Hacker News Reader

OK, so take one! Your partner is complicit in this and you still haven't done anything about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12926843

_piuson Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

Yes, you went Godwin. Trump isn't Hitler.

That's a vacuous argument. No one's Hitler except Hitler. No one called him Hitler except in your strawman. We can only judge the President-elect on what his stated plans are.

And one of his plans is literally to make Muslims register the same way Jews were made to register before the Holocaust. IBM faced an analogous choice: cut ties for moral reasons or preserve the relationship for expediency's sake.

The historical precedent is germane.

_piuson Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

Great moral courage there.

YC has a choice: do what IBM did in the 1930's or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

And before you say I'm "going Godwin," remember: It was Sam and Paul who've said they think Trump is a threat of similar proportions. If Sam really thinks that, the moral thing to do is cut ties.

And yes, it'll be hard. Would have been easier to do before the election. It will only get harder.

_piuson Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

Meanwhile, Trump's already got an RFS in waiting:

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-says-he-...

https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

The longer YC waits to do the right thing on this, the worse it will get.

_piuson Zcash begins

It's not a premine.

https://z.cash/blog/funding.html

_piuson YC, Thiel and Trump – 100 Shades of Gray

While it's important to recognize context and nuance, there are actual facts in the world and it serves no one to put "some people believe" in front of them as this piece does in many instances just to appear neutral.

Engaging in that sort of knowledge nihilism makes it impossible to have honest, rational debates because it doesn't allow for participants to agree on even the most basic of facts.

_piuson Shame on Y Combinator

I'll feel great telling my kids I encouraged people in my industry to stand up to a billionaire mouthpiece and financier of a prominent white nationalist trying to bring fascism to the United States.

In fact, I'd be ashamed to say I didn't.

_piuson Shame on Y Combinator

Another way to look at this is to apply a version of Jeff Bezos's Regret Minimization Framework: project yourself decades into the future and read about yourself in a history book.

If you truly believe Trump is an unprecedented threat to democracy in the league of Stalin, how would you feel telling your children that "it was just business" when you kept on a partner who was part of his campaign apparatus?

I don't think IBM is particularly proud of their management during the 1930's. No one knows or cares about the personal views of the people behind those decisions, just what they led IBM to do.

_piuson HN censored Marco Arment?

Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12731270

_piuson Shame on Y Combinator

In this thread and others I've seen this:

Shouldn't individuals have a right to have terrible opinions?

Of course they do. But a surprising number of “free speech” and “free market” people don’t seem to understand how either works.

Individuals have a right to support white nationalists.

Individuals also have a right not to do business with those who support white nationalists.

Individuals also have the right to organize protests against those who support white nationalists.

Let's be clear: defending the right to support a white nationalist while denouncing the right to protest against one isn’t courage, it’s sophistry.

_piuson Daydream – Google VR

Happy to take that bet.

_piuson Daydream – Google VR

A proprietary VR framework for a specific flavor of mobile phone with inadequate displays that will make people want to vomit if they try to use it for any serious amount of time. Wonderful.

That's neither fair nor accurate. Google wants to do VR at Android scale and they're starting with their flagship phone. The claim about the display and vomiting just isn't true.

God forbid we come together on WebVR instead of turning the VR space into yet another "monopolies punching eachother" not-invented-here pit fight.

People are coming together on WebVR! Chrome, Edge, Firefox, the GearVR browser all have experimental support for it and the spec is working its way through the W3C review process.

_piuson Daydream – Google VR

So sure, let's all pretend that wearing a pair of underwear on your face stuffed with a cell phone is going to advance VR. Yeah. That seems totally plausible.

Your comment is not going to age well.

_piuson Hands on with the iPhone 7 Plus’ crazy new Portrait mode

If it's good enough for Stu Maschwitz, it's good enough for me.

https://twitter.com/5tu/status/778670689930752000

_piuson Show HN: Primitive Pictures

This is really well done, nice work.

_piuson Api.ai is joining Google

How's firebase going these days?

Given that Firebase seems to have become the foundation of Google's mobile app development offering I'm guessing ... pretty well?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

_piuson Api.ai is joining Google

I'm assuming Google doesn't need any of the company's business, and that it is being acquired for its talent.

I wouldn't assume that. Developer-friendly natural language APIs will only become more important over the next few years.

_piuson Pirates Plunder 4K Hateful Eight, but Did They Crack DCP?

The use of DCP seems to be limited to very high resolution releases.

The DCP is just a digital print (what movie theaters play for digital releases instead of the reels of film that go with analog releases). It's not really about resolution per se, it's just a term for the whole package that the theater gets.

_piuson -

Guaranteed, you bastard!

_piuson -

Heh, fair point. I'll rename to something innocuous instead. :)

_piuson -

I'll delete.

_piuson Interactive Dynamic Video

Besides sounding bitter and petty, this comment is bizarre — the relevant papers are available right on the site (http://www.interactivedynamicvideo.com/publications.html).

We should encourage people to make their research accessible to a broader audience, not engage in catty sniping and whinging when they get recognized for their work.

_piuson Q&A with Jack Dorsey

has JD done any writing (books or posts) that would put him in a tech visionary realm?

Building society-changing products and startups doesn't count anymore? Twitter seems like a pretty big deal.

_piuson Marc Andreessen – Lessons, Predictions, and Recommendations [audio]

I am curious to see how a16z's investment results eventually pan out. I don't believe any of their funds have gone through a full cycle, nor have they experienced a down market, so its still too early to declare him a top dawg.

They returned their first fund twice over ... in three years.

http://fortune.com/2012/07/24/nice-ira-andreessen-horowitz-r...

_piuson Stephen King – How did a misfit high school girl change the author's life?

You can find them in a few anthologies.

Those two were published originally in Different Seasons, which had three of its four novellas adapted into movies. (Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and Apt Pupil)

_piuson Ask HN: Learning VR dev without a device

I'd recommend starting with Google VR and Unity.

https://vr.google.com/developers/

http://unity3d.com

_piuson Sign Up for Summer YC Open Office Hours

Seriously? You're trolling their diversity efforts with absurd strawmen like the idea that teams will trick black women en masse into being fake token founders so that the real teams have an extra shot at office hours.

There is a disgusting "argument" being made here, but I'm not the one making it.

_piuson Sign Up for Summer YC Open Office Hours

What's to stop someone from just getting a black female friend to call herself a founder to do the pitch.

Integrity? Self-respect?

_piuson Tool Recreating the “Decrypting Text” Effect Seen in the Movie “Sneakers”

If you have a better implementation, ship it. Don't trash someone else's work from the sidelines.

edit: OP removed the snark from the comment.

_piuson San Francisco Is Requiring Solar Panels on All New Buildings

If it's that compelling, you ought to publish it.

I'm sensitive to your viewpoint, but it's one thing to argue that state and federal institutions ought to take the lead on solving homelessness and quite another to suggest that the city ought to contribute nothing to the solution.