nancyhua

Is a "share" a subset of a "like"? Maybe they can have links count as shares but not likes.

Wonder if this will exacerbate the effect of everyone only seeing views that agree with theirs and decreasing exposure to different (/evil) perspectives.

Netflix did have a social network a few years ago. You could friend people and talk about movies, etc. When it disappeared, I saw people complaining about it but I assumed it was because Netflix was going to integrate Facebook or something.

Are you saying that Quora is fundamentally not valuable bc there are other ways of communicating? I guess if you wanted to learn about plants, you could go learn the Dewey Decimal System and go to the library and look it up in an encyclopedia... or you could about it on Wikipedia. Your response doesn't make sense to me and I don't know the purpose of this discussion at this point.

I just started using Hacker News recently and have never really interacted with internet communities at all prior to this year so I'm open to the possibility that I'm not communicating clearly, or that you're being facetious.

I think they try to do this to some extent with "perks." As a crowdfunder and crowdfundraiser, I can see a divide between people who donate bc they want emotional pleasure and people who donate bc they want to receive something. It should be possible to segment patrons to address different donors' desires. Maybe if you're a music patron seeking stuff, you get options to buy particular tickets/seats or are the first to get songs or limited editions or something. If you're seeking status maybe they put your name somewhere on their website or send you a special Facebook logo, etc.

I think she definitely cut her ties to the VC world by doing this which is why it's such a big deal despite none of us knowing who she is- she's either forfeiting her career to take a stand, or she's forfeiting her career for money/attention. Which possibility sounds more probable? I don't know.

The only thing I know about her is an article from when this lawsuit first came out saying her married boss gave her a book on sex poetry with a handwritten note inside of it. She claimed he would often make suggestive remarks and the others wouldn't invite her to parties with founders bc having a woman would "kill the buzz" (Is this tenable? Do men think women kill the buzz? I always get invited to stuff but I don't know if I'm missing special male tech networking parties). Those claims sound really gross and easily testable- if she has the book then they should fire that guy and if witnesses come forward saying they had all-male VC-founder parties then that's evidence of gender affecting her networking and career.

Exactly, I don't know why she didn't quit right away- even if it turns out her claims are completely true, can she still work in a place that she's (successfully or unsuccessfully) sued? And why would she want to? And why would you want an employee who's sued you? Is it standard to keep going to work after suing someone?

What do you mean? If you want to know what it's like to get a life sentence in prison or get funded on Shark Tank, how would you get this information?

Have you looked around the site? Most of the questions are not things I'd think of asking anyone. People also seem to be more inclined to answer on quora than probably a random forum or stranger's email.

Tldr. Where's the version of this that jacks straight into my brain matrix-style?

Would someone have the power to oust Charlie unwillingly? I dont know much about how the company was split up so am wondering.

The drama of these tech companies bores me except insofar as it relates to my personal account. Don't founders leave companies all the time, especially when theyve already made a lot of money? Also I feel like at some point all these decisions are mutual.

Agreed. As a user, cc often deters me from signing up bc 1) I hate filling out forms, and 2) I know there's >30% chance I'm going to be too lazy/busy to cancel eom. From the company's perspective, maybe 2) is an argument in favor of cc signup so they can tax my carelessness.

Maybe it's actually a secret brilliant plan implemented by super geniuses- the first few people to start buying up the walnuts/tulips/DI make a killing!

How else would you explain the existence and popularity of this crazy video? Maybe it was all engineered by DI or some hedge fund. We're playing right into their hands.

It's a joke, I am Asian. I guess I also watched that stupid video and like to play with financial instruments.

Further proof that Asians are crazy.

[edit] It's a joke, I am Asian. I guess I also watched that stupid video and like to play with financial instruments.

Agreed. Although how many of these projects actually get done for the amount allotted? Maybe it'll end up costing 100B or not get done at all after spending 10B. Whenever anything costs more than like 1M, we get scope insensitivity and have no idea what we are paying for or what it's costing.

