sillysaurus3

It's not really an exaggeration to say I felt insane. And like a worthless excuse of a washed-up community member. I know this isn't the goal of the penalties, but the psychological effects after 90 days are quite real.

Other people, though, take the opposite approach and paint him as a saint, willing to paint over the negatives.

Good point. Which kinds of negatives?

It's an important question for alt-HN. It seems like it'd be mostly harmless to let Terry post there, but your comment hints at possibilities I hadn't considered.

I'll probably lob an email your way. There are a few crucial questions to answer before alt-HN goes live. Like "What should we focus on?" and "What color should the topbar be?"

Everyone is convinced the new topcolor should be x. Unfortunately x turns out to be thread local to whoever's speaking. (Ba-dum tss.)

Do you think it's possible to launch a site with an arsenal of bad jokes? We've got hundreds. "The Bikeshed" would be a good name for a bar in SF.

Thanks again. Really. You have no idea how nice it was to find empathy anywhere in the replies.

I was so terrified to post any of this or to speak publicly about anything that it was very hard to read the replies. I was sort of skimming them holding my breath for the inevitable backlash. I happened to read your reply, and it happened to be nearly a verbatim description of me, completely by chance. And me replying about Terry was also by chance, since Terry was the first example that popped into my head of someone who has it way worse.

The truth is, I've been struggling with a few mental problems, and it's been very difficult. Partly because of how carefully you have to conceal them so as not to be labeled and shunned, or at least treated differently.

Somehow in the heat of the moment, it all made complete sense that my mental instability was so obvious that people were talking about it. And I was so stressed about the entire situation that I immediately started replying without thinking. That's more than a little stupid, on a few axes.

But um.. hi. I have a few problems. They're not so bad. And I try to remember to be thankful that at least it's not anywhere close to what Terry's going through. But they do get in the way of social interactions. This whole thread is arguably some evidence of it. Suffice to say, I empathize strongly with Terry and I wish that there were a way to include him in some activities.

When you're completely isolated by almost everyone you care about, it starts to get to you after awhile. I don't know what's up with me but I'm just going to take a break and focus on making the alt-HN good.

Sorry again. I tried to find your email but it's hard to locate. In hindsight my replies to you are incredibly embarrassing (more like mortifying, but whatever).

Actually, let's.

He can't control himself. He has no choice but to experience life through his eyes. He's excluded from pretty much every group he tries to join. Yet he persists.

Not only do I respect that, but I am starting to see why everyone conceals any whiff of mental illness. As soon as you reveal this fact, you become labeled and publicly known. And for people obsessed with their reputation, that'd be a risk.

In the same way you can't control whether you're gay, you can't control whether you have certain problems. Mine are nothing like schizophrenia, so it was a little amusing to be given the same treatment. But if hypothetically it were true that I suffered from some, your reaction would be to shake your head and call it tragic. That says a lot about the community.

No one can force anyone else to care. But it's a problem I've thought about a lot. Are we doomed to the Reddit and HN duopoly + faux-edgy 4chan? And Reddit is inherently balkanized due to the nature of subreddits. If you want to talk about problems with like-minded people, your options are severely limited. You pretty much have to create a throwaway or retreat to safe spaces. I've benefitted from both. Can we do better?

One experiment was to invite people to message me on keybase: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16089930

The response was awesome. A lot of them opened up about some really heavy things. We talked philosophy, morals, and mainly just gave people a shoulder to lean on when they needed it. I don't know whether it had much effect. I could tell some people didn't get much out of it, though I tried. But for others it was like uncorking a bottle, and there were often fascinating people on the other side of the screen.

This suggests a way forward, but I'm not sure what. It doesn't scale. But maybe it doesn't need to. I have time.

The thing is, when you bring people like this together, and they act as a unit, they can have an impact on the world. It's a force to harness.

Yet they never get this opportunity, because we're all so busy with our own lives. Why put up with someone's nonsense? Why not just hit that block button if they're giving you trouble? Poof.

That's little consolation to the human on the receiving end. We have no choice but to experience life as the master of our own existence, confined to the limits of our skull. Your thoughts are immediate; no words are required. Everything seems so obvious to you, because you're at the center of it. You're forced to be.

That poses a problem for people whose minds don't fit society's tight molds.

As a community, our reaction has been to dismiss these stories as tragic and to move on with our lives, or to quietly prune them so they can't bother anyone. But as one of the pruned, I can tell you that it's a lonely existence.

