drewbug01

Fascinating sources!

I find the wikipedia link about lesbian domestic violence so interesting, especially due to the all the well-sourced text it devotes to the fact that it's not actually possible to state anything with certainty about the prevalence of same-sex domestic violence! So - I wonder, what conclusion were you hoping a reader would draw from that source?

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The link to the study from 1992 about "gay pedophilia rates" is super intriguing. I mean, consider the first line of the abstract: "Previous investigations have indicated that the ratio of sex offenders against female children vs. offenders against male children is approximately 2:1" - or from a bit further in the abstract: "the ratio of heterosexual to homosexual pedophiles was calculated to be approximately 11:1".

I presume you have read the second-to-last line of the abstract: "This suggests that the resulting proportion of true pedophiles among persons with a homosexual erotic development is greater than that in persons who develop heterosexually."

But what should we make of the final line of the abstract: "This, of course, would not indicate that androphilic males have a greater propensity to offend against children."

I mean, it seems like the study is actually stating that despite an over-prevalence of homosexuals in the pedophilic group, that they still don't make up the majority of pedophiles?

(I suppose we can ignore the fact that Freund himself advocated for homosexuality to be decriminalized)

(I suppose we'd also have to ignore the fact that Freund himself published studies claiming precisely the opposite of what you've claimed here, and even references those results in this paper).

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The paper about childhood trauma is also so interesting. I assume you read this line from the abstract: "Epidemiological studies find a positive association between physical and sexual abuse, neglect, and witnessing violence in childhood and same-sex sexuality in adulthood"

What do you make of the remainder of that same line from the abstract: "but studies directly assessing the association between these diverse types of maltreatment and sexuality cannot disentangle the causal direction because the sequencing of maltreatment and emerging sexuality is difficult to ascertain."

Or this really intriguing alternate explanation for the results, from the second line of the abstract: "Nascent same-sex orientation may increase risk of maltreatment"

I mean ... what should we think about the fact that the authors themselves are indicating up-front that their study may not, in fact, prove that childhood abuse makes people gay? Or their assertion that you simply cannot draw a causal relationship between these two things, only a correlative relationship?

Or the fact that the study finds the percentage difference amounts to approximately 2%, which just seems pretty small?

What, exactly, do you think this study is purporting to tell us?

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My friend, your critical reading skills need a lot of work. You're simply listing articles that you think confirm your priors, without actually reading them at all.

> negative qualities

> increased rates of domestic abuse

> rape and child sexual abuse

> the association with childhood sexual trauma

> obsession with pederasty

> ties to orgs like NAMBLA

Can you provide widely-accepted, credible sources or citations for any of the disgusting things you’ve alleged?

I do agree with you (especially in this case). Just adding a bit of useful background color.

I suspect this is going to get worse, and maybe there’s some value in shouting into the ether that some people did try to explain in good faith, before it got worse. Dunno what that value might be, but maybe it’s there.

Would you believe that many folks (including myself) did, actually, present people with the facts at the time? And that the response was an overwhelming “you’re being alarmist” or “why do you want little kids to learn about sex, hmm?”

Forgive us for being a little salty about it.

The law contains a loophole large enough to drive a truck through: “or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students”

Who gets to decide what is age-appropriate? The Florida Dept of Education, naturally.

I distinctly recall that folks engaging in discussion on this fine site were not amenable to discussion of this loophole, or of it’s obvious conclusion; and instead were more apt to ask commenters why they wanted kindergarteners to learn about gay sex.

We got here precisely how a lot of people predicted it would happen.

> I have a personal hypothesis that that some small locations depend too much on traffic fines

Your personal hypothesis has substantial basis in fact: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-ticket-quotas-m...

Ostensibly, although many (most?) of Musk's actions since the takeover have been rather detrimental to this goal.

> If I and other chromium leads didn't actually care about openness then you'd be able to tell pretty clearly because Chromium would be closed source, we wouldn't have big programs like wpt.fyi, and we wouldn't bother even trying to talk about this stuff on open mailing lists.

