What are people's thoughts on not deleting FB to better secure your personal identity. In the context of leaving google's services, I see people say that they sit on their email so no one else can take it, but I never see that sentiment about deleting fb.

Is it just that the bar to successfully impersonate someone via fb is higher and email is lot easier to manipulate?

I am particularly interested because I am planning on deleting my personal fb soon.

It's easy to not delete and stop using to serve your purpose. I loathe facebook et al., but some employers (fewer and fewer these days) want to see my online presence. To not have a facebook was considered strange, so for that reason, I keep it around. However, as far as maintaining an identity, or holding on to your custom facebook url, that’s a non-issue. Delete away, and create again—facebook is intelligent enough to reconnect you to all those people if need be. Personal identity is strengthened by other's endorsement. That's easy to get again with FB, especially if you're who you really are. It's difficult to take someone’s identity in that sense and it be valuable to the person doing it.

> some employers (fewer and fewer these days) want to see my online presence.

That's a really huge red flag. I don't think that I'd be willing to risk taking a job with a company that asked for this.

repl.it was one of the first platforms I used as I began my journey into the tech world. I very much appreciate the hard work and hours Amjad, Haya, and the rest of the team have put into their product.

With that in mind, I take a little issue with a YC partner saying the repl.it is a "YC Story." On the contrary, I think YC is a part of the "repl.it" story, and they were mistaken to take so long to see the value in the company.

Thank you, proud to hear this :)

I think the "yc story" was more about the interview process etc.

“The success of Technology of Orgasm serves as a cautionary tale for how easily falsehoods can become embedded in the humanities”

I only skimmed around so am perhaps misinterpreting their tone, but the authors seem to emphasize the vulnerabilities of empirical research in the humanities specifically, but I’m wondering if any field of research is not vulnerable to widely propagated falsehoods, or at the very least, poorly verified findings.

Mathematics, for the most part. I wager this is due to the low material cost of verification.

It's fairly easy for well-intentioned mathematicians to make small mistakes in their reasearch that drasitically affect the outcome of a proof. The sorts of falsehoods discussed in this paper are a consequence of lying about the source material, or a severe lack of due diligence. So these fields probably have a lower prior for a falsehood in a paper.

But in the vast majority of cases, these small mistakes are caught by other mathematicians. This is because verifying a proof is easier (in terms of resources) than, for example, replicating a randomized control trial (with the necessary equipment and subjects).

Not necessarily. Most papers are only ever read by a few people, and even very well cited papers can contain errors which may not be corrected in public unless they significantly change the outcome (but which can make analogous proofs more difficult, as I found with a 2000-citation paper in my PhD's field (its outcome wasn't affected)).

It probably happens less often in mathematics, but it is not immune: in 1932, von Neumann "proved" that hidden-variable quantum theories are impossible, but his proof was amazingly flawed (he essentially assumed that an average of sums is equal to the sum of averages), and the flaw wasn't widely noticed until John Stewart Bell pointed it out in 1966 with an anguished quote that has become quite famous:

"Yet the von Neumann proof, when you actually come to grips with it, falls apart in your hands!... It’s not just flawed, it’s silly... You may quote me on that: The proof of von Neumann is not merely false, it is foolish!"

This is more of a mathematical physics example, but everybody in every field could stand to have a bit more humility and rigor.

maybe i am just tired right now but "average of sums is equal to the sum of averages"

is basically true 100% of the time-it is called the linearity of expectation and is a basic fact of probability.

Could you include the papers or provide a more detailed comment?

Sorry for the confusion, I attempted to simplify the issue for the sake of clarity but apparently only made it worse. You can get a more rigorous explanation of the problem here: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0408191

I wouldn't necessarily call this article "bs", but at the same time, I don't see how people working for their family is really HN-newsworthy...But perhaps people in the software industry need reminding of this?

I believe there is a definite movement to partially replace remuneration with intangible "passion" in this industry, so yes the industry does need reminding of this.