Hacker News Reader

challenger22on Flying-V: Flying long distances energy-efficiently

Wow. The criticisms I've seen about using flying-wing designs for passenger aircraft (planes that look like the B-2 bomber), are often focused on how bad the boarding process is for the movie theater seating they require. This design looks like it eliminates the seating problem pretty well. Flying wings have been known to be more efficient for a long time; logistics problems are the devil in the details.

challenger22on Powerless investors vote overwhelmingly to oust Mark Zuckerberg as chairman

Do you think the other shareholders would have voted to dump Zuck if they knew he did not have a majority position? This act could have been a protest vote knowing it would only reform his behavior, not remove him.

Similar to how people speculate that Brexit was only voted in because nobody thought the vote would pass- it was a protest vote.

challenger22on Mental illness: is there a global epidemic?

The more society becomes increasingly oriented around thought-work the more these problems will manifest. Humans evolved to cooperate, but we didn't evolve to spend all day thinking about long-term work-related stressors that are only indirectly related to our own well-being. Once it became trivially easy to obtain food, water, and shelter, a good portion of our biological imperative was left without anything to be concerned with.

For an interesting tangentially-related thought, try asking people what the definition of "healthy" is for a human. Mental health is the hardest part to define out of all health.

challenger22on Using Python to Get Free Chicken Sandwiches

Anyone that thinks you should steal the property of a company because you disagree with their stances on social issues is a disgusting idiot.

challenger22on Shady Numbers and Bad Business: Inside the Esports Bubble

>As it turns out, it was a little too huge. According to Dot Esports, one commentator for the first-person shooter Quake received a $300,000 salary in exchange for live commentary that was poorly received. Counter-Strike players received a reported $2,500 a month plus housing in Marina Del Rey. That added up to about $1.8 million in salaries per year. “I know from firsthand experience running a team that a lot of these teams have never even made that much in revenue,” Fields said.

E-sports is a loss-leader for the video game industry. Duh.

challenger22on Global recession fears grow as factory activity shrinks

Let's say you had a version of the prisoner's dilemma where 7 billion people had to cooperate for the highest payoff to occur. Would you cooperate?

challenger22on Global recession fears grow as factory activity shrinks

People die due to the lower economic output of a recession. Lower GDP is a sign that we are not solving the world's problems as quickly as we had been previously. There are real negatives to be feared.

https://www.businessinsider.com/study-recessions-unemploymen...

challenger22on The Artificial Intelligence of the Public Intellectual

Most of Peterson's experience with Marxism is through reading about it's effects (Gulag Archipelago, collecting soviet era propoganda), not reading about it's philosophy. The philosophy can be understood pretty easily from social context without having read the Manifesto.

challenger22on The Artificial Intelligence of the Public Intellectual

>Their minds have hijacked the public trust, each one acting as the pinnacle of intellect, an individual example of brilliance to cut through all the dullness, before sacrificing the very rigor that put them there in order to maintain the illusion floated by the media, by them, even by us. The public intellectual once meant public action, a voice from the outside shifting the inside, but then it became personal, populated by self-serving insiders. The public intellectual thus became an extension — rather than an indictment — of the American Dream, the idea that one person, on their own, can achieve anything, including being the smartest person in the room as well as the richest.

>That includes online activists and writers like Mikki Kendall, who regularly leads discussions about feminism and race on Twitter; Bill McKibben, who cofounded 360.org, an online community of climate change activists; and YouTubers like Natalie Wynn, whose ContraPoints video essays respond to real questions from alt-right men. In both models, complex thought does not reside solely with the individual, but engages the community.

I do not like this article. It does not organize its criticisms well, and it is really hard to understand exactly why the author dislikes the individual intellectuals she calls out, and likes the others. For example, Peterson actively engages his audience, but doesn't get credit for it. The best guess I have for the author's position is trying to portray her left-of-center political as authoritative by appealing to higher abstractions; I honestly don't know. It is strange.

challenger22on Net worth of Americans aged 18 to 35 has dropped 34 percent since 1996: study

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...

