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You've confirmed all my suspicions regarding HN and YC's ideological positions.

Thank you, I will not be posting further on this site or directing any business your way.

I have a policy to return hostility in kind. The commenter DanBC was being vulgar without making any points, so I decided to respond in a manner befitting his tone.

But since you seem to be a levelheaded individual, I would like to seriously discuss the suppression of critical thought on Hacker News, and why moderators such as yourself enforce it ruthlessly.

Let's start with the parent comment:

When those gender roles are all but constant across countless independently developed cultures existent over tens of thousands of years, with distribution of visible physical traits to match them, it's pretty safe to assume that they're baked into our DNA and not some random whim of western culture. Imagine how long a tribe with male caretakers and female warriors (who it cannot be argued are not on average significantly smaller and weaker than men) would survive against a tribe of male warriors and female caretakers. There are species with much less divergence in biology between males and females. We would not have evolved to have such divergence if it were not useful for our fitness to have distinct fighter/protector and caretaker roles. Indeed as K-strategists that take a very long time to mature, having dedicated caretakers was an extremely useful evolution.

There is absolutely nothing controversial about this statement to a trained biologist. In fact, you could not get through an undergraduate degree in biology if you did not understand sexual dimorphism, r/K selection theory, and the sexual specialization that results. As such, there is nothing political about the statement. It is merely a statement of the current scientific understanding of the evolutionary history of homo sapiens.

Now let's look at your response:

This turn into generic gender-war predictably degenerated into yet another tedious spat. Perhaps elsewhere on the Internet there is a spot where people haven't had enough of these yet, but HN isn't one. Note the guidelines: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

So, the statement of scientific consensus stated by the original comment is labelled by a moderator as "gender-war" which "predictably degenerated into yet another tedious spat." And you summarise with saying HN has had enough, and the debate is to be ended.

So I just want to be clear, which branches of evolutionary biology, and science in general, are off limits to discuss on HN? And how does censoring known science help critical thought and discussions regarding the current entrepreneurial markets in tech?

Thank you for your time.

EDIT: to address your final statement:

It takes a lot of energy to post these responses, and it's hard to justify the investment when you're not making any effort to be civil, and when instead of open-mindedness you display only a desire to score ideological points.

It is a bold assertion that stating known science is "a desire to score ideological points." This line of thinking demonstrates more about the reader, and less about the material. Evolutionary biology is not an ideology, it is a science. Stating it does not make one an ideologue, but an empiricist.

A perfect illustration of my point.

Sexual dimorphism is real. Your impotent rage and ridiculous ideologies will never change that fact. I will be greatly amused by your kind's zealous need to tilt at windmills.

There won't be much difference beyond reproductive roles and other physical traits, but the brain doesn't seem to be affected all that much, no.

Ah so evolution stops at the neck! Genius!

The more you know...

Yes, it's a bit of a massive story to digest without knowing what he actually did.

If it was accessing user data, of course he should be fired.

New HN rules:

Citing science as a defense against the current cultural paradigm is inciting a flamewar.

How the mighty have fallen.

I actively steer young entrepreneurs away from YC and HN, as it has become incredibly in tune with the echo chamber of the radical political ideologies of our time. I don't understand how this behavior encourages clear and logical thinking or produces successful entrepreneurs.

I would appreciate a response on this topic dang, as I am sincerely amazed by your response to the parent's comment.

EDIT: In case anyone wants to start asking for citations, it is equivalent to asking for citations regarding the heliocentric model of the solar system. R/K selection theory, sexual dimorphism, and sex specialization are such well understood topics as to be assumed common knowledge among any educated biologists. It only speaks to the individual's naivete when they bring up the citation requirement.

Citations are used for new and ground breaking research, not for common scientific knowledge that has been in the mainstream for a hundred years. I am constantly amazed by the sheer ignorance of the HN crowd on this extremely well understood science.

How interesting. So using a statistically significant population sample, there will be no phenotypic differences between carriers of X versus Y chromosomes?

If so, science has progressed quite far in the last few years that I've been away.

Ah yes, the Y chromosome is indeed a culturally manifested construct. Good point.

Indeed, the crusade against biology is one I watch with great amusement.

Don Quixote would be proud of those who hoist their flags in battle against evolution, biology and the laws of the universe itself.

Keep up the good fight, dear gender abolitionists, for you truly are against a formidable foe.

We're already at zero sum when GDP is growing at near zero, a.k.a not growing.

while a very small percentage of the population accumulates an increasing chunk of the resources...without any work.

FTFY

Because he hired Henry Paulson, the ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs who single handedly devised the entire CDO ponzi scheme, as his Treasury Secretary.

For those interested, more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzrBurlJUNk

Watch the entire documentary, lays it out plain and simple. To this day, not a single prosecution.

