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carsongrosson About This Googler's Manifesto

Absolutely: I am accusing you of either that, clouded thinking, or both.

In fact, this discussion is a demonstration of my point. We are both attacking one another's intellectual and moral reasoning abilities via speech. This is better than than us having a fist fight over the matter.

carsongrosson 1950s New York City’s ‘Mad Bomber’

Quoting the judge, when handing down the death sentences:

I consider your crime worse than murder... I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-Bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.

carsongrosson 1950s New York City’s ‘Mad Bomber’

Apparently the "shrillest" moment of the "red scare" was correctly convicting two communist spies of treason.

carsongrosson About This Googler's Manifesto

Comment 1: > It's not great, but the idea that attacking people verbally is somehow "better" than attacking them physically is wrong.

Comment 2: > Solving disagreements through discussion is better than solving them through violence

lol, always amusing when I assume both intelligence and good faith when discussing things on the internet.

You think I'd learn.

carsongrosson About This Googler's Manifesto

That's insane.

All of human moral progress can be briefly summarized as "talking, not hitting."

carsongrosson About This Googler's Manifesto

As with the original post, I look forward to the thoughtful, tightly reasoned and unemotional discussion that this post will generate.

carsongrosson A Candle Loses Nothing by Lighting Another Candle

Well, if is someone is paying you for your light...

carsongrosson Increasingly, businesses don’t generate profits – they generate capital gains

We get more of what we tax less?

Weird.

carsongrosson What Is Ray Kurzweil Up to at Google?

I don't think that that minority is all that small.

carsongrosson Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark (2007)

If you are sufficiently old and autistic, you can still buy the licensed flying toasters screen saver from a Japanese company called infinisys:

http://en.infinisys.co.jp/product/flyingtoasters/index.shtml

I was.

carsongrosson Bollinger B1: An electric truck with 360HP and up to 200 mile range

Dear Toyota: look at this truck, and at the FJ40, and get to work.

carsongrosson How to Tell the Truth

Telling the truth will get you fired, ostracized and possibly assaulted today.

I don't like it, but telling the truth, like riding a bike to work, is a luxury that only the extremely rich and extremely poor can afford today.

carsongrosson Sperm Count Dropping in Western World

Turns out it wasn't commies that were going to corrupt our precious bodily fluids, but rather post cold war end-of-history ennui.

carsongrosson Why there’s no such thing as a gifted child

IQ is 50-80% heritable.

There is such a thing as a gifted child.

carsongrosson Why Capitalism Is Just Shitbag Science

Basic income + concentrated capitalism is a great way to minimize human liberty and maximize elite control of the population.

Friedman also implemented income tax withholding. So, despite what he wrote, he was no friend of practical liberty.

carsongrosson Why Capitalism Is Just Shitbag Science

Capitalism is very simple. Capitalism as an economic system is essentially defined as the process of private expropriation of public wealth. Technically, the Earth is every creature’s inheritance but we in our late modern wisdom have conceded that only a select handful of people will get to profit from its resources while the rest are forced by either gunpoint or starvation to serve them forever or die.

Yeah, no.

Look, I'm not a rah-rah capitalism guy, but the fact is that the vast majority of wealth is based on human labor, the labor of individuals, applied to nature. While the latter certainly has a strong claim on being public wealth (a commons) the wealth produced by a human's labor belongs rightly to that person. (Economic rents then tend to concentrate that wealth, but that's a separate topic.)

There is an economic third way alternative to capitalist rent seeking and socialist totalitarianism: distributism. For a modern introduction to this idea, this is a good book:

https://www.amazon.com/Vocation-Business-Social-Justice-Mark...

Some people will be put off by the catholic moral basis, others by the term "Social Justice", but it's a good read for a different way to look at both the history of economics and the economic situation we find ourselves in today.

carsongrosson Front-End Walkthrough: Building a Single Page Application from Scratch

Many, many code horrors exist today due to a deep and abiding fear developers have of appearing insufficiently smart.

Most of the web apps that are being built today have no need for a complex front end and, if they do, it's only in a few places. But, as you quote, programming is pop culture, so every new Form => Datastore app is going to be built using a toolchain more complicated than quake was built with.

carsongrosson Why Should I Start a Startup?

Here is a practical reason to start a startup:

You are married to someone who makes enough money to push your marginal tax rate on income to the point (it can hit 55%+ in places like CA) that you might as well take a flier on a startup rather than pulling a W4.

carsongrosson Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

This is more than a little self serving, but when I switched us over to intercooler.js it made a huge difference in our app.

When I pulled the trigger on it I was terrified that I was screwing us over by not using Angular (which was the cool tech at the time) or some other more javascript-oriented solution. Thankfully it has worked out well, and my co-founders don't hate me any more than they already did before hand. (And maybe even a bit less.)

carsongrosson Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage your life?

https://workflowy.com/

carsongrosson The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans

> Don't blame credit, you did this to yourself.

Sane western cultures don't allow citizens to fall into debt-peonage. This is why we forbid usury for so many centuries, based on the late roman empire experience.

carsongrosson Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman and Iranian to win Fields Medal, has died

The majority of 9/11 attackers were Saudi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijackers_in_the_September_11_...

Iran is our natural ally in the region.

carsongrosson Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman and Iranian to win Fields Medal, has died

More and more Americans understand that anti-Iranian sentiment here is mainly due to propaganda, not any rational considerations. Iran should be a natural ally of the US.

carsongrosson YC is compiling a blacklist of venture capitalists accused of harassing women

Accused?

carsongrosson NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

But most federal outlays are entitlements. Breaking it out by entitlement type doesn't change that fact. Military spending presumably includes space/rocket related R&D.

And the total as a percentage of GDP has gone up extensively, which a stacked graph doesn't show.

carsongrosson Show HN: Ancap News, a Chrome/FF extension to bring out HN's true colors

The average politically-flavored HN comment (not to say user, who can say?) is not ancap. It is not even libertarian.

It is liberal/globalist consensus: extremely liberal on social issues, globalist on economics.

carsongrosson NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

If you'd like to know why NASA is getting less and less funding and can expect this trend to continue, see this chart from Five38/NYT:

https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/16fi...

carsongrosson `Bro culture' at startups keeps talented women out: Harvey Mudd President

Similarly, does 'sis culture' at colleges keep talented men out?

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-REGjzKeq_LY/T53intthiXI/AAAAAAAAR...

This seems like a larger and more relevant problem for the president of a college to address.

carsongrosson URLs are UI

At some point here the collective web development world is going to realize what it lost when it tossed REST/HATEOS out in its rush to appear modern.

carsongrosson Ask HN: Good hacker backpack?

It's a goofy name, but I really like the three-zipper configuration of the Mystery Ranch Urban Assault:

http://www.mysteryranch.com/urban-assault-pack

Makes it really easy to get down into the pack.