HN user

doktrin

6,105 karma
Posts17
Comments1,802
View on HN

I think they just want families with young children to pay to sit together, like everyone else has to

Oh great so now I have to sit next to someone’s unattended child in the name of fairness? Am I gonna get the option to subsidise the family’s seat grouping instead of being saddled with that noise? Talk about creating problems for no good reason.

Sounds like you don’t even dispute his point, so how could you have refuted it?

To your point about relevance : nobody here has claimed this competitive advantage is wildly useful in a “first world” context, something the GP actually framed explicitly.

Personally I don’t think one needs to invoke post apocalyptic scenarios, as there are plenty of “first world” professions or scenarios that benefit from the same skill sets - military, emergency medicine, firefighting, just to name a few. The first world isn’t all spreadsheets and jira tasks.

Could not disagree more. Nothing is “interesting” in perpetuity. Hence why so many with ADHD engage with various topics in an intense but sporadic manner.

In the overwhelming majority of cases this scattershot approach is deeply frustrating for the individual, and orders of magnitude less productive - in terms of meaningful creation and innovation - than persevering on a focused set of tasks.

He might not be a super technical software engineer, but is he "non-technical" in that he can't even write some simple python or something equivalent?

1. that's a very low bar, almost to the point of making any distinction meaningless

2. imho, "technical" and "non-technical" are context dependent, and not intrinsic human qualities. Speaking for myself : I'm a technical individual contributor on my current team, but there are plenty of domains (bleeding edge AI research likely being one of them) where my technical acumen would fall short of expectations for an IC, and hence where my most logical role would be non-technical in nature.

Possibly due to social stigma. I don’t know that what I’m describing can be attributed to the safety net itself, but many countries with excellent social safety programs also have a low social tolerance for failure. This is not limited to using social benefits - e.g fail in business and you’re a business failure who will struggle to get any financing ever again.

I can’t pretend to know the man’s mind but I always got the vibe he didn’t really feel at home in the cultural landscape of the late 60s and onwards

Personally I think his contributions would be welcome in any era, and either way “this is the year that was” is a certified banger

I'm not buying that people here are "fine" with this. This is one of those things people might be fine with, until they find themselves in that exact spot.

I'm gonna suggest that people who are blase about this issue are comfortable in the knowledge that it will never affect them. HN contributors might have 99+ problems, but being lusted over by the internet at large isn't one of them.

1. Audit / evaluation / quality assurance teams exist across multiple verticals from multinationals to government, and cannot reliably function when overly subservient to the production or “value creating” side

2. Boeing is a good and timely example of the consequences of said internal checks and balances collapsing under “value creation” pressure. That was a catastrophic failure which still can’t reasonably be compared to the downside of misaligned AI.

Everything legal

First of all, this unironically reminds me of Borat.

More importantly, you keep citing legality in this thread as if that should basically end the discussion. Quite frankly that strikes me as a position of convenience, because clearly HN is not a court of law and the scope is not restricted to whatever happens to be legal in any given jurisdiction.

Do you for instance support all legal acts in your country? Going out on a limb I suspect you find at least a few morally dubious or worse.

Just some examples off the top of my head : IVF for single women? State support for all mosques? Fosen windfarms and a broad co-signing of feel-good UN resolutions? Preferential hiring based on either gender or ethnicity? Slap on the wrist punishments for basically all offenses? Enshrined trans rights? Teachers being at the total (legal) mercy of abusive students?

I dunno man, almost like “it’s legal!” is not the QED you think it is.