eldude

I'm not ignoring institutional racism, merely not assuming it, which is consistent with the American justice system tenet of never presuming guilt, even when you really want to and everyone around says you should.

You're making a lot of wild assertions that really are tangential and not intellectually consistent with my original point that there are no facts specific to this case to support the author's narrative, merely the assumptions and presumptions you espouse.

The only irony here is your complete failure to understand my original comment and your own failure to provide reasoning for your own false conclusion.

Based on the facts in the OP and parent comment, I was disassembling the race-baiting rhetoric as anti-intellectual and fact-less (which, since you missed it, is itself a fact), to refocus on the original issue.

Meanwhile, double-ironically, you again ignore context and facts, equivocate ("real issue"), and wildly mischaracterize me to make an increasingly invalid point based on a fundamental misunderstanding of my comment.

So, you focus on attacking my point with insinuation and equivocation, yet ignore the exploitative anti-intellectual (fact-less) position of the TechCrunch author, whose sole contribution to the story was to inject race?

Conveniently, you ignored the facts and in doing so implicitly mischaractered me as equally lacking in factual basis for my "narrative", which, of course, is absurdly wrong, since my first word, "Exactly" presupposes the parents' citations.

You mean the non-specific 2nd-hand quote from the officer that makes up the entirety of the justification for the race baiting and exploitative behavior?

    "Yup. That’s who I thought it was."

Like I said, it's an intellectually feeble argument.

Exactly. Exploiting his race to further a political narrative as the author has done, is both intellectually feeble and misdirects away from the real issue: authoritarian government behavior targeted at school children.

> In short, Ahmed was arrested for making while brown.

This sort of demagoguery masquerading as journalism has got to stop. Upvoting exploitative personal political propaganda like this contributes to an atmosphere of narrow-mindedness on HN that plays to the bigotry of its readers, with the majority of comments here responding in like.

I'm certainly not defending it, but in reality this sort of (over) reaction, is perfectly explainable when you consider the risk of government employees responsible for the lives of children NOT reacting and being wrong.

Yes, those involved need some education, but no more so than the author regarding journalistic ethics, or the commenters here stirring up a witch-hunt. You can see all the anti-Texan/Conservative/School/Government-ists overreacting here right on cue.

Procrastination is a rational emotional response that the outcome will probably not be worth the effort. Essentially, our body shuts down to conserve energy (resting) until we get to a point (waiting) where we feel a successful outcome is more likely.

This is especially evident in relationships when we put off "difficult conversations." It's not that we don't want to have the conversation (typically we rationally accept the "need" to have it). It's that we fear it probably will not go well. So we procrastinate until the odds are in our favor, either because the effort to achieve the desired outcome has decreased (waiting), or because our total available effort has increased (resting). This is a rational response and strategy toward achieving goals.

The problem of course becomes when the outcome is not something directly within our control, such that there is potentially no amount of energy or time that will make success possible. In these cases, we must "make your own fate" as many say. Or, to put it another way, one must gain leverage over the outcome by changing one's relationship to it.

Thus, the best way to overcome procrastination is to focus on setting outcomes you have control over (e.g., studying for a test vs getting an A), which creates a positive feedback loop since your goals are regularly achieved and thus rationally worthy of additional future effort.

This is also a circuitous way of defining momentum and it's importance stemming from a default to action.

In psychology, it's been shown empirically to be better to praise children for their efforts and actions than praising with identifying language (e.g., "that was a smart thing you did" instead of "you're so smart"). As stated above, this sets a rational positive feedback loop in favor of "smart" actions over behavior, which may include inaction, that successfully perpetuate a "smart" identity.

Yes. I'm aware. I was trying to be as terse as possible on the diverting topic. It's disputed whether past singular they was considered grammatically correct at the time, despite the source. Of course, then you have to define what it means to be "considered grammatically correct" and who decides that and now you're entering a whole subjective can of worms that turns into circular logic, leading back to the realization that language is largely cultural and expressive, not technical, unfortunately. All of these are reasons why there's not much room for a logical argument here, and only an appeal to emotion, bandwagoning, and some historical bad actors making the "generic he" untenable.

Still, the OC was factually incorrect and this entire topic is diverting and as you've now contributed to with your sanctimonious desire to prove me wrong, controversialized and alienating here on HN.

Please don't stop looking for a cofounder. It's true that all it additionally takes to be a solo-founder is self-discipline, but as a human being you are psychologically and emotionally unequipped to deal with this. Let me explain...