I do actually believe you care about this. I think your employer once cared; but now they fundamentally do not (as a whole; I'm aware that Googlers are not a monolith).

There are a lot of people shouting at you that this isn't what an "open web" means, and that it's directly counter to the "open web." I imagine that's a difficult thing to square: your own feelings about the open web, and this proposal. How do you make them fit?

One way, of course, is to label the people shouting as criminals. ;)

If you are feeling that tension like I suspect you are, then sit with it for awhile. Really examine your principles and try to decide if this proposal actually lines up with your values. If you find that you cannot actually align this proposal with your principles - then I urge you to do something about it. Kill the proposal from the inside. You'd stand a lot better chance of doing that than I, an outsider, would.

> I encourage you to actually try to figure out what in fact are you feeling and ask you self why you might be feeling that. The basic emotions are: fear, anger, joy and sadness. Start there! You can use more words as you gain more awareness, I guess.

The "Wheel of Emotions" or "Feelings Wheel" is a useful tool in this regard: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/The_Feel...

> I think it's pretty disingenuous to suggest that I "tarred all opposition as criminals". Still I admit my wording could have been better, please see follow-up

It is not disingenuous, it is a plain reading of the words written and it seems I am not the only one who read it in the same way. Thank you for clarifying your thoughts further; that seems like a prudent course of action.

However, labeling a comment as “disingenuous” is somewhat concerning to me. That particular label is typically used when one is trying to suggest that the labeled comment is somehow deceptive. From Merriam Webster’s “Did You Know?” section:

> A disingenuous remark might contain some superficial truth, but it is delivered with the intent to deceive or to serve some hidden purpose.

If that is indeed how you intended to use “disingenuous,” I would note that it serves to undercut any utility your clarification might have served.

I’m concerned you’re very primed to view everything around this as highly suspicious and that those involved have ulterior motives. Speaking as one internet nerd to another: take a break, go for a walk, clear your mind.

> Have you ever managed a large team of people? If so, do you think a good manager would really tell people that part of their job is to accept threats of physical abuse?

Frankly, I don’t see how that matters at all. If you want to make an appeal to authority like that, go ahead - but it’s fairly transparent and I’m not otherwise inclined to engage with it except to say: your team is proposing to dramatically change the internet, which is a concern that extends far beyond your team and your place of employment. Making this all about your team reads as a way to shut down feedback you don’t like under the guise of “abuse.” Your intentions are almost besides the point: as your clarification notes, your employer has burned up just about all trust with the community at this point.

If you have a legitimate concern about threats of physical abuse, I would suggest that there are perhaps other avenues to deal with it other than “ignore all feedback from GitHub.” For starters, I’m fairly certain that’s against their terms of service and code of conduct.

> Attacks and doxing make me personally MORE likely to support stronger safety features in chromium, as such acts increase my suspicion that there is significant intimidation from criminals who are afraid this feature will disrupt their illegal and/or unethical businesses, and I don't give in to criminals or bullies.

Intimidation is bad (and this fact should not need to be stated).

But… this is otherwise absolutely terrible. If he can’t differentiate between “negative feedback, delivered abusively” and “negative feedback, delivered forcefully” then he should not be someone involved in this decision-making process.

I am vehemently against this proposal, and my reasons have nothing to do with criminality. Tarring all opposition as criminals is a really shitty tactic and is pretty obviously done in bad faith.

> That's not to say we shouldn't oppose this feature, I just wouldn't be up in arms about an implementation existing.

People aren’t up in arms about the process by which web standards become accepted; they are up in arms about this standard moving forward at all because of its dangerous implications for the web and it’s outright user-hostility.

The family trust example is a good one, I think - because I think it illustrates my point rather well! What does the family trust “produce”?

We can say it allocates capital to other people who then produce things; and so they “produce” at a distance. I think a better description of that is “control” (or “influence” if you are feeling more charitable). They control what value is produced by others, through the trust.

