wbronitsky

> I don’t think you could code at a high level if you were actually smoking weed every day

Ah, but on the contrary, I can confirm, based on what I consider a “high level” of coding, that some people cannot code without smoking weed every day. I can also assure you that many, many devs are daily users, quality of code output not withstanding.

This article is megalomaniacal. Insisting that your company with 200+ employees will only hire people who will work themselves to the bone without any mention of how those people will be properly compensated is wild corporate propaganda.

I honestly don’t know why the tech industry continues to capitulate to leaders like this who obviously, and loudly, mistreat and dehumanize their employees by insisting that if you are not obsessed and willing to put in incredible energy into someone else’s project that you are bad. It does not follow that people should be obsessed with someone else’s business that they won’t be properly compensated for. No matter how many times someone rich says it, it will never be true.

I will say, however, that this is an extremely popular position with the rich and powerful. From startups to big consulting firms, there was not a single company in SF that I worked for that did not echo this. From PC saying how proud he was that we did not hire more engineers at Stripe while people were pulling 60+ hour weeks for months at a time, to engineering managers explaining how they slept under their desk while they were working at Facebook, to Big 3 consulting firm partners exhorting 22 year olds to work 80 hour weeks being screamed at by misogynistic clients in cities across the globe, the song remained the same.

I'm not sure how the government's messaging during the pandemic affects a private company, with global shareholders, claiming efficacy of a product whose results will be plain to see for all of those shareholders. You cannot lie about your products in an open market and be successful.

Sure, we should be skeptical of the government line on the pandemic, but why should we be skeptical of a product that comes from a company whose product must work for them to make money?

I think instead of letting our previous biases in one arena influence our current decision making in another, we should look at the evidence, make an independent decision, and then loop back on that when the evidence changes. Government bad != private company creates product that doesn't work

This is rich. This throwaway account is going around posting short dismissals that don't add to the discussion, which is against site guidelines because it causes problems with reasonable discussions, and then uses these guidelines to try and protect themselves after injecting flamebait, which also happens against the site guidelines for the exact same reasons.

It would be impossible for the poster to not be aware of what they are doing.

Let’s say I own a bullhorn shop. In fact, I have purchased every bullhorn shop, distributor, and manufacturer of relevance in the world.

Someone, a self proclaimed Nazi, comes to me, the owner of every bullhorn, to buy a bullhorn in order to convince others to be Nazis. I, a Jew, refuse to sell the bullhorn to the Nazi.

Am I being overly simplistic? Probably, but I don’t see where my analogy fails. I fail so see the strength in the “Facebook controlling the content of the platform it owns destroys our constitutional rights” argument.

I don't see how that would be possible. If you say you like working someplace, we know that you work there. You couldn't possibly be hiding who is paying you. I don't think that is a fair accusation.

I think it would be much better said that we should take with a grain of salt anyone's assessment of their current job.

In my experience, stories like this are par for the course. While at Stripe, a few of my close friends and former co-workers were treated so poorly during the application process that I stopped referring anyone over a year before I left.

I would argue that it is inaccurate to summarize Freeman Dyson’s work as “some cool thought experiments that only showed up in scifi”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson

The criticisms in this thread of Dyson’s wrongthink on climate science show us a lot about the current moment and how hard it is to have an opinion outside of the mainstream.

Sure, he appears to be quite incorrect now, but dismissing a mind of the caliber of Dyson’s because he got this one thing wrong is pedantic. And yes, he did appear to get this one extremely wrong, but that should not overshadow his amazing ideas and all of the things he got right. Ideas like Dyson Spheres, nuclear explosion based space travel, and many other Dyson ideas were just as outside of the standard deviations of thought as climate change denial at the time he came up with them.

It appears extremely popular right now to disregard an entire human’s work over an apparently incorrect opinion. Freeman Dyson is a great example of why this is probably a bad idea.

I want to point out that the crux of my argument, the very reason I posted, was that I could not "draw the line" from the previous argument. There is no actual rebuttal or new information in the reply, just a restatement of the previous point.

My point was that everything a company does is revenue related, and thus we cannot draw some imaginary line between things that are "more" or "less" revenue related. Restating that we can doesn't move us forward. I would be interested to hear how we can separate some revenue related reasons from others.

