Hacker News Reader

thenmaron In Bel-Air, someone is using 1,300 gallons of water per hour

I don't really like the faux-investigative tone of the article either, but it's misleading to accuse him of calling for vigilantism. He drove around a rich neighborhood, concluded that he would not be able to knock on anyone's door and talk about water, and then suggested a tiered tax system so that luxury use of water is discouraged, while also noting that there are additional externalities such as runoff that aren't being accounted for.

thenmaron Friends at Work? Not So Much

Would you mind elaborating? What kind of views are you talking about?

thenmaron The Genius and Faith of Faraday and Maxwell

Would you mind elaborating on this with specific examples?

thenmaron Free speech is last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’

I'd love to see what those exact same students would say if the prevailing attitude changed and a massive wave of right-wing ideology took over campus politics. I'm sure that they'd be crying about how their self-evident right to self-expression was being horribly violated. Poor things.

This kind of attack is completely unnecessary. How is anyone supposed to respond to this comment when you've already constructed a straw man for your opponent and trivialized it?

thenmaron Free speech is last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’

Agreed. Just read the first paragraph.

But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.

This base-shoring piece ironically panders to people who've already made up their mind and are uninterested in engaging in any kind of meaningful discussion. You can't possibly write something like that and expect to convince anyone that you're arguing in good faith.

thenmaron Uber slapped with suit by Philadelphia taxi companies

UberX recently became available: https://www.uber.com/cities/philadelphia

I've taken several in center city! (unsurprisingly, a much better experience than CC cabs...)

thenmaron Uber slapped with suit by Philadelphia taxi companies

There is UberX in Philly now, although as far as I know there were no regulatory changes (and Black still operates legally). The PPA actually did a handful of "sting" operations against UberX drivers when the service started, calling an Uber and then impounding the vehicle (http://www.phillymag.com/news/2014/10/26/uber-philadelphia-u...).

thenmaron An Orangutan Has Some Human Rights, Argentine Court Rules

I agree with your first point. Personally, I draw the line at the ability to suffer. It is well understood that dogs, pigs, cats, cows, orangutans, lambs, and many other animals feel pain the same way we humans do. Just like humans, I think they have a right not to be forced to suffer unnecessarily, by nature of being capable of it. For that reason I don't eat meat, nor do I go to zoos.

As for the second, I think that's an unfair and paralyzing comment but I don't think you mean it in bad faith. We all have different capacities to help alleviate suffering in different ways, with different impacts. The fact that there are "bigger" injustices does not mean that small ones should be ignored, especially when they are within your community and you have the ability to fix them yourself.

Or - if you're interested in stepping a little outside mainstream opinions - what makes animal suffering any less important than human suffering? Are we really special in some way that other animals aren't?

thenmaron The Troll Hunters

I don't think this sort of empty, dismissive comment helps anyone. Besides, is there even that much difference between someone who is genuinely hateful and someone who's just saying hateful things because they enjoy making other people upset? If it looks like a duck...

thenmaron What do all the controls in an aeroplane cockpit do?

Which crashes in particular were caused by attention to systems problems? I believe you - I'm just curious.

thenmaron A Eulogy for RadioShack

Were you recharging them?

thenmaron Is the NYPD About to Start Ticketing More Cyclists Due to a Mathematical Error?

Are they actually allocating resources for this? I read it as the police would no longer be giving people a free pass where they used to

thenmaron Is the NYPD About to Start Ticketing More Cyclists Due to a Mathematical Error?

It's not really a policy change though is it? Aren't they enforcing laws that cyclists previously were breaking with impunity? I would like them to show their work too, but I don't really see the policy conspiracy angle to this.

thenmaron Neuronal “Superhub” Might Generate Consciousness

I wasn't saying that meditation isn't measurable, or that it's a waste of time, I was talking about the idea of the brain as a "receiver of consciousness". Meditation is definitely interesting, but it is dangerously easy to cross from "this helps/interests me personally" into "I have constructed an irrational belief system based on insights that are ill defined and not supported by evidence"

thenmaron Neuronal “Superhub” Might Generate Consciousness

I would be careful comparing the work of pseudo scientific "spiritualists" to that of neuroscience. Why do you think scientists don't embrace these ideas? Is it really because they're somehow spiritually devoid and foolish and intentionally ignoring whatever truth you think you're grasping? Or is it because what you're talking about is nebulous and inherently impossible to test, with no theoretical underpinning based on experimental observation?