On History, there's a self-filmed TV show about 10 survivalist dropped off separately on Vancouver Island competing for $0.5M to be the last standing. The show is fantastic, not for the impressive survival skills, but for the human psychology. The show is called "Alone," and I'm fairly certain they (re)named the show after filming. What you witness over the course of just weeks, is nearly every wilderness expert abruptly losing their will to go on because there is nobody to share it with. They openly acknowledge that they have what it takes to continue, and were originally okay with being away from their family indefinitely, but they all just completely lose their desire and interest in winning or continuing because they are so alone.

In short, isolation doesn't just make it more difficult for you to achieve your goals, it rips the desire to achieve them from your psyche altogether! This is empirically shown and self evident in numerous aspects of society: solitary confinement being classified as torture, team dynamics, mentors, pair bonding, tribalism, etc... It's also why YC (mostly) doesn't accept solo-founders, as well as many other respected VCs.

[1] http://www.history.com/shows/alone/about

You're continuing to controversialize and divert from the original conversation. That said...

> I think I only get ten [downvotes] a day, so I save them for the really annoying comments.

10 downvotes a day? Please reconsider your behavior. You are almost certainly unnecessarily alienating commenters, and in this case, misguidedly so.

> I'm not sure why you think he/his pronouns are nongendered.

When I said "it was non-gendered," I was referring to the blog post, which meant your original comment, "The author uses female pronouns," is factually incorrect.

> The nongendered pronouns in English are they/them.

I'm aware, and intimated as much: "I'll forego [discussing] my use of a singular default male pronoun". Yes, they/them is non-gendered, but it is also plural, making it grammatically historically incorrect. However, despite the informality of my comment, given the extreme propensity of the "generic he" to be controversialized, especially in technology and the internet, and the movement away from it during my lifetime, I'll placate to avoid the negative insinuations.

Educating yourself on the context of the matter would go a long way to ameliorate your sanctimonious attitude, and hopefully disincline you to feel the need to controversialize, divert and detract from conversations in the future.

There are no gendered pronouns in her blog post.[1]

At first, I was surprised to find I falsely assumed she was male in spite of evidence to the contrary, and was going to thank you for making me more aware of my own oversight. Upon review, however, I made the correct assumption that it was non-gendered. I'll forego the inciting comment, and corresponding cultural political flamewar over my use of a singular default male pronoun. If you down-voted me, please understand that doing so is alienating and a disservice to conversations. We should not punish commenters for failing to conform to our own personal cultural norms. This is consistent with the spirit of your comment; engineers need not conform to external expectations of a masculine identity.

[1] Her handles at the bottom are neither pronouns, nor in the blog post, and were inconsequential to me given my present lack of motive for reaching out to the author.

This is a really entertaining writing style: technical enlightenment through demonstration via humorous examples. For the lazy (and additional humorous demonstration), I wish he'd provided an example gif showing it in action (i.e., Github, terminal, Sourcetree, etc...).

So Facebook rightly fears a backlash from implicit location collection because they are offering next to nothing in exchange. Do GoogleMaps, Runkeeper, etc...? No, of course not. Their value proposition is clear.

Conclusions: Users aren't aware and probably don't care enough in mass to deny implicit location collection. The subtext is there's only a potential backlash if you don't provide sufficient value; Facebook can't seem to figure out how to provide that value so they removed it.

I really like all the effort startups are putting into making employee equity more valuable, so awesome job here Coinbase! However, I was disappointed by the headline because I'm always hoping to see someone come up with a solution to the current cultural problem of employee equity's diminishing perceived value.

I've thought a lot about it myself and have yet to come up with a solution, but I really feel like it will cause major problems if equity is progressively treated more and more like a near zero value lottery ticket.

I agree with the need/value of side-effect/pure annotations. From a debugging perspective though, there are 2 alternative solutions: Aspect Oriented Programming (i.e., mutation observations) and Immutable data types (e.g., Object freezing) to cause an exception on mutation.

Depending on the language, you can replace the value with a watcher or proxy and add a break point to know if it was mutated between those lines. Alternatively, you could freeze the object or property or make it immutable between those lines to cause an exception to be thrown. Both will require triggering the case in question live so annotations still superior, especially compared to manually reading code.

So..... Could someone help me understand how we are simultaneously seeing a Seed Surge, a Series A Crunch, and a surge in $ filtering into "startups" from rich investors looking to increase ROI due to low interest rates? In other words, why are we seeing an hour-glass shaped funding environment and not a Series A Surge concomitant with the inflation in valuations?

