Humjob

I think you mean a high slave to citizen ratio.

That's a LOT of code in the controllers. If I had to guess, it sounds like they're putting business logic in their controllers, which is a fairly well-established anti-pattern.

How's Shopify's platform performing these days?

At the risk of appearing politically incorrect, what race/ethnicity was the guy?

Some of these time claims are comically wrong.

The average man spends nowhere near 90 minutes a day on 'attire and grooming.'

Most people don't work out an hour a day either.

Laundry? No way that's 2 hours per week.

Most people don't cook every meal either. And making a sandwich or pouring a bowl of cereal sure as hell don't take 30 minutes.

Here are some actual statistics that weren't randomly pulled out of my ass and subsequently upvoted on Hacker News:

https://priceonomics.com/how-young-adults-spend-their-time-2...

What I find interesting is how the media presents little to no statistics to back up their claims of blacks being subject to de facto police genocide.

Here are some statistics: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3ADqQNf...

A couple key points: - More people in the US are struck each year by lightning than are killed by police. (373)

- Of the 1,491 persons that died from police use of force from 2009-2012: 915 (61.4%) were white males 481 (32.2%) were black males 48 (3.2%) were males of other races 28 (1.9%) were white females 15 (1.1%) were black females 4 (0.2%) were females of other races

- Of the 56,259 homicides from 2009-2012, 19,000 (33.8%) were killings of black males. Comparisons by types of homicides of black males: 481 (2.5%) were the result of police use of force 152 (0.8%) were the result of a negligent accident homicides (i.e., child playing with a gun) 648 (3.4%) were the result of a justifiable homicides by private citizens acting in self-defense 17,719 (93.3%) were criminal homicides (murders)

More blacks are killed in justifiable self-defense scenarios than are killed by police. And overwhelmingly more are killed in homicides, mainly by other blacks.

Also note: According to the US Department of Justice, blacks accounted for 52.5% of homicide offenders from 1980 to 2008, with whites 45.3% and "Other" 2.2%. The offending rate for blacks was almost 8 times higher than whites, and the victim rate 6 times higher. Most homicides were intraracial, with 84% of white victims killed by whites, and 93% of black victims killed by blacks. (Whites are being lumped in with Hispanics here.)

It's fairly clear that there isn't an epidemic of wide scale police violence against blacks. Instead, a few incidents have been blasted onto social media, and uncritical leftists have picked them up and ran with them. I see Black Lives Matter more as an expression of intergroup competition and aggression against traditionally white power structures. Other leftist groups take the same approach, e.g. with feminist fabrications about mass rapes on college campuses - college campuses are in fact among the safest places in the world, but feminists treat them as though they're some Mad Max-esque raping dystopia by claiming nonsense like 1 in 4 college girls get raped. They're mysteriously silent about places where real mass raping occurs, such as Africa and the Middle East.

I could go on, but suffice to say, I believe we're in a period of mass hallucination and hysteria, with entire movements justifying their existence on statistically nonsensical claims. This has happened many times throughout history, and it's leaned to both the right and left axes of the political spectrum. This time the wind just happens to be blowing to the left.

This is a great example of an entrenched incumbent/monopolist backlash against an earnest attempt to cut costs and increase the efficiency of government. This same story happens every day throughout the world in numerous ways, and solving it so the 'good guys' win is in my opinion one of the of the most important things a country can do to improve its institutions.

I've spoken to a number of developers who work in DC, and they pretty much tell the same story: huge tech companies/consulting firms who want to lock in a long-term contract use unnecessarily complex technologies and solutions (I'm looking at you, Java EE) that create big legacy codebases which are very difficult to switch away from, ensuring that the contractor has a job forever. Furthermore, once they've got the government agency 'by the balls' (AKA, the contractor has built a complex, poorly documented monster which only it can understand), it can charge a ridiculous amount of money for maintenance and new feature development.

Wasn't Satoshi just outed as Craig Wright? Although, that story appears to have a lot of holes in it. If this is true, it's fascinating information.

Super cool idea - I'll try this out today.

Are you implying that the media obfuscates reality with selective reporting to push a politically correct/leftist narrative that implicitly demonizes white men? Why, that's absurd! #BlackLivesMatter

Agreed. Given the events the author described, the claim that Amazon sees its customers as 'disposable' is completely unfounded. If I were running a shipping business and a customer had three refunds issued in a brief period of time under unusual conditions, I would want to check in and see what was going on as well.

Very cool!

I'm a bit of a newb though - how do I install this?

I find the premise of the article rather silly, though I still enjoyed reading it. From my experience in interacting with college students, media workers and business executives we're living in an era of hair-trigger shock instincts, where a sizable minority of the population jumps at the chance to be 'offended' and 'shocked' on behalf of whatever is the oppressed group or social issue of the week, thereby gaining power for themselves by seizing a newly constructed moral high ground.

