Hacker News Reader

largesseon The War ISIS Wants

Michel Houellebecq alludes to an interesting idea in his novel Soumission - in the hierarchy that the West is using for identity politics, race and religion are less touchable than women’s rights and gender equality. The West will not criticize muslim culture with its implicit patriarchy and unequal treatment because they are the underdogs. Everything I see indicates that this is true especially in the UK. The question is how far accepts and lack of criticism will go before rights that we consider sacrosanct in the West are eroded by demographics in Europe.

largesseon Why is there only one Elon Musk?

> As much as I admire the dreams and accomplishments of Elon Musk, I have trouble getting past the idea that he failed to maintain his marriage

It takes two to tango. Maintaining a marriage is under no one person's control.

largesseon Disney have stolen my artwork

I'm not buying it. Both paintings are of Alice from behind with the same pose. That's about it. Are we really copyrighting poses now?

largesseon Facebook Home

Me too. For me it would be called 'Facebook Homely'.

largesseon David Heinemeier Hansson: Every Employee Should Work From Home

Best April Fool's Day joke ever.

largesseon The Lie Hollywood Loves to Tell

That's just an extension of the "big city" effect. In general, attractive women gravitate toward big cities seeking successful men. I know that sounds sexist, but it really is a thing and it skews demographics. There are more dating women in NYC competing for fewer men. The situation in Nome, Alaska is reversed.

largesseon Bitcoin: The Cyberpunk Cryptocurrency

In a world of alternative currencies, is deflation of one such a bad thing?

I think that the salient issue with Bitcoin is that it is going to deflationary at a set time and while people may hoard it, its divisibility 1/(10^8) should allow it to be used for exchange for a very long time.

I'm eager to see what happens. As far as I know, this is an unprecedented experiment in absolute scarcity psychology. Real Estate is still being developed, gold and other precious metals can be mined, but past a point, Bitcoin won't be. Imagine the economies around irreplaceable fine art along with divisibility. My suspicion is that Bitcoin has been given sociological imprinteur as a store of value, and it is hard for that to be erased entirely. In curious whether later virtual currencies can compete in a way which devalues Bitcoin.

largesseon Boston Police use fake social media accounts to phish indie rock show info

Wouldn't that violate Facebook's TOS and therefore the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

largesseon The Case for Getting Married Young

One thing that the article did not touch upon is that there seem to be health advantages for children who are born of young parents - they have better telomere length [1] and possibly greater longevity. When you add to that general issue of gene damage over lifetime and how it can impact the children we conceive as we age, it seems that nature favors young parents.

The problem is that our economic system favors delaying child-bearing in an unprecedented way. I wonder what it would be like if we inverted incentives and encouraged people to have kids very young, provided social and economic support, and a ramp up to high impact careers as their kids approached their teens.

[1] Paternal age at birth is an important determinant of offspring telomere length - http://hmg.oxfordjournals.org/content/16/24/3097.long

largesseon Wal-Mart may get customers to deliver packages to online buyers

There's that, but I'm sure they'd have lawyers work out some sort of indemnification. The first media reports would need careful PR handling.

I see this as something similar to what AirBnB went through. It's not unprecedented.

largesseon Wal-Mart may get customers to deliver packages to online buyers

Or products.

largesseon Wal-Mart may get customers to deliver packages to online buyers

Wal-Mart is big enough that they can take those thefts as a loss.

I see it working. If done right, it could leverage into neighborliness. It should be marketed that way. I can see people doing it just to have an excuse to meet their neighbors.

largesseon FBI wants real-time Gmail, Dropbox spying power

I'm tempted to believe that also.

largesseon FBI wants real-time Gmail, Dropbox spying power

I think the same thing is true and I have a very strong suspicion that the reason people are not more outraged is because they've been conditioned by film and television to believe that the government has those powers and uses them routinely.

I don't know whether to point the finger at writers of fiction for our lowered expectations or not, but I'm sure it contributes.

largesseon GCHQ – Not So Secure?

Thanks!

largesseon GCHQ – Not So Secure?

Is there some checklist some place that can be used to beat people over the head with the very basics of security for a user-facing site?

Sort of, "If your developers are doing this today, they are grossly incompetent and you are putting your business and customers at risk."

largesseon Don't specify X years of experience required - You're breaking the law

I'm finding myself more and more irritated with this sort of submission to Hacker News. It makes a bold assertion and does nothing whatsoever to back it up. Then, half the comments here attempt to do the digging needed to back the point and typically we find that the point is overstated or false.