My hypothesis is that there is a way to build a place for everyone to come together. Terry's case is difficult, because he seems unable to prevent himself from copy-pasting gigantic walls of text (among other things). But if you were to actually explain to him that the problem is the walls of texts, he at least has a target to aim for that he can occasionally hit. Maybe not often, and maybe only once a month, but those few times would bring him happiness. That's only possible if you're willing to actually speak with them.

I'm not sure yet how to accomplish this, but I'm resolved to try. Slack might be part of it.

The overall point is that it's not helpful to shake one's head and label them. From a game theory point of view, it's better to harness everyone's talents rather than isolate and deny them just because of some mistakes.

Did you know youtube removed all of his 850+ videos? That was actually tragic. Archive.org has copies of most of them but no one sees them anymore.

Also, did you notice? He singlehandedly built an OS. If I'm destined for a similar fate, I'll take a quiet life filled with skill.

Besides, it'll be entertaining. I have quite a show planned!

What does that have to do with this? Well...

But like in so many other arenas, the Valley mentality hasn't adopted to the fact that they are no longer underdog rebels besieged by barbarians on one side and big scary rich corporations on the other site.

The reality is now that these companies are the ruling class, and the users are the general population. And people rely on these services and base their lives on them.

That's exactly how this feels. It's everywhere in Silicon Valley. And when you try to talk to them and point out that maybe this is unfair, it's like they don't even grok it. "Fairness? Morals?"

It's about power. The power to control you and have you obey. You either have power or you don't. And unless you build something, you have no power at all.

Those are uncomfortable conclusions. It pretty much defines what you have to do in life, for years, if you want to be in a position where anyone will listen. But that was always true – the world just makes it more obvious now.

But... It's also exciting. We have the ability to acquire power. It's true that most of us won't acquire funding, which is what we really need to influence the world. But at no point in history has it been so easy (relatively speaking) for a side project to suddenly influence the world. If you were a farmer in the middle ages, you were boned. Ditto for most of the present world today.

Isn't it weird? SV suddenly became the ruling class; you're exactly right. And no one has really been talking about the implications yet.

The people above you are usually as clueless as you are. They just conceal it with confidence. Which they acquire because you can't fire the people above you, and it's less likely for their decisions to destroy the company/team than for your decisions to get you pruned.

Being forced to bow your head and meekly speak in just the right way is enough to make me want to vomit. And I don't know where this feeling is coming from. It's very strong, and it came on in the last 6 months or so. It doesn't seem healthy.

It probably sounds like I look down on people who act that way. Quite the opposite. It's more like realizing we're all forced to act that way, all the time, and suddenly I'm not so sure this system is one we should want to submit to.

Even if people try to convince you that the power dynamic isn't there, it is. Every single decision you make is through the lens of "will this get me fired?" Especially when it matters, as this article illustrates. Which is by definition the most important time to take action.

I think it's bothersome because it's true. And that reveals just how subservient employees actually are. If you're an employee, you're servile. It permeates everything you do, and the way you're forced to interact and think with everyone around you. But especially those above and below you.

In fact, "above" and "below" you are artificial terms. We're all people. Yet some people are more special than others.

It's very hard to want to participate in such a system. But this is a personal flaw of mine.

Worse, many programs break when you start getting fancy. If you would just stop trying to add color to your node programs, stop trying to add emojis, stop trying to control the entire terminal window, then suddenly everything would work much better. If you kick off multiple processes, you can simply console.log() instead of having to set up an RPC interface to communicate with the main process. (This actually happened.) If you stop putting emojis in your error messages, then WebStorm can highlight the stack traces automatically when you run in the debugger, enabling you to jump to the stack trace just by clicking on it. This breaks when you add emojis. (Also happened.) And if you stop adding color, then you can redirect to a file without screwing things up.

In short, stop getting fancy. :)

If you liked this sort of thing, you'll love that book. It usually stuffs you full of numbers, like this article. But mostly it just tells the stories really well. It has several detailed accounts of Napoleon's battles, including the reversal at Moscow and the final stand at Waterloo. It goes up through the Iraq war.

With the Old Breed: https://www.amazon.com/Old-Breed-At-Peleliu-Okinawa/dp/08914...

I can't help but mention this one, even though it's not at all what you were asking for. It's just worth reading. It's unrelated to logistics, but it walks you through the terrifying perspective of a single foot soldier.

It's not like we're doing anything else with our time, so we may as well have a thought experiment.

That doesn't sound correct. Bitcoin didn't exist a decade ago. The amount of wealth it added can be measured directly.

But perhaps I'm not thinking of it in the right way.

(Are you sure it's a good idea to perpetuate the status quo? It's hard to get anyone to pay attention to what you've made unless you're already known. That seems a bit unfair to the next generation, and rather the opposite of oldschool hacker ethos.)

