red_blobs

Remember when memes were lauded as a part of the millennial culture? Now when they are used for something you disagree with, it's seen as 'evil', 'wrong', or 'unethical'.

The problem is that the vast majority of voters are swayed by emotion, not fact.

These sorts of things are only going to get worse, because it is the only way to get people to vote your way. Even if you have a good idea and a sound plan, you need to dress it up in emotion-laced slop to get people to come out and vote for you.

It also doesn't help that the mainstream media, which is a very powerful force in the US when it comes to politics, is biased toward the Democratic party (as seen in the recent Wikileaks emails from the DNC). It means that to counteract this, you need to try another tactic, like posting on the Internet.

Even our leaders are swayed by emotion. Both Obama and Hillary have commented prematurely on important events ('Clockboy' and various police shootings) without having professionals and science weigh in on the actual facts of the events after a real investigation.

This is one of the main problems with our society today: anti-science winning out over facts and assuming someone is guilty before even attempting to see if they are innocent.

There was even a book on the New York best sellers list called 'Weapons of Math Destruction' claiming that math and statistics are somehow 'racist'. Think about that for a minute to let it sink in....Facts are now racist.

Social media has made it worse because instead of just having the mainstream media feed us hyperbole and rhetoric, anybody with a Twitter account can do it too.

It has now had some real-world consequences and resulted in many people getting hurt and even getting killed in riots over half-truths, hearsay, and rumors.

If you want shit posting to stop, we have to live in a society where it has to stop working so well. Maybe even holding people responsible for posting lies that lead to riots or death.

Edit: sigh. I always try to have intellectual conversations here on HN and am always disappointed. Most people here seem to just want to hear the current San Francisco narrative about the world and live only within that bubble. It's actually really sad.

Okay, then expect expensive drugs for decades when it costs billions in R and D and the drug companies need to recoup the costs (in addition to the red-tape involved in releasing the drugs).

Many countries with cheap drugs never had to pay all of the research and development costs.

If it's not government greed, it's government ineptness and the inability to understand how the market actually works.

The generic company in this article, for instance, never had to pay any R&D costs for the proprietary epipen applicator and can easily charge a much lower amount of money for a generic version (which is different).

The high cost of FDA approval also creates monopolies, because it's very difficult to get anything to market. To get better and cheaper drugs, we need to change this at the government level.

Okay, then expect expensive drugs for decades when it costs billions in R and D and the drug companies need to recoup the

This is why I find many of the global warming papers dubious.

like I said, it's all about control. It gives a company like Amazon too much control over your business..especially when it comes to price.

Most hosting providers take care of any hardware issues and open source has come a long way. It's not that difficult to manage and scale a medium-traffic website.

In all likelihood, you will never need the level of scaling Amazon provides and are overpaying for the service.

I've been running web businesses for over a decade and have seen many companies fold because they give too much control to another business.

Yes it does. As a business owner, more taxes means less money for employees (and less employees hired).

People that don't understand taxes never consider this and immediately think employers are just greedy.

Inflation is also never considered, which is exactly why we have to keep raising minimum wage in the first place.

Minimum wage increase will not help anyone in the long-run. It will only inflate the cost of goods and services for everyone within a few years.

The real answer is more education

I watched the first couple of episodes and had to stop. The 'I'm special and nobody understands me' theme was incredibly derivative.

Being an uber liberal-minded hacker in the US today is mainsteam and trendy, not rebellious..which is exactly the antithesis of the hacker credo.

I just wish there was more original thought and less pandering to the Reddit community.

Truly great shows make us think, not just tell us something it thinks we want to hear.

The hacking scenes are accurate, but I would rather open up a terminal and do it than watch a poor representation of it on television.

Many people here don't realize what it costs a business, in taxes, to employ someone. I think if more people realized this, we would have less people demanding a $15 pay-raise for minimum wage workers.

'serverless' apps are not really 'serverless'. You are just allowing another company to run the actual server infrastructure.

