I had a 15m walk to the office when I lived in San Francisco... The culture is such that people are willing to sacrifice ridiculous things for merely being able to maintain a life style they do not like. Unfortunately, I now have 0 commute time :) But I go for walks at least twice per day. People work pretty hard in order to get themselves into very unhealthy living situations, and often seem to be unwilling to work for 5 minutes per day to get out of them. I'm not placing blame, just describing the situation.
Beware of the ol' "I have a job so I can afford a car to go to work..." or "I'm working out so I can feel good about myself so I can feel worthy of women/love" or any self-unfulfilling prophecy.
A comment above about the guy's friends working out in order to get chicks... It's another thing I find quite strange. Sure, there are like 2% of girls who are only attracted to very muscular men (and they're rarely the most attractive) - but 98% of girls want a "real man". What is a real man? Well, I'm not going to say because I don't want to get my comment killed again :D However, spending so much time and concern on how you physically look is feminine, not masculine. Just inquire with some girls sometime; they'll tell you they're sick of it! Unless you're trying to cultivate beyond the body & mind, then 15m of strenuous exercise 3 times per week is all you need. Spending hours curling in front of gym mirrors is a beauty contest in fetishized insecurity.
As usual, you are merely picking views you do not like. Your participation in ideological battles is far more gratuitous than any commenter on HN because you are the censor. The front page has more politically charged articles this year than ever - and people who reply honestly are punished if they disagree with your openly one-sided argumentation. I have several email records to prove others feel the same way and have tried to reason with HN admins directly about this - to no avail.
Banned accounts cover the spectrum, so if what you're saying is true, we must dislike all the views.
Or we could just be moderating according to the guidelines, like we say. I'm confident the bulk of the community agrees with that. If they didn't, we'd never hear the end of it, where in fact the only accounts making these complaints are the few most ideologically strident ones.
Common tactic here on HN is to call politics you disagree with "political." I was even banned for this reason: for leaving "political" comments in political threads. Why not just be honest about it being different from your politics? One way to prevent all "flamewars" is to prevent all opinions that can be deemed offensive - and doesn't a quick appraisal of history reveal the issues with this oppressive strategy?
Even in tech companies, you silence opposing opinions about how a technology should work and you potentially ruin the company. I've seen this in startups many times - the problems that we read about after a startup has failed were raised early on by certain members, often who were ignored, fired, and ridiculed for having such opinions.
It's a common tactic to declaim grandiloquently about why one was banned but never supply the links so people could make up their own minds (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=linkless%20martyr&sort=byDate&...). If we were really as arbitrary as you claim (edit: or whatever it is you claim), the pattern would be the opposite: people would be rushing to post their links, revealing how badly they were treated.
You were banned for posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17491521 and ignoring our requests to stop. Any fair-minded reader can see that comments like "who brainwashed you bro" violate the site guidelines independently of your political views.
I'm not claiming that it is arbitrary; quite the contrary. There is a very narrow range of acceptable views on HN - and your reply only underscores that fact. People call posts "political" in a political thread when they disagree - and rarely feel the need to present evidence for their own views.
And since you brought it up - in a manor so truncated - that post of mine that got me banned was 90% about how biological gender does exist. This emphasizes my point about how narrow the range of acceptable opinions are here on HN. None of the words composing the portion that you've quoted are even mean or offensive - and yes, I was implying that propaganda must be used to make someone argue so confidently without evidence against what even establishment biologists overwhelmingly believe (that biological gender exists). And furthermore, since you bring it up, another post of mine on a similarly "political" topic was met with with this supportive reply:
"Speaking as a gay minority, I totally agree with your comment."
So within the code of conduct, I assume you are referring to, "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I started off sarcastically, but you ignore the rest of my post which is substantive. The comment I replied to began with the words, "race does not exist." If you search on scholar.google.com for the terms 'race' and 'biological' you get 2,640,000 results. And is it really so radical that I met a comment dismissive of the discussion within 2,640,000 peer-reviewed search results with sarcasm?
