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In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

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Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#21

Post by mc32 »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #8

When I read this, my first thought was "wow, this must have been really hard to anonymize, if he wasn't careful to remove/change enough details people could figure out who the garbage man is". Well, not so much... > So of course Sayyid was aware that I was researching and writing about him. At the same time, he is not literate, so there are serious limitations on his understanding of something like a New Yorker story…

Yeah, it’s a stretch to say using an alias makes it less real or using a ruckenfigur picture takes away from the story. If the law allows for witness protection via alias, I can’t see something less real or genuine.

As someone else had pointed out this man may not realize or care about the consequences of the publicity but the author does have a duty to care and I think he betrayed that duty here.

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#22

Post by jplayer01 »

riffraff wrote: post #2

I honestly thought this was about the graphic API and resource management, I'm impressed by my own restricted imagination at this point.

... funny. My first thought was actually Egypt and actual garbage because of how absurd a leap it would be, then figured it must be Cairo the OS or some other more likely Cairo.

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#23

Post by zaat »

>During subsequent conversations with Sayyid, I learned that the Reuters correspondent who lived upstairs paid only 30 a month, which made me feel good about my decision. It seemed logical that a long-form magazine writer would produce more garbage than somebody who worked for a wire service.

Thank you for this gold

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#25

Post by zaat »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #18

tl;dr, anybody? I came to this article hoping to learn something about public policy, esp. regarding privacy. Whatever insights into those topics there might be are too buried in story for me to find them easily so I stopped reading.

lithub.com. tl;dr'ing literature is senseless.

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#26

Post by egypturnash »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #18

tl;dr, anybody? I came to this article hoping to learn something about public policy, esp. regarding privacy. Whatever insights into those topics there might be are too buried in story for me to find them easily so I stopped reading.

When you do not have a publicly-funded garbage collection infrastructure, then the private enterprises that fill in those gaps can, and will, make use of any physical or informational resources they find in the trash they pick up in an effort to make a decent living. Examples given include "a nice camera", "drugs", "porn", and "knowing exactly how much money an ambassador is making". There are no examples given involving blackmail but I feel that's definitely an elephant sitting in the room of this story of one journalist's relationship with one private garbage collector.

Now that I put it that way I feel like this is the core of a good argument for nationalizing social media.

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#27

Post by efa »

woliveirajr wrote: post #4

I love how HN is so diverse and how many submissions' titles can be read in many ways. Tip: this article is about a human, real-person garbage collector, and garbage is the real, physical waste that people put inside bins.

Or just set on the fire escape!

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#28

Post by endymi0n »

dang wrote: post #24
erik_landerholm wrote: post #16

I figured there was some new language Cairo with a next gen garbage collector.

The domain name is the tipoff.

Well - I read the domain name as a pun on Github of a new open source community featuring literate programming languages, of which a particularly new one named Cairo had a fully correct GC.

It took me almost a minute to adjust all my assumptions. Well executed nerd snipe.

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#29

Post by Jeff_Brown »

zaat wrote: post #25
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #18

tl;dr, anybody? I came to this article hoping to learn something about public policy, esp. regarding privacy. Whatever insights into those topics there might be are too buried in story for me to find them easily so I stopped reading.

lithub.com. tl;dr'ing literature is senseless.

The fact someone calls a story literature does not imply someone else could not benefit from a third party's bullet points. If you like stories, don't worry; it's not an endangered art form.

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#30

Post by zaat »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #29
zaat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lithub.com. tl;dr'ing literature is senseless.

The fact someone calls a story literature does not imply someone else could not benefit from a third party's bullet points. If you like stories, don't worry; it's not an endangered art form.

Nothing to worry about, I just didn't feel there is much to lift off the story beyond its literary value. It is a bunch of small stories about ordinary folks told from the point of view of a foreigner.
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