While this might be good for large companies, it's dangerous for startups. Someone else has complete control over the infrastructure of your business and it not only makes it difficult for you to make simple changes that could save you money, but it's very expensive compared to traditional servers that you run yourself.

I run all of my own servers and it would cost me 10X to run it on AWS.

Too many startups outsource their infrastructure or create a business that relies completely on another business platform like Twitter/Facebook and then get squashed when things change or the platform doesn't want you to have too much power.

The book called 'Hatching Twitter' shows exactly this mindset: 3rd party API users were cut-off because the execs at Twitter realized that only a few of the 3rd party apps together had enough of a user base to compete with Twitter.

Which is why all of these services follow the same handbook: have generous access to the API, after this brings in and builds the user base, Cut-off access and severely limit the API (to prevent users from leaving).

One other step is charging so much money for the API access that it bankrupts most of these businesses and then launch a competing app.

I don't like these types of boxes because many of the people that get it think they can set it and forget it. When security updates fail in the background (or they know nothing about them in the first place), it gets 0wned.

I did this in Asia for a year.

If you can find a stable enough Internet connection (which costs a lot more in Asia), you will need to be very disciplined to actually get anything done.

All of the expats I met were 20 something college-aged students that just wanted to party, drink, and smoke weed every day or people that were rejected from their home country for one reason or another and can only find a job as an English teacher because most schools don't do their due diligence and weed out bad workers.

The rest are a small percentage of people that are in the same boat as you and were transferred for a short amount of time (usually 6-months to a year) for work.

It can be very isolating, unless all you want to do is party and get drunk. I was lucky because I had some other like-minded friends that came with me and I had studied the main language before I came. Almost all of my friends were locals, not expats.

I finally had to leave because my business was suffering and tripled my income after I came back.

Friendship needs to be earned, or it won't really mean anything. Bullying is a terrible thing and needs to be stopped, but this will do little to help out the person being bullied in the long-run.

I was bullied in middle school and finding a good group of friends is what stopped it. But I had to do it myself and earn it.

I feel like many startup founders, including Patrick, build the technology and hope the business will follow...usually with an unsuccessful outcome.

He's great at marketing. He should have spent a year building a network of employers with lower-tech solutions and then expanded it out with starfighter.

I've been following Patrick since the BoS days and all of his products have been pretty low profit. Enough to support himself only (some, not even this much) (I'm not including consulting, only products or services)

Money is the lifeblood of all companies and you will need it to truly change the world.

5 years of 1 year experience repeated 5 times is better than someone that will introduce spaghetti code and security flaws simply because they've never experienced it.

It takes years to figure out patterns (when to use and not use them), good coding practices, avoiding newbie mistakes like sql injection and xss and how to actually make a deadline (its not easy to finish a project when you also have to learn the language and other skills in addition to the task at hand).

As a business owner, I don't want someone learning the above on the job and on my dime.

There is a company in MI that tried this called Compuware back in the 90s. It was a complete and utter disaster.

I disagree. Aside from an entry level position, you want someone with previous experience.

Google wouldn't hire someone to manage their datacenter with no previous experience managing anything like it.

of course not. People with $500+ limit will automatically be charged for the $5000 in damages they caused. It's all about risk and accountability.

It's cool to shit on Trump..but the media bias is astounding to me. I don't think I've seen one article linked on HN that shows all of the terrible things Clinton has done.

This works for small projects that only you touch. However, if you are building a product for a company and plan on having teams make changes to the code base, frameworks are the way to go.

It's even easier when hiring because a big portion of your training is already done before the person is hired and they are knowledgeable in said framework.

"It is a future in which my loved ones and all of those who reared and mentored me will be recognized as first-class citizens deserving of the very best America has to offer, not as restive black and brown folk pathologically inclined to violence who should be pacified with low-paying jobs or beaten into docility by more "law and order" policing."

Why do they have low-paying jobs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_family_struct...