You nailed it. I've been banging this drum for a decade. There is currently no feasible career that involves advancing humanity forward. Only different forms of plumbing the digital infrastructure which pay well.

Everyone I know wants to do research. No one wants to do it in academia, and no one wants to live below poverty levels.

The Star Trek economy is here, and it's here now. Basic income, flat-tax and publicly funded research infrastructure (e.g. Bell Labs) is the way forward. Asset bubbles, financial crookery, and trickle up economics are the way of the past.

Time to choose now. Sadly, as a scientist, I know this decision has already been made. Human greed is insatiable, and the top 0.1% won't be satisfied till they're the top 0.01%, and then the 0.001%, and then...

How can HN promote capitalism on one hand, and open borders on the other?

Open borders is the classic pre-cursor to a worldwide Tragedy of the Commons. Currently, we have problems keeping public parks clean. Imagine if all of the earth was a shared commons, and no group of people could restrict access to any plot of land. It would be chaos. I can think of no better way to destroy the world than open borders.

Look into tragedy of the commons, and see why this idea will never be feasible due to human nature.

Stephen Wolfram does add a few self-congratulatory remarks.

This is the man to a T. I think he would have done well in Victorian England. He is a clinical narcissist, and is incapable of mentioning any topic, subject, or fact without inserting a remark about his achievements.

It gets comical once you get to know him. I'd start pointing things out to him if I ever spoke to him.

"Stephen, this steak is delicious. Didn't you invent the software that allowed the design of the temperature sensors on modern grills?"

Lineage the Bloodpledge, a hugely successful korean MMO was heavily based on NetHack [1]. It is still one of the most widely played games in the world (mainly in South Korea).

The article below does an excellent overview of its history and inspiration from NetHack.

1. http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/07/the-game-archaeologist-tr...

Biology is misogyny?

"Words that do not belong here"?

A dismissal of science combined with an accusation of blasphemy. Fascinating.

Furthermore, instead of immediately attacking the host of a file, perhaps consider first indulging in its contents. The book is by Sir John Glubb, a noted historian.

Compare the size of grasshopper to BO's little toy rocket. Grasshopper was a full Falcon 9 first stage, which is a production GTO capable rocket.

What exactly is BO's rocket capable of? Reaching 100km altitude?

No one is more embarassed than BO engineers by the comparisons with SpaceX. They are in completely different leagues. BO is playing with toys, SpaceX is hauling commercial payloads to GTO.

It's like me making a go-kart that goes 0-60 faster than an F1 car, and saying "I've built a faster race car than McLaren!". Anyone with an ounce of knowledge on the subject would be in tears from laughter.

TN allows for 3 years per visa and unlimited visa renewals, so as long as you demonstrate that you aren't trying to gain citizenship, the US embassy shouldn't mind.

As a Canadian, I have no interest in becoming a US citizen. On a TN visa you can open bank accounts (including investment), buy cars and real estate and do everything other than start a company. It's incredibly convenient and painless compared to an H1-B.

Most people gunning for H1-Bs want to become US Citizens. Canadians have no such need, we just want to work in the US legally and be able to buy stuff and make investments, all of which you can do easily on a TN.

That's great to hear, you'll be getting a few Canadian applications in the future.

Does Triplebyte do TN visas? They're almost trivially simple to do, so the candidate could take care of it themselves without any help from the sponsoring company.

Women in the United States gained the right to vote in 1920. The majority of men (non-landowners) received the right to vote only 50 years prior in 1870 [1].

This doesn't seem to be the work of a nefarious patriarchy behind the veil, but a continuing democratic movement that began with the Magna Carta.

Although of course, once again, this information does not fit the feminist narrative, and is blasphemy to a movement whose only goal is political power.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_suffrage

The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.

And therein lies the problem. Professional feminists are extremely vocal radicals that do not represent the majority of women. Their statistics and talking points tend to be universally unsound and inflammatory, and they are at this point more accurately described as a racist and sexist hate group.

So the question is, why are they deemed the authority on so many issues in the mainstream media? Why does PG even acknowledge their nonsensical demands, or try to engage with them to defend Jessica?

Anyone who has lived a day on this planet understands that empirical reality is immutable, and ideologies cannot alter them. So when feminists for example, state matter-of-factly that "biology is a social construct", why are they allowed to continue speaking nonsense? Meanwhile, brilliant academics who debunk feminist propaganda like Helena Cronin [1] are nowhere to be found in the media.

Perhaps women like Jessica Livingston and Helena Cronin need to take an active stance against radical feminists, and not dignify their accusations with a response other than: "please educate yourself before attempting to open a dialogue regarding these issues."

AKA: Do not feed the trolls.

1. https://edge.org/conversation/helena_cronin-getting-human-na...

