In this situation you are probably right. However, it's very problematic as a general statement. There are too many atrocities committed by violent majorities against powerless minorities that come to mind. This blanket statement gets into victim shaming really quick.
Agreed. Atrocities have happened and will most likely happen again with innocent victims.
But even with violent majorities there is usually a justification of the behavior that somehow involves something the minority party is doing (or not doing) that justifies the action. Not that this makes it any more morally palatable (or true) from an objective viewpoint but the division may exist to be seized upon.
I'd also argue that Trump isn't the cause of division so much as the result of existing divisions some of which are quite old and have been festering.
My last point is I really grow weary of hearing Trump slams. We get it. You don't like Trump. But some people do. Is there any way we could keep this repetitive bleating on Facebook or something? No offense to poster lastlogin. His comment history seems pretty solid, I'm just sick of the Trump slams every third forum.
My remark was not about Trump. That's why I started out saying that the parent is probably right in this particular case. My concern was with the statement being applied as a general statement. Had the parent made a statement exclusively about Trump I would have been totally fine with it.
It's somewhat concerning that there political situation has reached a point where many statements are assumed to be about Trump.
I was probably treading over the line into HN no go territory, which isn't right. However I really do think that ignoring the elephant on the room isn't helpful either. How do you balance these two factors? Likely by keeping threads on topic would by my thought...
As much as I despise Trump, I agree. I'd prefer HN remain relatively non-political. The minute it starts to resemble anything like the default front page of reddit, I'm going to be looking for the next HN.
Jeez, just when I thought Microsoft was getting better about letting people...actually download their software... they go and create pages that display completely different things based on what OS you're running.
Something like this worked out in my favor maybe 10 years ago. ChaCha (the search and get live answers site) was just started and wanting some extra pocket money I signed up to be an operator. I was probably 15 at the time, of course I just clicked 'yes I am 18' and ended up being accepted.
Well I found a few flaws in their system and started racking up money way faster than should have been allowed. After a few days of this and hundreds in my account I got a phone call during dinner. It was ChaCha, threatening to sue me for 'hacking them'. The 180 they pulled when I casually mentioned I was only 15 was amazing to witness. They completely dropped the matter on a verbal agreement that I would not visit their site anymore.
It was ChaCha, threatening to sue me for 'hacking them'. The 180 they pulled when I casually mentioned I was only 15 was amazing to witness.
Although it's an interesting story, it's worth remembering that you were probably just lucky here. I didn't notice where you were living at the time, but in most western legal systems you could certainly have got into real trouble under financial crime and/or computer misuse laws. Most likely, you weren't legally protected because you were 15, just practically protected because the company didn't want it on the record that it got outsmarted by a 15-year-old and/or because most 15-year-olds don't have enough assets to be worth suing for compensation.
Sure. This was somewhere around 10 years ago so my memory is slightly fuzzy on all the technical details but heres the gist of it:
As an operator your main interface to their system was a Java desktop application. Basically you sit there waiting for it to go 'ding!', you read the question, and accept if you think you're capable of answering. You would research (they heavily pushed their sources but Google was better about 100% of the time) and then communicate the answer back to the user using the application.
Once it was accepted the application would make an HTTP request to ChaCha's server to basically say 'A question was answered by this user'. This was easily visible using normal tools like Wireshark, etc. For your efforts you would be rewarded some very small amount of money, something like $.02.
I simply wrote a VB.NET application to hit this HTTP endpoint over and over again which would add money to my account without me doing any work. They didn't seem to be doing any verification that I had actually been given questions to answer.
The reason they noticed me was because I left ~8 instances of this program running for like 3 days straight which netted me hundreds of dollars ready to be cashed out, way more than any operator would be even remotely capable of normally given their pay scheme. So I was smart enough to figure this out but dumb enough to get caught almost immediately. And I'm not a lawyer but my guess is that this was considered fraud. Glad my morals eventually straightened out before I got myself in real trouble, honestly this was a decent lesson for 15 year old me.