> it could not do so for a revenue-related reason

While this might sound good, this would be impossible to enforce in practice, as everything a company does is revenue-related. Any rules the app store or iOS have are directly related to revenue by definition.

For example, if Apple allowed boundless permissions and tons of buggy apps, their revenue would probably decrease. This issue is harder to regulate than it first seems.

Interesting. Rippling is the only company I’ve ever interviewed at that, with full knowledge that they were doing so, offered me a job working more hours for significantly less pay than I was currently making. When challenged, they calmly assured me that it was a good deal, asked me to value the equity at something quite above this new valuation, and urged me to take the offer. Bold, but not the way I would choose to try and grow a company.

I thought a bit about this argument here, and I just want to sum it up, so we can understand where this landed.

The sum of the final argument is “I believe that you should do whatever the gunman says, so much so that I don’t care if they kill you”, directed at a commenter here.

I might add that insulting people might not provide a way to encourage “intellectually mature discussion” either.

There are videos where we can clearly see these unmarked agents (yes they are unmarked if they have no name or number) attacking and detaining medics without reading them their rights.

Those are the violations of civil liberties we are discussing and this argument throws out.

Yes, but the point is that we should do that first before polluting the night sky.

There are also reasons for humans and animals to not want new, moving stars for reasons other than pure utility. At the very least, these shiny beacons are an insulting advertisement for Musk.

Next, people will be defending a Pepsi ad on the moon or something. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/04/pepsi-ad...

It is interesting that these doctors in the UK are claiming that tactics that have already worked elsewhere don’t actually work, while their country continues to suffer a massive outbreak of the virus.

On the other hand, here is a study showing two countries that have made great strides in containing the virus, after massive waves and deaths, and did so with a harsh lockdown https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...

The suggestion that everyone who is pro- aggressive disease containment has not had their life turned upside down by the global pandemic is lacks logic. Shutdowns are necessary to contain the virus, and the economic damage done from not containing the virus is far worse than the alternative. We know this because we have data.

There are multiple countries that were hit very hard in the first wave, and then managed to contain the virus and accelerate their economies after; France, Spain and Italy are all great examples. IIUC, France now has 3.6% unemployment. They had strict lockdowns, followed by mask wearing, social distancing, and contact tracing. The same tactics are working for NYC in the US.

We do ourselves a great disservice to act as if virus containment is bad because it destroys economies. No, the virus destroys economies, and containment allows us to continue once mitigated. That’s what the data clearly shows.

> Do what you're told.

Why do we all need to conform to every order from every police officer, even, and sometimes especially, when that order is unlawful?

When the police are using unlawful orders to escalate violence, and then justify that violence by asserting that one was not complying with their order, which was unlawful, or otherwise stated illegal, is that not wrong?

I do not believe that any law, or logic, supports a situation in which anyone must "do what [they are] told" in this context. This argument can be restated as "do what I say, no matter what, or die". This is pure terror enacted by the state against its population.

The argument that some people die so it’s ok if more people die is not only horrific, but it makes very little sense.

This “shut up and do what I tell you” mentality is remarkably similar to that of the management in the consulting firm I was in, and is a big reason I left. They hired experts, asked them to give their opinion, then ignored it and/or shouted it down when it didn’t conform to their previous expectations. I would then be told I was incompetent and that my opinion was not valid, always without evidence. Interesting to see the pattern here as well.

I’m glad the attacks have gone from consulting partners to random anonymous commenters on the internet though.

> Are either of these consultants going to turn down the work and point out the real problem of missing market research?

This comment is extremely real. I was hired as a software engineer for a Big 3 Management Consulting firm that was building out a development lab. Every single time I was brought in on a case, it was clear that the client and the consulting firm simply did not care about things like market research, product market fit, good engineering, or even solving things that were actual problems. The client had paid for us to solve a “problem” they had designed, and whether or not the “problem” was an actual problem worthy of spending millions on a solution, we were going to cut as many corners as possible to make it seem like we “solved” the “problem”

After 18 months, and an insane amount of harassment, degradation, and humiliation for insisting that our organization does the correct thing instead of continuing to swindle the clients, I left, having solved few client problems worth solving.

Consulting firms are full of con-men getting their friends at other companies in on a swindle together.