The percent of people who have completed a 4 year degree has been on a continual increase.

This will drag down the net worth of young folks who give up working years and take on a debt load.

challenger22on Is This the Universal Basic Income That Americans Will Buy?

>Burman proposes a way to pay for the Universal Earned Income Tax Credit: a new value-added tax of 11 percent.

Pretty steep.

challenger22on Salesforce.com tells its customers to stop selling assault-style rifles

You accept that it describes what people think it describes, so the concept exists. You also give an example of the concept being applied, so it is not only a concept, but it exists in reality as well.

Sounds to me that you think it is a thing, but you do not enjoy the fact that it is a thing.

challenger22on Salesforce.com tells its customers to stop selling assault-style rifles

To me, when the social signal is valued more highly than the negative outcomes caused by the action, it becomes a bad thing. The action does not reduce gun violence, but hurts both customers and profits.

challenger22on Salesforce.com tells its customers to stop selling assault-style rifles

First, you claim that it virtue signalling is made-up nonsense. Then, you claim that use of the term virtue signalling is an instance of virtue signalling.

Your statements contradict themselves. Describe your position more accurately, please.

challenger22on Across the rich world, an extraordinary jobs boom is under way

Because access to nature is an aspirational form of wealth.

challenger22on Salesforce.com tells its customers to stop selling assault-style rifles

I strongly believe this will not reduce gun violence. I also concede that it is impossible to measure.

I think their CRM software (and other software) is about as integral to the sale of a gun as the Doritos for sale in the gun retailer's company canteen. If Frito-Lay came out and said "we will no longer sell snack products to gun retailers" would you applaud them?

challenger22on Salesforce.com tells its customers to stop selling assault-style rifles

Your argument does not appropriately address the concern. Donating real cash to an effort actually helps. Withdrawing CRM software from gun retailers does not accomplish anything to reduce gun violence. Virtue signaling, as a term, is intended to address instances where the social signal is more highly prioritized than the action itself. The action was specifically to fire some of Salesforce's customers over a political motive.

challenger22on Salesforce.com tells its customers to stop selling assault-style rifles

If you accept the propositions from my first post, and suppose that the owners of Salesforce value this virtue signalling more than they value the profit they lose, there is no problem for them. But I would also argue that this would be silly ordering of preferences, especially considering that it is a publicly owned company.

challenger22on Salesforce.com tells its customers to stop selling assault-style rifles

The question to me is whether salesforce executives really think they can stop their customers from selling guns, or whether they are just virtue signalling.

The reality is that retailers that sell guns will continue to sell guns, and salesforce will lose customers as a self-inflicted wound.

The argument "if you don't do it, someone else will" isn't valid here, because CRM software is not a necessary economic input for selling guns.

challenger22on Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist (2012)

Has anyone done the math to determine what fraction of global warming is just from the steady-state relationship between heat production and radiation into space, regardless of changes in albedo? Always been curious about that one.

i.e. In the same way that a computer runs hotter when consuming more wattage, how much has the Earth gotten hotter just because we are consuming more wattage lately?

challenger22on Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

Exploiting people's psychology to consolidate their resources for yourself is not tantamount to theft.

challenger22on Buyer's Remorse: High Debt and Low Pay Leave Some College Grads Rueful

You make it sound like all possible paths suck. To an individual decision maker, just do whichever path sucks the least. If college is getting less and less likely to be a path to prosperity, I wouldn't be too upset. College is already saturated, and to the degree it is oversaturated it is largely oriented around signalling value more than actually delivering value. The less people that go, the better.

challenger22on [dead]

I will now invent Basiscoin, which, as part of its cryptographic hash program, encodes the cost basis at which it was last sold in each transaction, and generates 1099 forms automatically. Never again will users have to manually calculate capital gains!

challenger22on The preachers getting rich from poor Americans

>even when you discount the money they give to the church

is key.

challenger22on The preachers getting rich from poor Americans

On average, religious people are more charitable than non-religious people, even when you discount the money they give to the church. This is a good outcome and is evidence that religion is good.

challenger22on The preachers getting rich from poor Americans

Dumb people are not happier. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/significant-results/...). That would also do nothing to disprove anything I said if it were true.