In September 2014, Boeing won a $4.2 billion award to provide crewed launch services, and SpaceX won $2.6 billion. (SpaceX received less because it offered to provide lower-cost flights).

Oh, the logic of government contracts. Maybe they should've incentivized Boeing to try and do it for the same price as SpaceX? I understand the whole redundancy argument, but by paying Boeing double to do the same thing SpaceX is doing you are simply incentivizing inefficiency.

This amounts to sheer stupidity in economic terms.

"[f]ully 1,191 members of the list are self-made billionaires, while just 230 inherited their wealth"[1]. The top 3 richest people on the planet at this point made their money themselves, and 2 of them (Gates & Buffett) are not going to pass their wealth down the family tree.

@Natsu, my point of contention is the very liberal definition of "self-made" and "made their money themselves". If you give every reader on HN a trust fund, and a few start successful companies, would these individuals be considered "self-made"?

I don't think so. Self made means start with zero net worth. That means no trust funds, no loans at 0% from parents with infinite payback periods, and no parent board members making absurdly lucrative deals that you'd never get otherwise. Just money you've made from your own labor, and loans you've received without nepotism. You'd be surprised how few entrepreneurs fall under this category.

If you don't restrict your definition in this way, then every rich person is self made, because the interest accruing in their trust fund happened during their lifetimes.

The good old "Bill Gates the bootstrapped college dropout" argument. These myths never die.

William Henry Gates the Third had a trust fund before he was born. His downside risks for anything he chose to do in life were completely nonexistent. Same with Zuck. Same with Spiegel. Same with 99% of the entrepreneurs HN idolizes.

Here's some light reading:

http://qz.com/455109/entrepreneurs-dont-have-a-special-gene-...

http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/

EDIT: Removed potentially inflammatory line, which went as follows: "Just a bunch of rich kids trying to prove a point to their parents".

This is definitely a personal opinion, but one that has merit if you examine the evolutionary psychology of parent-child relationships. The conversation is a bit in depth, but please understand that I was not trying to simply fire off an ad hominem. I was instead trying to hint at the incentives which drive an already rich child to strive for more wealth. For the vast majority of us who have to work for a living, such behaviors seem confusing. Only upon deeper analysis do the pyschological incentives for such individuals begin to make sense.

I struggle to understand why you've been downvoted for this. Perhaps HN has finally become the bastion of neo-oligarchs it purports to train?

It's all high and mighty to speak of taxes, but as the esteemed commenter above states, they mostly come from the wage slaves, not the capitaled elite.

And economies have overcome many revolutions, from iron to industrial, without these programs. Do you have a principled reason why the information age is any different?

I truly hope you are a billionaire, because once your Randian utopia comes to fruition, you will need private armies to protect you against their Blackwaters and Pinkertons. Because they'll come for your assets. Count on it.

Don't believe me? Look at Russia. See what happens when oligarchs challenge the supreme oligarch? Their assets get "nationalized", and they are imprisoned. That's best case. The less significant ones catch odd diseases strangely similar to polonium poisoning...

This is a very deep topic, but in summary, I believe the difficulty for women looking to marry in this day and age actually has more to do with the supply side.

Marriage is a terrible, terrible decision for any individual with above average income or assets. Given that most people who get married want to have kids, and because of biology women usually need to be the ones to take maternity leave, this creates an imbalance in earning power that only intensifies throughout the length of the marriage.

As a result, the lower earning spouse has an increasingly larger financial incentive to initiate a divorce. Note that this incentive is completely independent of the relationship between the spouses, because of the way marital assets are divided after a no-fault divorce.

Even in the happiest marriage imaginable, if there's any income/wealth disparity, the spouse on the low end has a massive economic incentive to initiate divorce for a payout.

This is why I said in my first post that marriage is an inherently broken institution, and needs serious reform. Incentives matter.

The "pressure" for these women to find their ideal spouse is similar to the "pressure" startups face in finding ideal employees. That is, they want the absolute best at rock bottom prices.

If you read the article, many of these women who desired to get married had numerous suitors, but these suitors were judged unfit for one reason or another and thus failed to meet the women's strict requirements. Much like companies wanting to hire 100x developers at 30$ an hour, these women are unfortunately trying to bend the supply/demand curves to their tastes, rather than working within the reality of the market.

As an aside, marriage as an institution in western societies is now a legal quagmire [1]. It's legal roots were laid down in times when women did not earn much and did not vote, so they were paid very generously in case of a divorce whose fault could be proven. Nowadays, divorce is the single most powerful legal instrument to take half of someone's net worth without any reason whatsoever. Marriage as an institution is beyond repair, and any couple who supports the spirit of family unity should boycott legal marriage for their own sake, as it leads to extremely toxic financial incentives for the lower earning spouse.

Just another case study in man-made systems which are patched and reworked continuously without thought to the designer's original intent.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZTOT6DKfZ8