The most galling thing is the usually the tone of the original submission. It's all: "This is the way it is, kids! Run off and use this information because I'm giving you a scoop on the truth!"

The worst thing is, I don't think there is anything we can do about it. It's just the way things have devolved.

largesseon Startups have a sexism problem

It's funny to see how this story migrated from being about the tech industry to being about startups. Are the two synonymous now to people outside the industry?

largesseon Next Big Thing, a HN-like site for music content

It's not coming up. Load problems I suppose.

largesseon Ask HN: Overcomming a federal conviction (computer fraud) for decent job?

Given this, I wonder what the rationale is for denying felon's passports? I mean, if it doesn't prevent you from leaving the country or entering the country, both of which are violations of international law.

largesseon Ask HN: Overcomming a federal conviction (computer fraud) for decent job?

I'd like a lawyer to explain the legal distinction between a felony and a misdemeanor. Over my lifetime it seems that the the number of felonies has grown enormously and many of them don't seem to be for offenses that have much harm relative to many misdemeanor offenses.

largesseon Ask HN: Overcomming a federal conviction (computer fraud) for decent job?

I wonder.. technically, not having a passport doesn't prevent you from leaving the country. You can get in a boat and take off. Leaving by plane is difficult, as well as legally entering another country.

Is it actually illegal to reenter the US as a citizen without a US passport? I would hope that as a US citizen you have a right to entry and visiting a US Consulate in another country would start the process regardless of whether you are a felon.

largesseon Donglegate: Why aren’t we questioning what Anonymous did?

There's a theory that the same thing happened with Al-Qaeda. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda#Command_structure

largesseon SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

Nope. I don't consider PyCon a "professional conference." Programming is not accountancy, or medicine. "Professional" is a word that people use to lull people into circumspect behavior leaving their basic humanity aside. Sometimes there is a good reason for it but often there isn't. In any case it's not a way of being at ease.

When I am with my close friends at a conference we speak however we like. It isn't church and it shouldn't be. But I'm sure now that I'll never go to PyCon. It's drowning in the crazy.

My sense is that this is largely generational and geographic. There's a strain of political correctness in the California area that is rampant among people in their 20s. I don't see it elsewhere in the US although I have seen it in Canada. PyCon is definitely a California conference.

I'm sure the educational system has something to do with it. It's a trend that rode the general trend in education in the 90s toward making people believe that feeling good was more important than anything and that their sensitivities were positive demands on other people's behavior. That's subsided since then in elementary education so I think this drama may be a blip.

largesseon Unfit for work

I have to chime in here. Physical labor itself is not necessarily wearing. When I was growing up, our next door neighbor in his 80s was constantly gardening and doing projects around his house. He was in incredible shape for his age. He used to shovel coal for steamships as a young man. He died in his 90s.

Physical labor can become debilitating when there is injury that is not allowed to heal completely or when there are excessive hours compounded by stress. Aside from that, it's probably very good for you.

largesseon SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

We all deal with the fact that we're in the middle of change, and it isn't always comfortable. Just as it wasn't comfortable for people dealing with the acceptance of homosexuals: I think everyone accepts that the word "faggot" is no longer appropriate.

Nope. That is not it. Men and women joke together freely with innuendo throughout society and most of the time it is not considered a problem. She did that exact thing on Twitter. To somehow say that a physical conference space is sacrosanct in a way that Twitter is not is ridiculous.

I think that if you look carefully, what you see is that what we term political correctness today is in actuality a new label on the old idea of chivalry. It aims toward a norm of social behavior where women are seen to require special protection in a way that men are assumed not to. They can toss away that protection and engage in banter, but men can not. This has been the norm in polite society for at least 500 years. Today, it just has different ideological window dressing.

largesseon Wherein SFPD is still going surveillance-nutty

It's an odd choice that they have to make, to press this or just install a video surveillance system and malfunction it, saying "oops" if the police ever come by for footage.

I'm cynical enough to think that if they press it, they will be denied permits on other grounds or be retaliated against in some other way.

largesseon MPAA: The Cloud Is A Threat To Us And The Best Response Is Censorship

Go for it.

largesseon SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards?

We are entering the MAD-SM era: Mutually Assured Destruction via Social Media

largesseon PyCon Code of Conduct changed to avoid public shaming

You're assuming that the people who are against public shaming are the ones doing it to her. "The mob" you speak of is not a thing.