Does the trust really create anything useful on their own, though? Is there value inherent in their control/influence? Is that an optimal way of allocating resources?

Personally, I don’t think so - I think it’s inefficient, and mostly serves as a way for the wealthy to extract rent (so to speak) from society.

I will admit that this is the only world I have ever known, so it’s hard for me to envision an alternate future. But, I don’t think that means what we have today is really a good idea - and I think recognizing who actually produces “value” in society is an important realization to have.

> It’s not an insult. It’s odd that you took it as one

I don’t find that odd. Even if accurate, “naive” tends to have more negative connotations and typically codes as an insult.

I tend to find other ways to communicate that same information to someone when needed, even if it is less direct or less accurate: it ends up being better received. The communication winds up more successful overall.

Is it really fair to say the rich “produce” anything? Having multiple income streams doesn’t at all imply you produce anything whatsoever - some people are born into money, some earned it in the past, every now and again someone wins the lottery.

I’m not saying the wealthy never make anything of value, but rather that wealth is not necessarily correlated to “output” of any kind.

> That sounds cute, but humans don't have inherent worth in a business. If you don't contribute to success (and aren't good enough at deceiving people that you are), you're going to get laid off.

Of course humans have inherent worth in a business - humans are the business. I refuse to emulate the hyper-capitalist mindset of "some people are worthless." I'm not sure if you're saying that this is a value you hold, but it is certainly a value I do not share. There's a lot of room to talk about what "value" is in a business (including how some "value" is more readily quantified than others, and how we tend to mistake that for the only "value" that exists). But we have to stop conflating that with the worth of the humans in the business - that's not a humane way to view your fellow man.

> infra is competing with potentially cheaper and more flexible solutions

[citation needed]

I've been in the field for awhile now, and I can't say I've ever seen a PaaS turn out to be more flexible or cheaper in the long run. Even my beloved Heroku, to whom I compare all present and past PaaS offerings on the market! There are some limited exceptions I recognize for things like internal applications, or niche applications that do not have a broad user base (and never will), but I don't think those exceptions are enough to support the statement.

Our industry chases fads in a circle. This isn't the first time we've all decried "infra is bad, long live hosted services!" - Heroku's heydey wasn't that long ago, and I fondly recall App Engine being a big deal. Then the bill comes due and people migrate. Hell, you could even consider mainframes a part of the cycle, if you squint at it.

> Infra teams need to prove their worth or get out of the way

This is an incredibly demeaning comment. Assuming your colleagues have inherent worth and that they're doing their jobs reasonably given the constraints and demands placed upon them is a far more humane way to go about work.

> The business cares about time to market, not the perfect little homegrown PaaS the infra team built.

Those "perfect little homegrown PaaS" solutions get built for a reason - because of what happens after you get to market: the business starts to care a whole lot about how much it costs to run the thing you just shipped.

One of the main reasons a "perfect little homegrown PaaS" gets built is because it's typically a lot cheaper to run in-house. Lots of downsides to it, for sure, but you can't neglect the immense cost of a PaaS when you're running a business.

> Religion is also protected, racism has no religious base, what is deemed marriage is.

And yet, religion was touted for many years in this country as a justification for horrific racial discrimination.

The big issue here is that the court has declared that some classes are more protected than others, which will allow discrimination to flourish. They haven’t struck the right balance with this ruling.

That’s a stark misrepresentation of what happened here - the district refused to provide adequate (and, at times previously agreed-upon) safety measures.

Every teacher I know wants to educate their kids. They wanted to do so without putting their lives at risk, which is a reasonable thing to ask.

Another way of reading this other than “wrong team” (which is itself a culture-war-centric comment to make)… is “this person has stupid ideas, so this idea might be stupid too.”

(Whether or not the idea is, in fact, stupid is not my point - rather, you choose to read a culture war into it but there are other ways to read it.)