But admins decided to cherry pick support or lack thereof for my comments, and then censored me. I don't know if this will be seen either since I am shadow banned - and the commenter who alerted me to the fact that I was shadow banned was then banned as well (for making that comment). After being banned I Googled for other people banned from HN from posting outside of the acceptable range of opinions and I found a load of them - and I don't think HN audience would appreciate that you're deciding to follow this censorship tread that we're seeing on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and many more. HN is framed as a more open community, but my experience here reveals a safe-space of increasing proportions.
You were banned, or rather your troll account was banned, because of a long history of posting crappy comments (by the standards of the site guidelines, which include no political criteria) and ignoring our multiple requests to stop. It's just that simple, and anyone who bothers going back through the history can see it.
It's not uncommon for people who were banned to fancy themselves a political dissident and go on about how repressed they are. But the truth is less glamorous: moderation is janitorial work, and the stakes are trivially low.
I'm confident that the HN community supports how we sweep the barn, because if they didn't, we'd never hear the end of it. And what we see is just the opposite: the community flags comments like these ones, from all political quarters. Even your comment upthread was flagged after I unkilled it, so I had to unkill it again.
It was impossible to get most of what I was used to at a competitive price when living in Sweden. I paid, for example, about $70 USD in tariffs in order to retrieve the light bulbs I ordered online from post office. Your package is basically government property until you pay the taxes on it which are rarely specified at the time of purchase.
I missed Amazon when I lived in Sweden. The issue is not the value Amazon brought us from their excessive competition. It is the relationship with government that should be illegal. Americans pay taxes and those tax dollars go to support Amazon's workers with food stamps, welfare, etc - this is not capitalism, but the socialistic policies that have been growing for nearly a century now. Also, if the government cannot defend the people against The Washington Post's propaganda, then it is not doing its job. It is treason to support other governments and foreign entities above one's own government - which the Post and others very often do. If the US was a free market for the people, then the government would have raided Bezos' home & business a long time ago... But I don't blame him - this is the type of behavior we are promoting without enforcing separation between government & private entities.
Yes, I've been emailing them about it and they won't reply. They first emailed me saying that people can (have to) support you in comments - and I did receive support via comments - but they still decided to censor my view... And I didn't realize it until I had written many more comments.
By the way, I highly support your previously downvoted comment, "The only science you're allowed to be skeptical of (on HN) is science other people are also skeptical of..."
SpaceX: How will we fund the amount of rocket fuel required to get the stuff to Mars that can produce an atmosphere? If producing an atmosphere isn't required, then how will indoor atmosphere be maintained sustainably (financially)? Matt Damon's math didn't seem to work out in that movie...
Tesla: So far so good, but what about battery recycling?
“We are at the very beginning in energy storage in general,” says Phil Hermann, chief energy engineer at Panasonic Eco Solutions. “Most of the projects currently going on are either demo projects or learning experiences for the utilities. There is very little direct commercial stuff going on. “Elon Musk is out there saying you can do things now that the rest of us are hearing and going, ‘really?’ We wish we could but it’s not really possible yet.”
https://www.theguardian.com/vital-signs/2015/jun/10/tesla-ba...
Please don't link to Phil Mason / Thunderf00t. In addition to being a misogynist (top videos include "Feminism versus FACTS" and "Why feminism poisons everything"), he's also a food scientist posing as a rocket scientist.
Please don't assert that someone's beliefs or advocacy about a political movement make them wrong about facts. Classic ad hominem fallacy. Listening to people making sound arguments about X even though you disagree with them about Y is healthy, and the lack of this health is a major intellectual problem of this century in my humble opinion. Listen more, judge less. Post and watch more things from people with whom you disagree. And don't shut people down just because their views on unrelated topics are not palatable to you.
