Hacker News Reader

blackbagboyson Severely injured worker sues Tesla

If Tesla refused to cut the power but required the work to be done anyway, it's absolutely their fault.

blackbagboyson Icelandic fiction: a family affair

On the other hand, you're much more likely to be able to carve out a niche for yourself and be niche-famous in a huge and varied country like the United States.

blackbagboyson Everything the Government Did to WikiLeaks Is Now Done to Mainstream Reporters

According to the government, every leak of classified information "may" put the goverment's personnel and interests at risk. That doesn't mean it's true, and even if it is true it's not necessarily a sufficient reason to halt publication.

blackbagboyson The CIA made a Magic: The Gathering-style card game for training agents

Good point! Hopefully the Kickstarter crew will incorporate the "incinerate whole families based on probabilistic guesswork" card in the public release.

blackbagboyson The CIA made a Magic: The Gathering-style card game for training agents

Doesn't seem particularly true to life. Where are the cards for kidnapping innocent people off the streets, keeping them locked in secret prisons, pulverizing their internal organs and torturing them to death?

blackbagboyson Germany Acts to Tame Facebook, Learning from Its Own History of Hate

Nah, this is wrong. Putting a Nazi symbol on your car with the intent to piss people off is a juvenile provocation and in no way requires that the perpetrator actually harbor a secret desire to bring about the extermination of the untermenschen.

Completely relinquishing the ability to judge things on their actual context in favor of the unthinking punitive application of absolutist principles is the beating heart of every anti-human ideology.

blackbagboyson Germany Acts to Tame Facebook, Learning from Its Own History of Hate

At absolute best, it's tasteless, and certainly grounds for social exclusion, but criminalizing and especially pathologizing mildly anti-social behavior is profoundly immoral, reckless, and inhumane.

blackbagboyson Germany Acts to Tame Facebook, Learning from Its Own History of Hate

Ironically, this is exactly the sort of conformist, vindictive, authoritarian mentality that helped the Nazis stay in power.

blackbagboyson Elon Musk hires 2 Newfoundland interns who solved problems at Tesla factory

They were good problem-solvers and Tesla needed a PR win. Let's not mysticize Musk more than has already been done.

blackbagboyson How a Special Diet Kept the Knights Templar Fighting Fit

Monasteries of the medieval / renaissance time period usually had very large complements of lay staff and tenant farmers, who maintained the estates and produced goods for both internal use and sale at market.

This is not to say the monks didn't work or didn't follow ascetic regimens, but they weren't doing all the work of keeping the monastery running.

blackbagboyson John Carmack: My Steve Jobs Stories

True. Any organization in which the incentives for an executive to increase or maintain their own power within the organization trumps the incentives for them to work for the benefit of the organization as a whole.

blackbagboyson The Medieval Mindset (2017)

Tuchman in her heyday was the recipient of an enormous amount of opprobrium from her generation of academic historians (of which the nearly-fossilized Bachrach is a member), mostly for being a non-academic, extremely successful female popular historian. Modern academics are generally much more positive about her work. Just remember that it's an introductory popular history.

blackbagboyson John Carmack: My Steve Jobs Stories

There's a book I remember reading - I can't remember, but it may have been The Dictator's Handbook - which talked about how this is a common management pattern in authoritarian dictatorships (although typically somewhat more extreme in its implementation). The dictator ends up weeding out most people of exceptional talent and competence, but it consolidates his personal power. Bad for the state when it faces a crisis, but good for him personally. Easy to see how this applies to senior management at a public company.

blackbagboyson Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes

This is a useful academic introduction:

https://www.amazon.com/Oligarchy-Jeffrey-Winters/dp/05211829...

blackbagboyson Don't let Google take over Berlin

companies and wealthier people moving in makes everyone in the area more wealthy.

This would only be true if everyone owned their own residences and profited from the increase in land values. In reality, the inhabitants of gentrifying neighborhoods are usually just evicted from their homes so the owners can sell to developers, and they end up worse off than they were before.

blackbagboyson Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes

It's worth keeping in mind that, by and large, this is how the oligarch class thinks. Their top priorities are protecting and justifying their wealth and power. A journalist who exposes a massive fraud and probably saved lives isn't someone performing a public service - he's an enemy. There is no mea culpa. The relationship between the oligarch's own interests and the public interest is purely predatory and adversarial.