Want to shock the average person who considers himself an 'intellectual' or 'politically enlightened?' Say something inegalitarian (whether it's true or not doesn't really matter in terms of the emotional impact it will cause) about a population group other than southern whites.

Other fun hot topics include eugenics/dysgenics and the cultural attitudes and government policies that drive population quality, the concept of population quality itself, immigration and whether it should be restricted, whether the 2-parent family unit is important to society's long-run health and how feminism played a role in its decline, etc.

This is a great summary of the pitfalls of laissez-faire economics. Do you have a blog where you write about your political/economic beliefs? Also, what books/resources have you found most useful in attaining a more accurate perspective on the way economies actually work?

I have a question about bitcoin in general - how do transactions on the network get verified? Does it mostly happen through miners? If so, what happens when mining reaches the point where it becomes economically worthless to everyone except a few electricity thieves? Will there just be a massive backlog of unprocessed transactions?

Unless I'm wrong somehow, I could see this becoming especially problematic as bitcoin becomes more popular and the daily transaction volume grows. How does the bitcoin foundation/community plan to tackle this issue?

I've read much the same - it seems to me that the West's current political ethos is largely a reaction to the racial idealism propagated by the Nazis in WW 2, which was used as an ideological justification for the Holocaust. Consequently, any discussion or idea which even tangentially broaches the topic of eugenics/dysgenics is a massive hot potato.

China doesn't have that kind of baggage associated with its history and on top of that it's ambitious to establish itself as a superpower. Thus, Chinese people are far more welcoming of genetic engineering and it won't surprise me at all if China is the first country to implement it on a widescale basis. Then, like you said, competitive pressures will virtually guarantee that the rest of the world will follow its lead.

Very interesting. This topic has some rather pertinent parallels to our current civilization.

Suppose:

a) Human intelligence is heritable.

b) Less intelligent humans are more fertile than their brighter peers.

c) The breeding of the less intelligent is subsidized by society over a long period of time.

What are the long term consequences going to be? I'd bet Peter Thiel has secretly considered this among his theories of why innovation has slowed, but wouldn't dare say so in public.

I absolutely agree with this.

For anyone curious about how psychiatry is bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies, read the book "Mad in America" by Robert Whitaker. He looks at studies of the long-term outcomes for schizophrenia patients who are treated with drugs versus those who aren't given drugs. What he finds is that schizophrenics who never take psychiatric drugs have overwhelmingly better long-term outcomes than those that do.

This isn't a mere selection effect either; the studies track cohorts of people who were given the same prognosis (bad, medium, or good) at the beginning of their course of treatment. In each cohort except for the most severe, individuals who were treated with drugs experienced some short-term relief but fared far worse than the non-drug subgroup over the long run.

The psychiatry establishment has a long and ugly history of suppressing alternative treatments which emphasize little/no drug use. There is a massive vested financial interest in the status quo treatment of keeping schizophrenics on drugs for as long as possible. In my opinion it's the most criminal act being perpetrated today on a systemic basis by a supposedly respectable profession. Forget about Wall Street blowing up the economy with collateralized debt obligations or politicians underfunding pension obligations to the tune of billions of dollars; psychiatrists are literally preying on the brains of the mentally ill in direct contradiction to the evidence of which treatments work best, all so they can line their pockets with money.

One concrete example: a study by the World Health Organization found that schizophrenics in the US and other developed countries fared much worse than schizophrenics throughout the developing world. What's the common thread among treatment of schizophrenics in the developed world vs those in the developing world? Drug use.

This issue strikes near to me since I had a run-in with a psychiatrist when I was much younger due to anxiety issues/mild psychotic symptoms which have since been resolved with age and quitting a job which I hated. He kept pressuring me to take drugs, but when I showed him the aforementioned study his response to me was astounding: "Well, I haven't personally seen that in people I've treated." His entire basis of selecting a course of action was anecdotal data!

http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology/index.html - That's another great resource on the sham science underlying psychology/psychiatry. Paul has written a number of them, and they're quite informative.

Agreed. Annotated code with long-form explanations on the side (instead of annoying comments which clutter up the code itself) is a huge help to aiding my understanding. I hope one day that IDEs will incorporate a code commenting system with clickable 'overview comments' which expand into broader side bar descriptions, making the code shorter and more readable yet at the same time better documented.

What you're describing is 'regression to the mean.' Francis Galton noticed this effect when he was studying the traits of various genetically influenced traits.

This doesn't invalidate the idea of eugenics. You can still modify the average of a trait over time in a given population in spite of any mean-regressing tendencies. It just happens a bit more slowly.