Religious populations that murder irreligious people are bad, and not worth defending. That is likely a type of suffering caused by religion.

My argument is that participating in religious activity makes an individual person happier, on average, when looking at the data. That should be convincing, given the data I presented.

> It is entirely possible to be religious without rejecting rationalism ...

>This is clearly not true, even if (as you suggest) attempt to morph capital-G god into a metaphor.

I would have a tough time convincing you that it's true, especially considering that you don't appear to be trying to argue in good faith. But consider the Unitarians. They are mostly focused on personal virtue ethics through religiosity that rejects fundamentalism. I can say that looking at athiest strongholds, such as r/atheism, does not look like a more rational congregation than you might see at your local Unitarian church. The Unitarians are trying to better themselves; r/atheism is mostly focused on tearing down their oppressors.

The claim that religious people are more charitable has not been debunked in this thread, and I would be surprised to see that the evidence points that way in the literature. I've researched it a good bit. "But it's because they give to church" does not fully explain the difference.

>but in any case if the motivation is 'not spend an eternity being tortured' it suggests it's self-interest, not altruism at play.

Altruism is not incompatible with self-interest. Additionally, most Christians are not fundamentalists. You can conceptualize Hell as the suffering that you are dealt as a result of your own failures. By giving to charity, you avoid one of these failures, and in doing so also make the world a measurably better place. (Meanwhile the statistically uncharitable atheists still think of themselves as superior, for some reason...)

challenger22on The preachers getting rich from poor Americans

>Of course correlations are not causation, and the negative correlation that I expect between religiosity and happiness does not mean that atheism makes people happier, or religion unhappier. What it means—and this is supported by several sociological studies (see here for one)—is likely that people either turn to religion or maintain their religion when their social situation is so dire that they’re unhappy. When conditions are good, and there’s lots of social support, including help for sick people, old people, free medical care, and so on, then there’s no need to be religious, no need to supplicate a god for what your society can’t provide. When you’re well off, your country gradually loses religion, the thesis of Norris and Inglehart in the preceding link.

>In short, what makes people happy is not religion, but material well being and the assurance of material aid. That’s supported by the study’s finding that immigrants, including Muslims from the Middle East, quickly gain the happiness of their new country, while (I suspect), still keeping their religion, though perhaps in an attenuated form.

This does not contradict my point- if you live in rural Appalachia, there's a good chance you have a pretty hardscrabble life. Religion is adaptive in this circumstance, and you can become happier by becoming religious. The author of the article you linked also goes on to quote Marx, saying that abolishing religion is curing the masses of their opium addiction, and curing them of their delusions. I would argue that irreligious people are just as delusional, but with different failure modes. Apathy, nihilism, and lack of a sense of self dominate the irreligious; moral absolutism dominates the religious.

challenger22on The preachers getting rich from poor Americans

Religious people are happier than non-religious people. This replicates fairly well across many countries. This should be a fairly convincing argument all on its own. It is entirely possible to be religious without rejecting rationalism, as well, if you accept God as a metaphorical construct. Religious people are also more charitable. If you break down the numbers, this increased charity is not just benefitting the church.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/31/are-religio...

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/30/religious-p...

https://www.philanthropy.com/article/Religious-Americans-Giv...

challenger22on 25% of Americans say they worry about money ‘all the time’

Are you living a bare bones lifestyle? If so, and you're still stressed out of your mind, it's a tough battle. You have my empathy.

challenger22on 25% of Americans say they worry about money ‘all the time’

I'm married. My wife is pretty much just as frugal as I am.