I'm trying to be as inclusive as I can be, and I have been told that BIPOC is an inclusive term. If there is a better term here, please let me know so I can use it. I was discussing American society in particular, so the Sami might not be relevant.

Either way, it would be nice if we could look at my comment as doing what I can to not be offensive, instead of nitpicking an argument that is clearly trying. Instead of tearing it down, do you have another suggestion?

> b) it's the seven billionth "minorities in tech" story in the past month

I would urge people to stop and question that if they are tired of the "billion"s of stories about BIPOC, what must BIPOC be feeling about their systemic erasure from many facets of our society, including journalism and entrepreneurship. This article allows us to think about and discuss those issues.

The article is not hard to believe, is one of substance that I find interesting, and the content of the comment section is not the only arbiter of what should go on Hacker News.

I would suggest that Occam's Razor is a better tool here; a small number of people who want to silence the idea the article presents are trying to silence it.

I deleted my replies to you because I didn't think they added anything to the conversation, and did not raise the level of discussion. I do, however, feel that I now need to point something out.

> Sloppy thinking gets people killed. That's why I get upset.

We are discussing a urinal on a platform in an art museum.

I agree, and did not mean to imply judgement against anyone who dislikes "Fountain" and other, similar pieces of art.

I don't even know how I truly feel about "Fountain" either; all I know is that it is quite thought provoking for me and has taught me a lot about how I think about and digest the world. To me, even if the art is ugly and snobbish, it still has merit if it helps us better explore our world. The art piece's mere existence allows us to have this conversation about the relative merits of different forms of art, which I believe to be meritorious in and of itself.

I think this has led us to an interesting, if for now rhetorical question: what is art for? Well, at least I'll have something to think about for the rest of the day :)

This is a great tip, thank you!

I find the best museums and exhibits help you get into this mindset; I'm reminded of an exhibit I saw at the Tate Modern about Picasso in 1932. It provided not only the context to his art, but to him as a person. I was able to better understand how his art was shifting at the time due to the nature of the world around him and his personal relationships. It really allowed me to see the artist through the art and the art in its context. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ey-e...

I hope that I can take this idea to domains outside of art as well; considering the context of everything we encounter is important for a better understanding of our shared world.

Oh boy do I resonate with this. Thank you for sharing this!

I remember the first time I saw "Fountain" by Duchamps, which, for the uninitiated, is a urinal, on its side, signed and dated by the artist. For years, decades, I cast it aside in my mind as something silly, something artsy, something that wasn't for me. It was ugly, vulgar, and above all, obvious. For years, seeing replica after replica in modern and contemporary art museums, I continued to breeze past the installation, laughing quietly to myself like I knew something these art people didn't.

Then I had a similar situation happen. While continually saying "anyone could have done that" and "this isn't art" someone finally said to me "yes it is art, you didn't think of this, and without this, you lack the basis for many other contemporary forms of art." It then started to occur to me that this art was anything but obvious; if I so easily cast this aside as "not art," the simple fact of calling this art was a profound statement, one worth considering within its context. Maybe this piece of art had so much to teach me about perspective, context and expression that it was just too much to swallow for years.

We seek to replace things that are not working all of the time. Sometimes it takes more creative solutions, but usually we can fix systemic issues we have created ourselves, as long as we have a little imagination.

Defunding the police would allow us to do things like fund more social workers and non-armed, non-enforcement officers who can help people in crisis. It would allow us to fund infrastructure for safer streets, classrooms and highways. It would allow us to fund restorative justice programs, subsidize housing for those who need help and make our society work for everyone. It would allow us to fund drug treatment and education programs, fund school lunches, and help create vocational training.

Fundamentally, defunding the police would allow us to actually identify the problems that they solve, and eliminate those they create. The problems that are left over can then be solved in different ways.

> Trump as if it's a foregone conclusion that he's a racist sociopath

You are totally correct. I do think this. I have ample evidence that backs up my case as well. I think the quote "when they start looting, we start shooting" which was hidden by Twitter for inciting violence, is enough for me.

> This is a strawman, because I haven't seen Trump "inciting random citizens to commit violent acts."

I don't think we can have a real conversation because we disagree about the basic facts on the ground.

Trump, from my position, is clearly, repeatedly and blatantly pushing people to violence using Twitter. In fact, even Twitter thinks so.