If the government ends up prosecuting him, it will be a massively idiotic move on their part. It's already bad enough that they've withdrawn their job offer. To use a war analogy, this situation is similar to your army shooting a surrendering enemy at the end of a battle, thereby ensuring that no future enemies will want to surrender and will instead fight to the death. You gain a short run benefit at the expense of destroying your reputation.

Offering him a job under false pretenses and then prosecuting him creates a big disincentive for any future hackers to a) talk to government officials who approach under seemingly benevolent circumstances and b) even want to work for the government at all if it pulls scummy moves like this.

It's incredibly difficult in the long run to make money by day trading. You need to be in the top 20% of trading ability to just break even (meaning, 80% of people who day trade outright lose money) and among the top 2-3% of traders if you want to make any substantial profits.

I personally take Charlie Munger's approach of going long a US equity index with most of my money and then using leftover funds to exploit what I perceive as structural mispricings in different asset classes/financial markets that I think will correct themselves in the short/medium term. Bitcoins, for example, have been a fun ride since I bought some at the start of 2013.

See this study on day traders for more info:

http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/odean/papers/Day%20Traders/...

Very interesting. You've clarified a lot of points I had floating around in my head about this topic.

Here's another version of events:

http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-true-story-of-the-tinder-war-o...

As awkward as it is to say, stories like this make me averse to hiring or working with unknown women in the tech world and I suspect the same is true of other male developers. If I'm ever in a position to do so, if I were to hire a woman I would have to know for a fact that she is very cool and wouldn't cause a shit-storm over some trumped up sexual harassment allegations.

I don't have any a priori objections to working with women, but the potential ability of a 'sexism' lawsuit to sap a startup of its two most valuable assets (time and money) lowers their desirability as prospective employees.

I'm also baffled as to how this brogrammer meme came about. Developers/males in the tech world are some of the nerdiest and nicest people I know. They're the diametric opposite of 'bros' who wear backwards baseball caps and act obnoxious in public.

If government debt grows high enough then an increasingly large percentage of federal spending will be devoted to paying interest on that debt rather than on arguably more useful areas which create future prosperity, such as education and scientific research.

After a certain point this becomes unsustainable and bad things start to happen, ranging from total political & economic collapse (Germany in the 1920s) to hyperinflation (Zimbabwe) to, in the best of the worst case scenarios, a large default/restructuring and subsequent downgrading of a country's debt to junk status (Argentina in the 2000s).

As F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and numerous other economists have written, government spending tends to be more inefficient than the free market because the government isn't constrained by profits and losses, which are society's way of indicating whether a company is producing goods and services that are valuable and desired. Of course, there are some goods and services that only the government can provide well, and the current left-right political divide is largely a debate over the point at which government taxation and spending becomes undesirable and inefficient. However, it's undeniable that at a certain level (almost certainly a level below our current level of spending in my opinion) each marginal dollar the government sucks out of the economy is used less efficiently than it would have been used if it remained in private hands.

Of course Slate would write an article like this.

The site was always liberal, but it used to represent a sort of rational leftism. In recent years it's churned out increasingly deranged and self-parodying social justice warrior-esque articles, to the point where Marx himself would call them a bunch of dirty commies.

From what I gather, in a weighted vote PM system the 'weighting' of the vote (AKA, the expected likelihood of the event occurring) is based on how much money you invest for or against the event occurring. Hence, 999 'for' votes of $1 are worth less than a single $1000 vote 'against.'

With all due respect, you are speaking like an employee, and the OP explicitly stated that his intention is to be a founder. It's undoubtedly true that coding skills can matter in the early days, especially if you're a solo founder and don't have a technical partner, but if you're a founder and your company has any significance then your abilities to manage others, stay motivated, create detailed and inspired yet feasible product specifications, pivot when necessary to meet market demand, effectively & cheaply acquire customers, create distribution channels, market your company, etc. are vastly more important than your ability to code. The employees do the bulk of the coding.

Maybe HN is becoming more negative. Or maybe, just maybe, HN users weren't in the mood for holier-than-thou moralistic berating about how evil the tech industry is for focusing on the bottom line of innovation and profits rather than trying to bend reality to fit some postmodern wet dream of inherent equality in STEM-skills based aptitudes between genders.

In other words, Larry Summers was probably right. Then again, he was fired shortly afterwards for daring to express disagreement with one of the popular ideologies of our era.

The Science of Enlightenment is a pretty good intro CD. His YouTube videos are great (I've watched all of them) and he also has a home study course you can use. The URL is:

http://www.basicmindfulness.org/

The best teacher bar none in my opinion is Shinzen Young. He is completely secular, has decades of experience, and has developed an in-depth methodology informed by science and logical systematization. He's all substance and has no fluff and no woo-woo BS about how your chakras aren't aligned.

http://www.shinzen.org

http://www.youtube.com/user/expandcontract