned, which I did and they unbanned me. It was then permanently banned a week later with no explanation and no option to appeal.
I think there are 3 things on Facebook: friend posts, short videos from content farms, and actual ads. The first are what I want to see, the third… well, obviously I don’t like them, but they pay the bills, right? The second are, I guess, like things Facebook puts there to hide the fact that nobody posts anything to Facebook anymore.
Yeah, on web with extensive adblocking it's not as miserable (or routing my phone back through my pihole install). But most people aren't adblocking, and the "normal" user experience was jarring.
"short-dated out-of-the-money call options that cash out a day after a merger/acquisition" is, like, the definition of a suspicious transaction. Somebody's gonna get a knock on the door from the SEC.
If they obtained info about this through their role as a senator/congressperson, and not just through normal channels. If I understand it correctly:
Insider trading off of classified or whatever info they get from their senate/congress job - not illegal (though imo it should be illegal). (Edit: as mandevil points out, strictly speaking illegal, but largely uneforceable/unenforced)
Insider trading off of info they got from their buddy at XYZ place who knew about something ahead of time, unrelated to their senate/congress job - still illegal, same as for other people.
Why don’t people track the investments of senators and congresspeople and race to follow them? It seems like an easy way to get nearly insider trading.
This is false. Then-sitting Congressman Chris Collins (R-NY) pled guilty and was sentenced to 26 months in prison for insider-trading back in 2019-2020. He was pardoned by President Donald Trump as one of his last official acts as President, but Collins still spent 10 weeks in prison for insider-trading as a sitting congressman (this was for knowledge he gained outside of his duties as a congressman, it was knowledge he got as a member of the Board of a company).
Congresspersons separately aren't allowed to trade on things they learn from their job- that was banned in 2012 under the STOCK act.
Eh, my take is that the electronic disclosure stuff makes this more annoying for the activists- the people who are building dashboards of Congressional performance etc.- but doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the problem. The activists still build their dashboards, still comb through the documents and find things that look really bad, it's just slightly more out of date and slightly more work for them.
I do think that something like the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act (everything in a blind trust), or its even more draconian (no blind trusts, just sell!) Ban Stock Trading for Government Officials Act will probably pass, eventually. Those are general markers for where we are going. But to just say "It's not illegal if you are a Member of Congress" is flat wrong and encourages a level of cynicism that makes it harder to actually fix the problems we face today.
But lottery-ticket options trading is done all the time. The fact that the options expire the next day is part of the strategy (because before that, the options cost more). $20k might sound like a big stake but you don't know the size of the trader's portfolio, it might be 0.01% of it, and they didn't stand to lose the whole thing necessarily.
Yeah, this is not that suspicious IMO. The trade was opened yesterday when Splunk was at $119. They just needed a 7% gain by Friday to be profitable on their $127 calls. Traders make those kind of gambles all the time.
Not at this volume. Also, typically they do it for indices and typically based on some event (e.g., rate announcement), not on a heels of an unknown acquisition.
Radley Balko has a great overview on the fundamental flaws with ballistics forensics[1]. The tl;dr is that the core claim of ballistics forensic analysis, that it is possible to reliably differentiate between two models of the same gun using just casings and shells fired from those guns, has never been proven to be valid.
Great read, had no idea it was so incredibly bad! Definitely like pseudo-science, with extremely poor reproducibility. And a lot of dishonest massaging of words to make it seem much more certain than it is, benefiting the prosecution only. Imagine being innocent and having an “expert” take the stand and say it’s a “practical impossibility” that the bullet was fired from any other gun. The analogy with the tarot cards seems appropriate.
Seems like markings can be exculpatory at best, for instance that casings or bullets clearly don’t match, but that the “unique markings” of an individual barrel is complete BS, especially with precision mass production of modern firearms. But in practice, it seems to rarely exonerate suspects, even if the evidence exists.
> the above 2 passages cannot be serious at the same time as translations of a literary work
This honestly reads like maybe you don't understand how translation works? I mean, you're clearly coming at this from the standpoint of "I have a culture war axe to grind and I'm gonna grind it", but here goes: languages don't map perfectly into each other. Even languages that exist in the same time, in the same physical locations, where many people are fluent in both languages. There are words in modern Spanish and German that you can't express in a single word in English, and those languages have massive overlap and lots of common roots. There are words in English that mean different things to different people. My 21 year old cousin and my 70 year old father would understand the sentence "I saw Bill Murray on the street today, no cap" in completely different ways.
All of those issues are massively compounded the farther you are from the context of the original text. A 50 year gap between living people in the same country and speaking the same language is enough to make communication confusing; a 3,500 year gap makes it nearly impossible. The article this thread is based on (that you are clearly commenting on without having read) displays 5 different ways that different translators approached the exact same passage in the Iliad over multiple centuries. Lombardo's translation, much like Wilson's, much like any translation, is a work of invention. It has to be, because we aren't Ancient Greeks and we are not operating in the same milieu as the original audience for this work.
You clearly don't like Wilson's work for personal/political reasons, but trying to generalize that to "she's a bad translator" because her translations are different from other translations is a silly complaint that reveals a fundamental shallowness in your understanding of the process of translation.
Right?! This is the dumbest bit from a pretty dumb statement. Politics is just people working out how they're going to interact with each other. There's no way to cordon that off from anything else. You can certainly pretend that those industries don't interact with politics, but that's just another form of politics.
Hard to imagine a sillier complaint about a translation than "it tries to convey an ancient text to the people in the era when it is translated". It's like complaining that cooking a steak changes the nature of the meat. Yes, correct, that's literally the point.
Hybrid is the worst of both worlds. You still have to live close enough to the office to get there without an insane commute, so you don't get the "live where you want" benefits of fully remote, but you also have to have enough space in your house to work, so you lose the "home is home and work is work" benefits of working in an office. Plus, unless office and WFH days are rigorously coordinated (which destroys any "flexibility"), you're still going to spend a bunch of time in the office on zoom calls with people who are WFH. It's wild to me that this is being suggested as a compromise. Hybrid just guarantees a baseline level of misery for everyone.
> You still have to live close enough to the office to get there without an insane commute, so you don't get the "live where you want" benefits of fully remote
I just absolutely marvel at this attitude, like it is such a massive put-out to have any form of inconvenience by the entity paying you. The entitlement in this industry is going to bite a lot of people in the ass.
I was just pointing out why your suggestion that hybrid work is a solution was a dumb idea because it's the worst of both worlds, but you appear committed to a willful misreading of my comment, so...have a great day!
It's quite fast if you've got 240v outlets in your kitchen. Otherwise it's a little slower, altho I do like being able to hit a button and wander away to do something else, which I never feel comfortable doing when something's on the flame.
reply