I’ll see your `FLUSHDB` and raise you a `DROP TABLE foo`.

Or one that’s actually more likely: `DELETE FROM foo WHERE <insufficiently selective clause follows>`

Every “boring” database I can think of offers many such foot-guns, waiting to be used.

> Engineers should not spend their careers intimately memorizing random quirks of the infrastructure they use. They deserve better. They deserve boring.

In my opinion, this is a little nonsensical and reeks of the no-ops movement. I’m very excited to see what becomes of Dragonfly over the next few years (Redis needs some competition, I feel) but I will be gobsmacked if they produce a product that somehow requires no infrastructure engineer to memorize its quirks.

I mean, for starters, “quirky” is highly subjective. But more to the point, I’ve never met a piece of software that somehow meets everyone’s expectations in all cases. It’s definitionally impossible.

Set your goals high and all, but at least make them achievable!

I live in Chicago, I’m married to a teacher here, and we’re planning on having kids here soon.

There are certainly problems, but the good far outweighs the bad. We discuss Chicago’s problems openly all the time (and certainly randos here on HN seem very excited to discuss it, frequently).

What, exactly, do you think the problems and solutions are? Let’s discuss them openly.

Have you seen the Prometheus “native”/“sparse” histograms that are being worked on: https://promcon.io/2022-munich/talks/native-histograms-in-pr...

They’ve released it as experimental recently, and we’ve found it to be a massive improvement over the original histograms. It’s still bucket-based at the end of the day, but the exponential bucket layout and sparse representation seems to work really well in practice.

> Are you suggesting that all corporations actions are based on morality?

I believe the suggestion is that they certainly should be based in some moral system. Corporations are a convenient fiction we use to shield the actual humans from the effects of the actions they collectively take.

To be fair - the author didn't "start[s] out" with that statement. They started out with seven(ish) paragraphs explaining exactly why the FSF has become irrelevant and how the foundation cannot reach its goals.

The author contends that Stallman (and through his leadership, the FSF) ends up repelling the very kind of interconnected community that could sustain the free software movement. Thus, their first suggestion (replace Stallman, and include different kinds of people in future leadership) is directly related to that specific issue.

It's actually a rather nicely written piece, and they support their suggestions in the narrative pretty well. Perhaps you skipped ahead (or perhaps you just disagree, which is certainly your right), but they absolutely didn't "start out" with "orthogonal social issues". They made the case for why those issues matter and then connected them to their suggestions.

The author screeches about “virtue signaling” all over this article. I hear that a lot from right-wing folks.

One wonders: do people like this author ever stop to consider that maybe those who they think are just “virtue signaling” actually believe what they’re saying and/or doing? That maybe it’s genuine?

This constant retreat to “I can’t stand the virtue-signaling left!” really starts to sound an awful lot like projection, at a point.

(Do read the article; it’s a fantastic look into the mind of someone who feels that the current solutions aren’t working but actually hasn’t put a ton of critical thought into what needs to be done differently - or, at least, is unwilling to say most of their conclusions aloud.)

“Need” is a strong word. I guess it doesn’t need to change. But new features == new opportunities to make money, if nothing else.

I’m free to demand whatever I’d like, and they’re free to ignore my demands. “Entitled” is an odd way to frame the interaction to me.

> that has run unchanged

Exactly. Software that changes as frequently as something like a Twitter (or anything of that ilk) never has the chance to reach that kind of stability. Your thirty-year system wouldn’t have the track record it does under the same set of conditions.

> In other words, "grow as an engineer" means "parroting the lies that keep you employed"?

I’m not sure what kind of leap you’re making, but it seems breathtaking.

In any case, you’ve clearly had the privilege of working on software under vastly different constraints and timeframes. That sounds fun, and interesting, but it’s comparing apples to oranges.

Come back in a few years, when you’ve written software at this scale and at this velocity. I’m interested to hear what the experience has to teach you, and to see how you grow as an engineer beyond this kind of uninformed nonsense.