There's a threshold to things like that. Would you honestly watch Alex Jones's video evaluating technical facts raised if it was posted? At some point you can discount people / publications as generally not caring about facts. It's fine to deny them the ad revenue.
Absolutely. When talking about matters of science and physics, Alex Jones has a very poor track record to say the least. He's demonstrated a strong history of inaccuracy and blatantly ignoring facts to fabricate sensational stories. The opposite of what we should appreciate about some of Thunderf00t's contributions, in fact.
As much as I disagree with Thunderf00t's political opinions and how much I hate his style, he has a pretty damn good track record on dismantling hypetrains of physical impracticality.
More clearly, if Alex Jones had a good track record of accuracy or predictions on anything, then his contributions would be valid and shouldn't be discredited because of his opinion on unrelated things.
You're right, the fact that he's an asshole just means he doesn't deserve link and ad revenue. The fact that he's unqualified to make many of his engineering claims is why you shouldn't use his videos in arguments.
I've observed a dearth of videos going into technical detail about why the "busted" things will succeed. I'd like to see them.
Thunderf00t does have a great track record in predicting the failure of many pipe dream techs including solar roadways and fontus and waterseer and that thorium car. Who exactly is qualified to do so? Basically anybody with a cursory understanding of physical forces and skepticism, which he has.
I'm not sure why you set the bar so high for reasonable skepticism informed by very, very basic physics
> Thunderf00t does have a great track record in predicting the failure of many pipe dream techs including solar roadways and fontus and waterseer and that thorium car.
Thunderf00t takes things, let's say Scio, and shows how, despite marketing videos and press attention and funding, they're complete nonsense. Then he shows what the state of the art is, or what the basic physics say. Then he does follow-up videos when they fail. The Waterseer series is absolute gold.
What references do you need? A chemistry or physics book and what the failed projects actually say when and as they fail.
Properly justify it? Read his YouTube page and video list. I didn't even get into the racist shit. I'm going to let you guess what "Who's killing who, by race and gender, FBI statistics" and "Black Son of a MULTIMILLIONAIRE, STILL the SJW victim!" are about.
Before you say "ad hominem:" no, that doesn't apply here. He's not a credible source.
Speaking against a particular brand of feminism does not make one a misogynist. From watching his videos, it's pretty clear that he isn't prejudiced against women. He just calls out bullshit claims by the likes of Anita Sarkeesian, who is on record stating that video games are a 'male sex fantasy' and whose only credential is being a perpetual victim. People like Phil Mason and Stephen Fry are a desperately needed public voice against bullshit disguised as feminism or social justice.
If Anita Sarkeesian went unchecked, games like GTA would be banned by now and reclassified as rape simulators.
This attitude of blindly dismissing people's arguments or entire credentials just because you bought into an agenda, this refusal to engage in civil debate and discuss matters on their merit. I think this is one of the factors destroying democracies around the world today. Everything must be polarizing, everyone expressing views you disagree with must be shunned. Any attempts to debate established status quo must be shouted down.
She is all of those things by virtue of playing public victim. She was a no name vlogger with a handful of subscribers. Her entire 'career', if you can call it that, began when the internet overwhelmed her kickstarter to fund a bunch of videos about how misogynistic video games are. She's the Kim Kardashian of feminism and an insult to 2nd and 3rd wave feminists who fought to improve society through intelligent discourse.
Watch this and tell me that you think she is making an intelligent argument about anything. And while you're at it, have a think about why the comments and votes might be disabled on those videos.
I'm aware of who Anita is, and I have no expectation of changing your mind about her.
That said, I think she was "all of those things" when people contributed over 100k to her Kickstarter, which was before the Gamergate harassment started. So she was earning her keep well before she was made the "public victim," as you say.
Of course the comments are disabled for her videos. Normal YouTube comments are toxic enough. She literally got bomb threats over scheduled appearances on conference panels – do you think comments on her videos are productive? If your Twitter was filled by anonymous users threatening to rape you, and kill your parents, etc., then you'd disable comments on your videos too.
