batemanesque

I'm sure this is interesting from a statistical point of view, but does the tech scene really need yet more reinforcement of a binary view of gender?

guess it's time for HN to wise up to the fact that investors aren't just benevolent gods handing out opportunities from above

using "teh Internets" on yr front page is a great way to put off anyone who doesn't subscribe to calcified "geek culture"

West Africa is my favorite country.

nah, you're right

problem w/ that is that regardless of how good yr intentions are, you can't prevent unconscious bias from coming into play.

exactly. fill the most solipsistic company in the world w/ self-exalting geeks & you're bound to get more than a few creeps who don't understand social boundaries.

I agree that it's unlikely Google as a whole would decide to read/use confidential data. on the other hand, the idea that someone w/in Google might abuse their position is completely plausible.

if we know that people at the NSA were passing around phone sex calls by US troops, do you really want to keep trusting that no-one at Google will ever do anything problematic w/ yr data?

edit: to be clear, I use Google services all the time & store a lot of confidential data w/ them. but there need to be institutional (whether at Google or outside it) safeguards that go beyond trusting a company as a whole to always behave in a way compatible w/ its own rational self-interest.

this kind of seems like a way to advertise the conference, but well done anyway

given that so many people don't have any access to housing at all it seems somewhat myopic to criticize the fact that construction generally aims for efficiency rather than beauty.

the dome looks nice but is stuff like this really a viable alternative for anyone other than a small well-off slice of the population? how does the cost of not having a kitchen compare to what you save in building materials?

this isn't the evil at Disrupt I thought he was going to address.

it's the misogyny, not the pornography, that's problematic here.

in any case, the guys at Hacker News have now hidden this thread & the other one about TitStare, so we can all pretend the problem's gone away.

trying to debate this guy on the merits is absurd - he's not some misguided IQ guy but, as you'll see if you look at his other comments, a hardcore racist. blocking is the only productive thing you can do here

a white supremacist w/ 1865 karma: congratulations, HN!

are you fucking serious?

if the Brazilian government is so concerned w/ civil liberties, maybe they should focus their attention on addressing rampant police brutality & overreach rather than geek-pandering gimmicks like this.

exactly. I find it problematic that they seem to think calling someone names is completely impermissible but citing a white supremacist forum's guidelines is not.

this is great. wasn't really expecting his research to have contributed anything meaningful to science when i was halfway through the article

the meaningless boosting around here is fucking weird - negative feedback is crucial to stuff getting anywhere. calling anything besides praise 'disappointing' is the best way to create a completely ossified creative field, i.e. the complete opposite of the 'hacker' ethic worshipped round here. besides, this guy isn't even being particularly critical

and describing all this as the same 'agenda' is grossly simplistic & undermines attempts to reinforce civil liberties. there may be broad trends but they're not driven by a unified entity, and given that the scope of NSA surveillance was known before Snowden his leaks hardly give credence to the possibility of taking conspiracy theories seriously

meaningless reification of 'the internet'... the current secrecy debate is no more about the internet than Watergate was about tape recorders

given that we don't yet know the full range of nutrients the human body needs to function, it'll be completely impossible to live off Soylent & stay healthy in the long term. it's really that simple.

loving that some mod changed the headline from "A cheaper alternative to Soylent?" to "Nutraloaf", thereby removing the satire - wouldn't want to offend our investor overlords.

of course, there's no record of the edit, & my name is still attached to the article. nice to see Paul Graham's as ethical & self-aware as ever.

I'd like to think that most people on HN don't worship business so much as to exalt even those based on dishonesty & intellectual incompetence.

the part where a guy who has no idea what he's doing got an absurdly positive response for a product that's nothing new at best & dangerous at worst

it's not a marketing problem. people outside a given field will, by virtue of their inexperience, be prone to more hubristic ideas they don't understand the impossibility of. combined w/ the tech scene's natural credulity - as demonstrated by the Soylent debacle - & there you go.

the problem w/ casually describing it as a "marketing problem" is it completely excuses both entrepreneurial excess & the whole Valley hype thing. sure, there should be an onus on people to present/market their ideas well, but also on the public to be a little more skeptical of wild & unfounded claims.

yeah, if you want a clear, wide-ranging picture of what's happening in the world, this guy is definitely the source to turn to: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ-_BhM...

most common figures on human trafficking are horrifically inaccurate, due to either A. grossly inaccurate sampling or B. efforts on behalf of parts of the evangelical & feminist communities to expand the definition, e.g. to define anyone involved w/ helping someone illegally enter a state as a "human trafficker", even if they're a family member/friend of the traveller in question, or to define anyone who illegally crosses a border to engage in sex work as a "victim"

except that he didn't leak only specific evidence of war crimes so much as a vast, unfiltered amount of secret (& potentially dangerous) information