Quora has more mass appeal and is more of a time waster site than Stack Exchange. It's like a smarter, more gamified, Facebook-y version of Yahoo answers. The friends I introduced to it said they can spend all day reading about "what it's like to be a hitman" and asking Mark Cuban questions about his youth and stuff like that. Some of the questions re: what server to use, etc are answered by founders promoting their companies but nevertheless I think Quora has 2 valuable virtues:

1) You can get firsthand info from the horse's mouth, like read about what it's like to be a 25 year old self made millionaire, or what it's like to work with ashton kushter, or what it's like to get an investment on shark tank. You can ask what it's like to get a life sentence in prison and a real prisoner will respond. You can ask Larry Summers his opinion on something and he'll respond.

2) Quora organizes the information on the internet. Some of the stuff you could find by googling, but who just googles random questions? The flow of the site is pretty nice because you go from one interesting answer to suggested related questions.

(I am just a Quora user although I know a bunch of people who work there.)

Junot Diaz was my writing teacher at MIT. "Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." He's really into comic books, the apocalypse, Dominican immigrants, New Jersey.

You're right that fear of failure prevents many people from reaching anywhere near their full potential.

The working mom thing is a separate issue from representation of women in various industries such as tech. For me, I'm hoping to band together with friends so we can all watch each others' kids and cooperate more and have the whole childrearing thing be more "village"-centered and less of an individual burden.

This is great! It's almost a history and an explanation of the internet.

We bring up nursing: well, doctors used to be 100% men. Maybe doctors or biologists used to say, "Women are not interested in medicine or biology." Would any person say that now? Poets probably used to say, "Women aren't interested in writing at all." When women became poets, writers probably used to say, "Women aren't interested in serious literature." Artists probably used to say, "Women aren't interested in art- they prefer to pose as our nude models." Would anyone claim women aren't interested in these fields now? I've never taken a woman's studies class or anything but I imagine many of these arguments have occurred in the past regarding industries that used to be male dominated but aren't anymore.

I think we are generally wrong when we try to presume what a group of people would be interested in. Like who knew Japanese people would get so good at baseball? Whoever said, "Japanese people aren't interested in baseball in the first place bc they like samurai swords, not projectiles," would've been totally wrong, as wrong as whoever said, "Women aren't interested in being doctors. They get hysterical and like to sit quietly in drawing rooms," or as wrong as people who say, "Women don't like math or science or computers. They prefer art and writing and medicine and biology." Maybe one day people will be saying, "Women don't like intergalactic war travel, they prefer math and science and computers and tesseracts."

I don't feel any desire to downvote you. Here's my take as a woman who studied math at MIT and was always one of few if not the only woman in her classes/ nerd camps/ jobs throughout my entire life:

If you're the type of person who always knew what you were passionate about, you should realize this focus and passion is not common. There are some people who can explode out of some small town where everyone's main interest is football and still become a tech mogul. Most people are not like this- people do what their peers do and what they perceive as normal for whatever group they identify with. I think this might actually be especially true for children. Very few children see a scientist doing science or see something cool like a machine and then say, "Mom and Dad, I want to learn to do/make this thing," or then go online and research it. Most of the time, someone is showing the kid what they think this kid should learn or the kid is looking at stuff other people are giving to them, including their peers. Based on this, many girls who aren't deliberately introduced to tech/science as a possible interest don't realize they are interested in tech.

Most kids are friends with kids of the same gender. In middle school, when I went into a classroom to learn QBASIC as the only girl, it was less fun in every way except 1 than being in a classroom filled with girls who were my friends. I didn't make any friends in any of my middle/high school programming classes and generally kept quiet because boys made me shy, and vice versa- I also made them shy when I spoke to them. They weren't doing it on purpose- I think it's just human nature for us all to behave the way we did.

If I were less interested in programming and more motivated to have a fun classroom experience or to fit in (being a girl with my interests made me weird, which bothered me slightly but I was also interested in art so that kind of evened it out. I can imagine it bothering other people much more than it bothered me, sufficient to make them avoid this feeling of strangeness by avoiding atypical (for their peer group) activities), I easily could've not gone to those CS classes or to any of my nerd camps. When I went to a Theoretical CS nerd camp called Andrew's Leap at CMU, out of the other 30 kids, only 3 others were girls. We 4 girls were all Chinese and we became great friends. We also befriended the boys but it wasn't as easy because both boys and girls interested in Theoretical CS don't tend to have PhD's in male-female interaction or even human-human interaction.