> Speaking against a particular brand of feminism does not make one a misogynist. From watching his videos, it's pretty clear that he isn't prejudiced against women.
I have an issue with naming of those videos. It's great to call out people who misinterpret some labels and are harmful to others. But calling that "facts vs feminism" isn't helping. His other videos manage to call out specific things like solar highway, rather than being called "tech vs facts". Why imply that feminism is bad if you're going to talk about one specific person's idea? (that's not generally accepted)
He doesn't talk about just one person's idea though. Have you actually watched any of those videos? They're not ideally named and they're not his best content, but to pass that off as misogynistic is just beyond disingenuous.
I'm not saying they are or aren't misogynistic. Just that they're really badly named to be clickbaits and feed on the existing hostility against a bigger community. I've seen a few fragments and honestly they don't make me interested in analysing the whole thing. What they don't seem to do though is help any cause beyond getting more popular and setting up us-vs-them ideas.
Usable as commercial products? What product does the boring company have? They've asserted things will be cheaper, but haven't sold a ticket.
So far the boring company is a money pit. It remains to be seen if they can accomplish anything you suggest they have. For now they're still just a marketing engine.
One of the main reasons they say they'll build tunnels cheaper and faster is because they plan to make their tunnels half the diameter of other tunnels. It's like someone saying they can make cheeseburgers faster and cheaper than anyone else, but when you order one they bring you a slider instead of a normal full size burger.
If we could get Adobe and a few other companies to port their software to Linux - even if it costs as much - then I think there would be a cascade effect that decreases the cost desktops & laptops, while increasing the quality. You wouldn't need much more than a great windows manager after a main proaudio & provideo app is ported.
I highly doubt they would be that difficult to port. Maybe +2 engineers per program per year max. And that extra bread would be more than enough to cover their salaries! It feels like were further off from ideal workstations these days, but we're not really... It's just that Apple & Microsoft have been pushing various types of "power users" away from what they've been asking for all along. Finally let some group of us move to Linux comfortably. Linux has browsers, productivity & office, music & video players, communication, utilities, and even games to some degree - covered. But we need pro-audio & pro-video areas covered!
At this point, I think you should be rooting for the 'year of the android desktop' more than the 'year of the linux desktop' if you want low cost OSes.
We need Adobe and just a few apps to support Linux and we'll create a cascading effect that will lower the cost and increase the power and freedom of many users laptop and desktop choices!
What would it take for hackintosh users to move to Linux? You'd think we'd get enough Linux users asking for Adobe products these days... And with Apple's hardware choices lately creatives could be killing it on Linux + whatever HW they can afford. I think one company - like Adobe - migrating over would create a huge domino effect.
Who brainwashed you bro? Are you trying to say ethnicity doesn't exist? There won't be genetic differences (and physical non-genetic differences) between different groups? This is how far leftist propaganda has gone :(
EDIT: and typical that I get downvoted without reason for merely suggesting that it is silly to claim that ethnicity doesn't exist (which is how the parent is using the word 'race').
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines, despite our requests to stop. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Beware of the ol' "I have a job so I can afford a car to go to work..." or "I'm working out so I can feel good about myself so I can feel worthy of women/love" or any self-unfulfilling prophecy. A comment above about the guy's friends working out in order to get chicks... It's another thing I find quite strange. Sure, there are like 2% of girls who are only attracted to very muscular men (and they're rarely the most attractive) - but 98% of girls want a "real man". What is a real man? Well, I'm not going to say because I don't want to get my comment killed again :D However, spending so much time and concern on how you physically look is feminine, not masculine. Just inquire with some girls sometime; they'll tell you they're sick of it! Unless you're trying to cultivate beyond the body & mind, then 15m of strenuous exercise 3 times per week is all you need. Spending hours curling in front of gym mirrors is a beauty contest in fetishized insecurity.