Or more simply, why have Series A funds plateaued considering all other stages have experienced increased competition? What is unique about Series A that is creating this lack of VC competition?

While well articulated, this post is bloated with alarming entitlement and a lot of misunderstandings. In short, he largely claims to know what's better for people than the market (i.e., themselves) while lamenting his loss of power and importance through moral rationalizations and judgment.

Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are vast improvements over a world where bloggers would seriously claim, "I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted." Social media merely democratized and disseminated that power to the masses. No amount of rationalizations or FUD over a "television-internet" will reverse that positive trend. The elitist condescension that his links, comments or conversations are implicitly superior to the likes, shares or up-votes of the populace is more than a little sad, and I think he's missing the point; social media thrives because it gives people more of what they want, and who is anyone to decide that but themselves?

That said, he makes a good few points with invalid conclusions, mostly regarding centralization. The loss of ownership over our own content has severe implications for the internet, most specifically in our ability to control its dissemination and protect it from loss and privacy. Protection from loss is easy with the rise of web-exposed storage APIs like Dropbox, and eventually I think we'll see more and more cloud-storage-backed SaSS platforms, starting first in the enterprise and trickling down into the consumer market.

Regarding our ability to control our own data and the corresponding loss of privacy, it will take a lot longer, which is a real problem because the government treats the "privacy" of SaSS as a public square; You are entitled to none. We'll probably need a technological or cultural innovation here. Culturally, people would need to revert, which is unlikely. Technologically, something like a content-owner controlled database would need to be developed, and upon maturity, laws passed to require its use. Such a database would enable the revoking of permissions to cause all reference entries to be removed, and disallow the denormalization of any personal data. That seems unlikely to happen anytime soon, so we're consequently headed for some major cultural conflicts.

Lastly, the author scapegoats and disparages our focus on newness and popularity. First, humanity's focus on newly discovered information has existed for some time: gossip, newspapers, magazines, tv, movie theaters, et. al. Every edition has only ever contained the newest information or opinions along with the occasional reprint. Second, popularity is but one vector for relevance, as were hyperlinks. Yes, a poorly implemented Stream that interprets likes as votes creates a false-feedback-loop, but it's a widely known flaw, and exists primarily only in the nearly obsolete Facebook.

Once you clear away all the rationalizations he uses to justify why things were better when he was in power, you realize, it's mostly just whining intermixed with a decent social commentary on and summary of the evolution of internet media.

I may be naive/ignorant (I do have an Electrical Engineering B.S.), but hardware really seems like it would benefit from an experience / innovation sharing like this. It seems like hardware is at an inflection point w.r.t. large portions of it being backed by shareable / FOS software (e.g., 3D-printing blueprints; hardware/software platforms like Tessel, Beaglebone, Arduino; etc...), and adding a little fuel to the fire like this really seems like a potentially huge payoff. Pardon the connotation, but it's like domesticating a rare, but extremely useful wild flora, and growing it in mass while disseminating the process so others can grow it as well. Very exciting.

Would anyone with recent hardware prototyping experience care to comment on whether the above reflects their own experience?

Okay. This is a good data point and where I think we culturally and legally should be focusing our attention; laws should be passed to expand employee liberties and ensure the right to disclose wages for a specific class of employees before considering laws to regulate and encumber businesses.

Regulation like this would be absurd considering anyone can legally publish their salary publicly. Salaries are not public because employees want them not to be public.

I don't want lawmakers or trade unions undermining my right to privacy under some manipulative power-play guise of "fairness". We are all free to make our salaries public, if we think it is in our best interest to do so, let's talk about and focus on that and not be so naive as to believe regulations will magically solve a cultural issue.

> We're instructed to forget what we know about these characters, but then through hints we're supposed to recover the details of these characters' relationships to each other and the world?

Honestly, I think that's the point. You're told to forget your predispositions and be objective, and it's the degree to which you're able to and the biases that surface to fill the gaps of unknowns that this test is revealing.

S did not force himself on M. Objectively, he abused his power to make a trade for personal gain, and that's what you're judging. M was in no way forced to do anything and the way the story is presented is nearly as guilty as S in that she abused her sexual power for gain (undermining justice in the process) to free someone. The way it is presented, we don't know if it's altruistic or selfish.

For reference, I was JMSR.

> you make ignorant accusations with no basis in fact

The link you provided to refute my fact, is itself a fact that disproves your point and proves mine.

> The problem you have is a combination of ignorance and arrogance that you rely on to justify the assumptions and bias you have.