These priorities are relatively easy to see when it comes to techno-weirdos like Tim Draper and Peter Thiel or cartoonish megalomaniacs like Bezos, but they govern the behavior of even otherwise staid and conventional oligarchs (see, for instance, Eric Schmidt strong-arming the New America Foundation to fire everyone involved in antitrust policy research).

blackbagboyson The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s

President John Tyler (born 1790, President 1841-1845) has two living grandchildren.

blackbagboyson Twenty-first century Victorians

There is no 'battle' here, and all political discussion is inherently ideological, so either the site should ban all political articles or you should specify which ideologies are acceptable.

blackbagboyson Twenty-first century Victorians

There are very few people actively trying to prevent lower class people from getting into the upper class, but it's competitive to be in the upper class and there are only so many spots. You don't get to be prestigious by letting everyone in.

Yes, again, that's the point. The entire paradigm exists to justify the unjust concentration of power and wealth in a small upper class. It doesn't require an active conspiracy, it just requires people to accept that there is something objectively 'right' or naturally ordained about this state of affairs, as you apparently do.

blackbagboyson Twenty-first century Victorians

Yes, that's the point. University admissions are a ridiculous sham, the primary purpose of which is to justify the political power and wealth of the elite professional class. But not every member of the elite professional class gets to go to Harvard. The fuss about how whites and Asians are REALLY the ones being discriminated is a mechanism by which yuppie resentment is directed away from the system and towards racial minorities; it keeps people from questioning the fundamental utility and purpose of ultra-exclusive, ultra-wealthy, 'prestigious' universities.

blackbagboyson Twenty-first century Victorians

Yes, I take that as strong evidence in favor of demanding that society make higher education free and available for anyone who wants it.

blackbagboyson Twenty-first century Victorians

This post is a perfect example of this mechanism in action. It takes as a given that the criteria for university acceptance are fair, objective, attainable - 'meritocratic'. The only explanation for underrepresentation is that the under-represented are simply inferior.

Note especially the conflation of 'minorities' with 'poor people'; this lets those members of the bourgeois who miss out on their exact institution of choice (and might have to attend UC Santa Cruz instead of Stanford, the horror) reconcile their own sense of self-worth with the class myth that failure to get admission to college denotes inferiority: they did meet all the fair, objective, meritocratic criteria, but the university gave their rightful slot to an undeserving black / hispanic person instead.

blackbagboyson Twenty-first century Victorians

Yes, this is exactly what the upper class wants to think about itself, and sort of the point of the article.

blackbagboyson Twenty-first century Victorians

The underlying point is that these professional-class distinctions are cast in moralistic tones and serve as an ideological justification for denigrating and ignoring the material needs of the bourgeois's class enemies. This is most clearly seen in the case of college admissions.

Of course, most bourgeois aggressively refuse to accept the idea that there is anything political about their consumption choices at all, or that they even have 'class enemies', because they refuse to acknowledge that they occupy and actively maintain a privileged position in a fundamentally unjust and exploitative system.

blackbagboyson Wild Horses Can’t be Broken: Zebra Domestication Attempts (2014)

gwern rejects Diamond's hypothesis later down the thread, so I'm interested in hearing about any alternate hypothesizes he may have.

blackbagboyson Wild Horses Can’t be Broken: Zebra Domestication Attempts (2014)

A more interesting question to discuss might be why Africans were never able to accidentally domesticate zebras as useful insect-resistant beasts of burden when Europeans/Asians/Americans were accidentally domesticating all sorts of species left and right, such as horses.

What hypothesizes might you suggest?

blackbagboyson The United States of Japan

It was acquired by a Japanese company, but it was originally an American company / brand.

blackbagboyson The rise of the pointless job

I’m a little curious as to why this comment, of all comments, has attracted downvotes. Is there something about the comparison between these two types of bathroom attendant positions I’m overlooking? Genuinely curious

blackbagboyson The rise of the pointless job

This is also common in higher-end nightclubs and bars in the U.S., although these aren't full-time jobs and the attendants work mostly for tips.

blackbagboyson Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

When you say you consider the gaps in employment (of which 'one-man shop' is just a subset of) to be a 'red flag', is that in the common sense of 'immediate disqualification' or just 'something to follow up on'? I certainly think there are plenty of legitimate reasons to have gaps in one's employment record (including 'I felt like not working for six months').