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Simply calling someone "hateful" is an emotional argument at this point, and hurting discourse.

I know they have real concerns, like economic pain, threats to their way of life, and concerns about mass immigration—concerns which, by the way, I argued in the grandparent that the left counters with labels. "Your concerns aren't real; you're just xenophobic." But I think the cultural stuff was a big part of it.

I realize they don't represent all Trump supporters, and never said they did.

These are labels. No one really knows what "hate" means anymore, but because people are emotional, they see the word, recall what they think of Trump, and think, "yeah, that's hateful!"

This is a problem for two reasons. First, while Fred is probably a smart, intellectually rigorous guy, many people aren't. Most people who shout "that's hateful" or "that's racist" don't actually have a repository of comprehensive thought behind it. This is partly why Trump won in the first place. People everywhere would say, "You support Trump! You're racist!" or "Trump has a position involving race! He's racist!" This is not an argument, but once you introduce this vitriolic adjective into the room, everyone worries about their ideas being placed into this odious category, and discussion becomes stifled. People become sick of this, and vote Trump just to fuck with everyone.

The second reason is that using labels convinces no one who isn't already on your side. Fred knows this, and this post is targeted at those people. This is virtue signaling: taking a "brave stance" on a position that people already agree with you on. Some virtue signaling is necessary; leaders should speak out; but generally this type of lazy rhetoric, combined with the incentive of popularity over truth, divides us more than any policy.

I'm glad he's donating money, but he writes that he's "done keeping his mouth shut," and for that to be a courageous act he has to (like everyone else) do more than hurl labels.

I'm personally extremely conflict averse, in that I hate senseless fighting where winning depends mostly on asserting yourself. I'm cool with competition of ideas where the best ideas win, and I optimistically suspect most of these "conflict-averse" women would be too.

Edit: I just ran the quote through Google Translate. Still, merely casting God as being ultimately responsible is a step forward from interweaving theology throughout your physical theories.

I want crowdfunding to work, but your claim that Sam can't see straight about it isn't supported by the video.

The problem with JS is there are too many patterns in the code, like the mentioned list.map(function(whatever) { ... }). Because JS is a medium power language it doesn't let you abstract this stuff with macros or at least rewrite the syntax.

Coffee and Live provide some relief, but Clojurescript is heaven.

Anyway, you're building something through your own initiative, and every day you wake up and think to yourself, "what do I build next?" Perhaps you continue thinking hard about this as you pour yourself a coffee or whatever. Then you go and build it, and if you picked the wrong thing, your customers will as a direct consequence get mad at you. I personally think that kind of responsibility is much more exciting than being managed.

There's a pretty good chance all this will fail, simply because most things fail. That doesn't mean it was a waste of time. It just means your time wasn't here yet, and in the meantime you face life with a bit more data than you had before. Maybe next time around.

As for the people who tell you your project could've been built in a couple weeks, ask them if they routinely say the same thing to students doing problem sets, or anyone who's just starting to learn something. I mean, it's just nonsensical.

Also, mean-spirited negativity is really bad. You basically just have to cut people who radiate it out of your life, or at least be disciplined about what you talk about with them.

I don't know, that's my $0.02.

I was worried whether it'd randomly shut down, so I emailed the creator, http://pastebin.com/raw/eWG8RQqk, and it looks like it'll be safe for a while.

I have no idea whether using services like these is a good idea.

I did read once that humans basically evolved to handle childcare as a society. Apparently villages used to raise all the kids together. So I am probably arguing against biology here.

I'm still not sure assuming that people with kids have less time left over is discrimination, but I am probably projecting my own lack of desire to have kids onto the separate issue of how society should be run.

But why does it fall on companies to create an "environment" that treats people with kids the same way when in fact their circumstances are different?

During the YC/Thiel thing, I saw someone cite "I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon", as an example of a morally outrageous statement. But surely people with small kids are more preoccupied?

Why do companies/society need to accommodate people who have kids? Why are maternity/paternity leave a thing? How come we don't expect people to price the fact that having a kid is a lot of work that will inherently set their life back into their decision of whether to have one?

Is it really so "evil" when one makes the assumption that someone with kids is on balance less dedicated, more tired, more preoccupied, etc. than someone without? Can't we rephrase that as, someone who has a matter in their life they need to spend hours a day on will have less time for other things? Is that discrimination?

Am I the only one who just hasn't experienced this feeling? There used to be Rails/Django and jQuery. Now there's Node and React. Both revolve around extremely simple ideas. Spend an afternoon reading the React docs, and you'll know everything you need. Take another afternoon after that and learn Redux. If you have another few afternoons, learn Clojure, and see what the Lisp folks have gotten going with reagent/re-frame. There isn't that much to keep up with.

It's the same with complaints about JS having too many transpiled dialects. These dialects make life easier. There are good ideas in them. For example, Livescript is wonderfully concise and elegant, at no cost of readability once you grok Livescript. It makes your code more readable and faster to write. How is this a bad deal?

I sometimes wonder if people are just annoyed that they need to learn new paradigms at all. It's not like ours shift at an especially fast rate.

I've yet to see this claim substantiated. Why can't one coherently believe Trump is an existential threat to society while allowing one of his biggest supporters to give advice to startups? What on earth does one have to do with the other?

People keep talking about moral "incoherence" and "spinelessness," in response to which I have two concrete questions:

(1) How does it "support" Thiel to allow him to advise startups who are allowed to choose whether they want to work with him? How would it improve the situation to rob YC startups of his advice?

(2) Sam already wrote that he thinks Thiel is "completely wrong" in his support of Trump. What else must he do?

I can't wrap my head around the idea that it's evil to do business with someone committing an unrelated evil to the business being done. It'd be one thing if Thiel were using YC as a megaphone for his political efforts, but YC already said he wasn't.