Most kids do whatever their friends do. Most people do whatever they perceive people of their type to do. I think having a woman scientist in a popular movie does a lot more for planting that possibility in the popular imagination than many types of affirmative action programs. If anyone is saying, "Black people don't like hockey bc they prefer basketball," I think it just takes a great movie about a famous black hockey player to get more black kids to start saying, "I want to play hockey."

If I have a thesis, it's this:

1) Most people do whatever they perceive the group they self-identify with as doing. If you're a person who self identifies as an intelligent male, maybe you're more likely to think, "I should become a businessman," than, "I should become a nurse." In contrast, a person who self identifies as an intelligent female might be more likely to think, "I should become a doctor," instead of "I should become a programmer." If you're a person who self identifies as an athletic, white male, you might be more likely to think, "I should play basketball," than "I should play pingpong." People don't tend to want to be "weird" because of complex cognitive stuff to do with identity.

2) Most kids do whatever their friends do, and most kids are friends with people their own gender, and most people prefer being with their friends than not. So if you're a girl walking into a classroom full of nerdy, Starcraft-playing boys or a man walking into a yoga studio full of giggling females, you might think, "I should find another room where I fit in better," instead of discovering whether you have an interest in this strange field. Hence the chicken and egg thing. It's less fun for kids to be "weird" because being weird is lonely.

Doesn't everyone invite everyone to stalk everyone now by putting their information everywhere online? Stalking your crush is the original purpose of Facebook according to that movie.

The main thing e-stalking reveals is how interested the guy is, and maybe how smooth he is (smooth guys don't do as much research, or they know how to hide it better). So if he brings up the horses, she knows he's into her and maybe a little awkward, but it doesn't tell her he's definitely a psycho- she'll probably judge his weirdness from his appearance and manner.

The creepiness of normal stalking depends on how attractive the target finds the stalker. If you're a hot, rich, 100 year old vampire, you can watch a girl sleep every night for months and she'll think it's awesome (but the vampire didn't admit he was doing it until after they were dating).

If he realized "horseback riding" was the key she'd used to encrypt all her passwords, then that'd be a serious red flag. So there's certainly a point where stalking becomes creepy no matter how hot you are, but looking at someone's Facebook profile isn't it.

I agree. I don't know how you could have IP without patents.

How do you get rid of patents without getting rid of intellectual property? Do you mean setting up better infrastructure for licensing?

This article's title should specify that by "work remotely," it means "live together with your coworkers in an exotic location remote from company headquarters."

I would agree with this suggestion. The article categorizes everything from modifying phones to illegal and wrong activities such as theft and spying as hacking. Things will always be used for purposes different from their original intent because humans are resourceful and care about their own wills. Neither humans nor nature care what the original creator's intentions might have been- our eyes may be "intended" for sight but worms will evolve to use these eyes as food and housing- and it's nonsense to label these worms or their evolution as good or evil. Hacking is an idea that will always occur because it's part of nature, which has no sense of justice. Morality only comes in with how we humans use our ideas. For example, the making of a knife from a toothbrush is not illegal, even if it offends the sensibilities of the toothbrush designer, but the use of this knife to harm another person is illegal.

This discussion is framed very weirdly, almost to the extent of meaninglessness because the language is so imprecise. Asking "is hacking good" is like asking "is evolution good for people when it produces everything from terrible worms that blind people by living and eating their eyes to fantastic bacteria that allows us to digest all kinds of crazy foods?"

Systems always have weaknesses and systems always change. Sometimes we improve the weaknesses for fun or profit or usefulness, sometimes we attack them for fun or profit or malice.

Yeah it's off putting that poker was #1 on the list. His remaining suggestions were actually things that seemed sensible, like reading, writing, programming, and starting a business, but the poker stuff was so distracting it was hard to continue.

This is awesome and revolutionary. No more looking for parking spots- just send the car to the nearest garage or back home. Also the cars could coordinate to minimize traffic. So many possibilities!

Interesting, I don't know anything about either of the things you mentioned: range mode (When giving me the car, they told me it could go about 200 hours on 1 charge but to keep it under 150 because if it got completely drained I'd have to pay $10K for a new battery. Most of the time I would hook the car up to those free chargers in downtown PA), or not speeding (I always assumed speeding was good for mileage. It's also easier for me to speed in a tesla bc there aren't engine sounds, just road sounds, and everyone speeds on the 280).