Try to find a quote and paste it. It's a useful exercise, because it forces you to constrain your thinking. Either from the whitepaper or from http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/

I don't think Satoshi said this, but I'll be happy to admit to being wrong.

In fact, here is Satoshi's clear and complete vision from the very beginning:

http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/16/

Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. It'll be distributed to network nodes when they make blocks, with the amount cut in half every 4 years.

first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins etc...

When that runs out, the system can support transaction fees if needed. It's based on open market competition, and there will probably always be nodes willing to process transactions for free.

Satoshi Nakamoto

Again, people don't like Satoshi's endgame vision. This is working as designed. Bitcoin was designed to evolve into this. It was not intended to stay static; it's in the whitepaper.

Break out of the groupthink. It's worth realizing when everyone around you is being irrational.

It's the design, folks. Read the paper and think about what it's saying.

Satoshi was acutely aware that 1MB blocks could only encode a couple thousand transactions. So what do you think "the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees" means in practice?

Not a <$100 fee, that's for sure.

Most people just don't like the idea of Satoshi's endgame vision. But it's working as intended.

Sure, it might feel upsetting. But is it true?

It seems true. And that has merit.

But so does your side of it. So it's a balance.

The government realizes how powerful Google's monopoly is. It's a monopoly on information. And that implies a monopoly on the rest of the world – at least, the part of it that uses Google.

Any litigation would be spearheaded by the government. As long as Google plays ball with the backroom deals, they have nothing to worry about. If the NSA couldn't tap into the data behind their backs, they'll do it clandestinely but with Google's knowledge.

This isn't as far fetched as it sounds. You're right that Google faces a monopoly breakup. But that gives the government all kinds of leverage into their treasure trove of human interaction.

It's worth internalizing this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

As technology specializes us, humans will become as obsolete as the horse. This is inevitable. Humans are not horses, but many may as well be.

This is an offensive thought, but it doesn't change its truthiness. What will the workhorses do? You saw what happens when coal miners become upset.

This will only worsen over time.

You do owe people food, shelter, medical attention, and everything else. People are alive. They are people. You owe them as much as you owe your parents. We're all connected.

Except for one minor nit: this logic doesn't scale. No one can possibly care about others that much. So it will be "interesting" to see what happens.

Someone was once interviewing pg, and asked him "Why did you start a company?" His answer was "to avoid poverty." He said it flippantly and almost without giving it much thought. People's feathers got ruffled at the notion that someone in his position could possibly have to worry about poverty.

But I think he meant poverty in a different sense: Your employer owns your brain. You are not allowed to say what you know (NDA). You're not allowed to compete, in many places. You have much less autonomy than you'd like to believe.

But take comfort in being able to choose which employer you serve. You're right, it's a choice. But you can't escape the system we all bought into.

Except, we didn't. No one asked you, and no one asked me. This was the system we were born into.

If you try to opt out, if you reject the notion that you must sacrifice your time in exchange for money, you will swiftly find all the reasons why you have much less freedom than you think.

"Poverty," in this case, refers to an impoverishment of time. Your employer owns 70% of your productive life. You're left with a meager ~30% of waking hours to devote to your own.

For all the talk of injustice, it seems incredible that more people won't speak out against this. This seems like the central injustice. We only get one life.

You're raw material to them. Something they can consume. You're a chess piece.

One reason I conceal my identity is because my father has some very strange political beliefs, and I'd be embarrassed to be associated with his writings. But as time wears on, the belief that war is the inevitable outcome keeps pressing at me, gnawing at me, like a scratch on the roof of your mouth.

History shows that war is the natural state of things. For roughly a million years, we have been at war. The peace brought by nuclear weapons has been maintained, thankfully. But we see how fragile the world is; this state of affairs holds up until the next generation becomes unhinged, and no longer.

What do you think will happen when the top captures so much wealth production that the rest of the world cannot self-suffice?

Truly. Put yourself there, mentally. Get into the mindset of the greedy nature of those at the top. Those who wish to grow their portfolios and dominate the world. The ambitious.

Those who own the automation pipelines. Those who own the government.

What possible incentive do they have to give up their control? They own you.

And like the middle ages, we have no recourse. We'd lose this fight. And they know it.

Forever. The lever of technology has become so large and terrifying that no one can possibly win.

The only way is to subvert it. And as we approach 8 billion people, achieving any consensus becomes less and less likely.

How high shall we go? Ten billion? Twenty? A hundred?

How far are we from the limit?

These thoughts are uncomfortable. Better compartmentalize them and follow the crowd: don't think about it, pretend it's not true, focus on math and programming and what little you can change.