thenmaron Ten Years of World of Warcraft

My point was that the game is specifically designed to remove the aspects of hardship, frustration, and uncertainty from the work. It's not an analogy for real world problems because the real world isn't designed to coddle you and make you want to keep playing (or working). You might as well say that Cookie Clicker provides useful life lessons.

Edit: Feel free to disagree with me, but personally I wouldn't see WoW on a resume and think, "This person has experience doing hard work in the face of adversity".

thenmaron Ten Years of World of Warcraft

Is that a good thing? Aren't games like that designed to provide constant, positive, encouraging feedback for the player's "work"? There's no real risk of failure as long as you put enough time in, unlike the real world.

thenmaron Philae has landed

It really sounds like you're trolling. If you're actually trying to have a debate in good faith, please read back over your posts and edit them to reflect that. Using dismissive language such as calling space probes "toys", or space exploration "some arbitrary aim" doesn't help your cause - it makes you sound juvenile, defensive, and bitter.

thenmaron President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

Isn't the competition in Britain only possible because regulations require companies to share infrastructure?

thenmaron The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

Yes, the critical theory is what I'm talking about, and I think that knowledge is definitely associated with the political "left". The issue I had is that the skepticism is almost always ignorant and dismissive. It's just impossibly frustrating to try to talk to someone who refuses to do any background reading but wants to tell you you're wrong about concepts that live in an academic and historical context.

As for the military, I guess that one is more debatable. I agree that the Bush-era "support the troops" jingoism isn't around much, but I used to see a lot posts where it's implicit. Things like hugely popular photos of special ops soldiers followed by adoring comments of how "badass" they are.

thenmaron The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

I don't really buy that... the only liberal views I can think of that are popular in the aggregate on reddit are about the war on drugs and sometimes socialized medicine. In general, reddit is pretty hostile towards women, skeptical of feminism, overtly racist, and pro-military.

I guess I would characterize it more as libertarianism strongly centered on the perspectives of middle class, white men.

Edit: I guess "I don't really buy that" was a poor choice of words. I don't think you're lying to me. But your experience was very different from my experience. I stopped using reddit because I felt like all the big subreddits were too socially conservative!

thenmaron Tim Cook Speaks Up

Please don't respond to me with disrespectful and disruptive snark. Nobody was fired. Nobody went to jail. There was no "stifled discourse". If you'd like to elaborate specifically, then please do.

thenmaron Tim Cook Speaks Up

Brendan Eich donated money with the sole goal of denying equal rights to people based on their sexuality. There's nothing wrong with having an unpopular opinion, but I think there is something wrong with that. And I suspect you would too if it were you whose rights were being taken away.

Edit: Eich supported Proposition 8 which was _ruled unconstitutional_ for violating the Equal Protection Clause. Yes, his support was non-criminal, but he was fundamentally supporting something wrong, both morally and legally.

thenmaron Countries where Americans can study at universities, in English, for free

Doesn't sound too great for the (disproportionately black and poor) victims of the drug war...

thenmaron Alan Eustace Jumps from Stratosphere, Breaking Felix Baumgartner’s World Record

Mine is that I can't afford to hire a team of engineers for three years...

thenmaron iMac with Retina 5K display

Thanks!

thenmaron iMac with Retina 5K display

What does "full benefits" mean?

thenmaron What Developing Acute Schizophrenia Feels Like

It's a very good reason to investigate causation. This comment gets tossed around all too often by armchair scientists with a political agenda.

thenmaron All pull requests will be accepted. Let's see where it goes

So far: goatse, troll face, and rm -rf

epic trolls, gamers...

thenmaron The USSR used a nuclear charge to stop a gas well fire in 1966

Here's the wikipedia page for anyone curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corexit#Toxicity

There are plenty of links to reliable sources there. Which page were you looking at?