That sounds a lot more like you. I only really wanted to discuss my opinion on the use of a biased platform for election reporting, not whether libertarians are conservatives or the rules of /r/politics.

> You still ignored the underlying point that you are looking for evidence to convince you that your bias is true while selectively omitting facts.

Not so. I think you did a pretty good job providing the facts that proved my point. Thanks.

> So I'm assuming you are basing it on stuff like this [...]

Yes, that article is somewhat consistent with my point. Ron Paul stated himself (can't find the quote) that the Republican party was not reflective of libertarian values, but was merely the most expedient vector toward affecting US politics.

> If that is the case you are stating you are a social conservative.

Nope. Ignorance on your part. See my last comment[1].

> "A lack of facts to support my opinion" is evidence you don't have an opinion based on reality

Yikes. You wouldn't make it very far as a theoretical physicist. To be clear, you are either misunderstanding me (should I also mischaracterize it as a reading comprehension issue?) or maliciously mischaracterizing me. The complete quote is:

> It's not my intent to prove anything however, so lack of facts to support doesn't disprove my opinion either.

What I meant was, I am not presently intending to prove my point, and so am not presently providing facts to support it. As you can see from various other comments, I have no difficulty providing them, though to be fair, you provided the better fact to prove my point.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9627633

> http://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/3448-myth...

[Original response to the above quote removed]

EDIT: Looks like I missed the original context (in a different comment) for the above quote. Thanks for providing evidence that supports my point that libertarians are not conservatives.

> Objectivists, have taken part in conservative or right-wing political coalitions aimed at economic policy.

That's a political strategy in a two-party system. You're equivocating. Communists, socialists, anarchists, etc... must also choose a side in a two-party system. It, however, does not make them equivalent. More ignorance on your part.

Regarding fiscal policy, yes, you're right, I unintentionally was discussing foreign policy. Thank you for the correction, but it in no one affects my point. It seems fairly trivial to recognize I was talking about foreign policy, not monetary policy. Either way, my point stands. You would've been better off addressing that instead. Again,

> social conservatives [bias] is really the only bias you've presented.

I presented a general anti-conservative bias, not a specific one. I'm sorry you misunderstood.

> If you feel libertarians are not "conservatives" it is because you are a social conservative.

Nope. Your views are reductionist and yet again extremely ignorant. From a reductionist point of view, libertarians and conservatives differ in regards to Social, Foreign, Monetary[1] (as opposed Fiscal) and Federalist policies. Getting further into the specific details undermines your myopic view of non-liberals altogether. It's really quite a wonder how much of a disservice your ignorance is to making your own points.

[1] Libertarians are unrelentingly anti-Federal Reserve, while conservatives have historically mostly ignored it and Republicans actually helped create it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Federal_Reserv....

> To address your completely re-written post:

Despite your fixation on it, it in no way invalidates my point. It was one sentence that's acknowledged in the edit, and I openly acknowledge it as "ignorance" further down. What would you prefer I replace the text of "Edit #1" with?

> Yes, Reddit is not friendly to social conservatives but that is really the only bias you've presented.

Thank you for partially agreeing, but you are illustrating your ignorance and seem "only interested in attempting to misrepresent the facts to fit [your] world view." Specifically, you are ignorant to the fact that libertarian monetary policies are not interchangeable or equivalent to conservative monetary policies. Just one example is that libertarians are isolationists, while conservatives tend to be interventionists. You also seem completely ignorant to the fact that libertarians are neither liberal, nor conservative, but in fact libertarian, though from your POV (and those on Reddit I would suspect), libertarians probably are what you consider "conservative."

> https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/?sort=top&t=month

That's the link I intended ("top posts from the past month"). If you were not so blinded with bias, you would recognize that your link proves my point and illustrates that you are "only interested in attempting to misrepresent the facts to fit [your] world view."

> its really hard to be nice to someone

Really? I have no difficulty politely discussing the issue with you despite your clear ignorance, anti-conservative bigotry, myopathy and that you are wrong and misrepresent all the facts I am presenting. I have said nothing negative about liberalism at any point.

> 1) You make conservatives look bad by being this ignorant.

You make liberals look bad by being this ignorant, and arguably worse through your tone and difficulty with not demonizing me.

> 2) You are painting me as a "hostile liberal" when my problem with you is the fact you have a fact-free opinion of the world and actively misrepresent and completely rewrite your posts to remove those misrepresentations?

You are clearly hostile and liberal. You are having difficulty being nice and instead of focusing on the topic, go on to mischaracterize me as "Un-American," "horrible American," "opposed to [the 1st Ammendment]," dishonest and opposed to honest public political discussion, which is self-evidently false as I am presently engaging in one. I did provide a fact, I'm sorry you are ignoring it. The facts in the link as discussed stand.

> and completely rewrite your posts to remove those misrepresentations?

Again, ignoring the facts. See "EDIT #1: Okay, /r/politics is a US-only forum. Supporting facts updated." and above, "What would you prefer I replace the text of "Edit #1" with?" I will however assume this is not due to some reading comprehension on your part and instead fault your myopathy or hostility.

> Populist rhetoric isn't inherently "subversive". The fact you are convinced that Reddit is an avenue for "anti-US political rhetoric" means you frankly don't understand the value and purpose of the 1st amendment.

Lol, geez man. Did I say any of that? I sound pretty terrible when you discuss me. I said, within the context of US-elections, a global opinion site could be an avenue for subversive rhetoric masquerading as something else. I love how you rail on me for misrepresenting things in ignorance, yet you have a literal mischaracterizing misquote: "anti-US political rhetoric". You seem to pervasively disregard the facts to support your opinion. I said "anti-US political subversion", and if you don't think that exists, then you don't understand politics or power. I'd be happy to recommend some reading if you need education.

> The fact you would go against that makes you [...] Un-American [,...] opposed to people exercising a fundamental constitution right [,...] a horrible American [,...] think the ability to have an honest, public conservation about political views is a bad thing

Wow. Alright, enough, you've gone off the rails. You're no longer discussing the topic and just flat out doing everything you can to mischaracterize me by attacking my character. Thank you for proving my point in absolutely every way.

While it's possible your intentions are honest, you are clearly misguided and are ignorant of both the facts and from your demeanor, probably malicious.

> Your lack of reading comprehension [is] the simple truth

Ha. Geez. It had nothing to do with reading comprehension, and the fact that you both jump to assumptions that I must be something like stupid despite my evident articulation proves my point further regarding your propensity to mischaracterize opposing views. /r/politics' liberal bias is near-universally known amongst conservatives on Reddit. Because of this, I unsubscribed, and so never bothered to read that it was US-only. So it was a faulty assumption on my part that had no relation to reading comprehensive or my stated point in any way.

> How is he in any way proving your point?

His myopic openly hostile anti-conservative POV in defense of /r/politics. I provided one fact that by no means was intended to be comprehensive, and have since updated it to a far superior one. Rather than discussing the topic, he focused on my character (e.g., "lack of reading comprehension").

Easy. Tone down the hostility and thanks for proving my point. Despite my ignorance WRT non-US posts, a quick glance at the top /r/politics stories from the past month[1] displays the bias I mention: there is literally not a single pro-conservative post, only libertarian, liberal and anti-conservative posts. It's not my intent to prove anything however, so lack of facts to support doesn't disprove my opinion either. I posted to have a discussion, not whatever you're trying to have.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/

No. Reddit's user base is extremely liberal and hostile to conservative candidates and values as evident by the echo-chamber that is /r/politics, which fails to meaningfully support pro-conservative news. There are literally no pro-conservative and no anti-liberal top posts from the past month[1], only libertarian, liberal and anti-conservative. The paradigm or technology platform dramatically favors a very specific demographic, and is ultimately a disservice to democracy by disproportionately favoring that demographic's POV. If you fall into that demographic, I imagine it would be very difficult to resist the potential power play to further your own views.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/

EDIT #1: Okay, /r/politics is a US-only forum. Supporting facts updated.

EDIT #2: As a final point, being global in nature, Reddit will always encourage an english-speaking non-US-centric world-oriented political-view. This is precisely, as a nation, what we don't want, to provide a global avenue for anti-US political subversion masquerading as populace rhetoric.

I don't understand these strawmans. The virtue of the asynchronous programming model is low-memory overhead as compared to threads AND low latency for IO-bound tasks in highly concurrent scenarios.

Request per-process/thread has all the same memory overhead implication it has always had. It's almost like the author is ignorant of the reason for node.js' success or why it was built in the first place.

Also, "callback hell" is just FUD. Nobody who does this for a living and knows what they're doing really has an issue with this. Promises solve the unreliability issues, and async/await solves the syntax complexity issues.

I'd like to see this same analysis for 1000 req concurrency measuring memory overhead and using async/await for code comparison. Cooperative multitasking will always be capable of lower latency when you know what you're doing, and async programming is lightyears simpler than multi-threaded programming.