68% of African-American babies were born to un-wed mothers. This alone makes it extremely difficult to actually get an education and make a living beyond minimum wage.

"recognized as first-class citizens deserving of the very best America has to offer"

Is this a joke? We have an African-American president. You can't get much more 'first-class' than that.

"beaten into docility by more "law and order" policing."

Yes, I would like more law and order and less violence. I don't want to raise my children in a society where they have to worry about getting beat up or robbed because our political correctness wouldn't allow us to arrest criminals.

"Gone would be any chance of sending my and my wife’s children to fully integrated and well-funded public schools without being forced into complicity with the structure of grossly unequal educational opportunities that wears the mask of "school choice.""

At some point, you need to stop blaming the system and start blaming personal choice. I read an article on CNN the other day that explained why the police stop African Americans more often than other races. They make up the majority of people that drive on suspended licenses and/or with unpaid tickets. The police will automatically stop you for this, regardless of the color of your skin.

What we really need to do is find out why this happens. But the truth often times doesn't fit the narrative.

What's sad about this article is that it doesn't account for personal choices and personal responsibility in the black community. There will always be racist people, but to say that the US has anything close to having systemic racism is ridiculous.

This article will only continue the ongoing racial divide in this country...but what more can I expect from VOX??

Want to see systemic racism? Live in Malaysia for a few years.

What ever happened to personal responsibility? It's something that needs to be instilled in our youth before they ever get to college.

I know at least 3 people that knowingly got PHDs in majors that will not amount to any sort of high-paying job. They chose to do this and it's not really the job of the university to determine the market value of their degrees.

Zuckerberg thinks he is a roman emperor..so visiting the pope fits right into the universe of his mental illness.

What a surprise. Amazon is a terrible company. They built it on the backs of smaller sellers and are now turning around and pushing them away.

There is always a subtext to Amazon's actions. The reality is that margins are decreasing for everyone (even the original manufacturers) and by forcing people to prove that they are an 'authorized reseller', it also allows these manufacturers to not only control the largest secondary market in the world, but profit handsomely from it.

The rich get richer and the rest of us are slowly pushed out of the marketplace and forced to work for the rich.

I used to be an Amazon seller about 5 years ago. They banned my account, held my money for 90 days (which nearly bankrupted me) and I couldn't actually talk to a real human about what happened.

I only got canned responses telling me they were sorry, but the information was proprietary to their business and they couldn't tell me why I was banned. I had 100% feedback and bent over backwards for all of my customers. I still didn't ever figure out why I was banned.

Jeff Bezos is a snot-nosed, Arrogant, child, in the body of an adult. What they do is criminal and they should be investigated and shut-down.

My thought? Most likely an ill-informed rant by a millennial.

"#CodeLikeAGirl."

The irony of discussing privilege and equality on a forum entitled '#codelikagirl' is not lost on me. If you want equality, you should act like it..instead of creating websites and forums that segregate yourself into gender-based groups.

"How can we reach males who have empathy for women’s causes, but are oblivious to male privilege?"

Women have higher reading rates, better graduation rates, and more are graduating from college than men.

We have a much higher percentage of women as: teachers, vets, and biologists to name a few..and nobody is complaining or fighting for more 'equality'.

We have women executives in almost every large company in the US and contrary to popular belief, there is no gender-pay gap when you actually account for the career/position.

There was male privilege in the 1950s and 60s, but our society is different now.

I don't agree with most of the feminist causes online because I can see that when they get any sort of power, they only want to oppress men. It has nothing to do with true 'equality'.

There are two solutions:

1) move outside a major city. I've never lived directly in a major city and have always been able to afford apartment rent. Even when I was making slightly above minimum wage.

2) Cities need to change the rules on housing. San Francisco, for instance, has an artificial housing shortage. The city artificially limits the amount of housing (height and amount), and since demand increases every year, the price also increases. While this is great for anyone that owns property, it's bad for renters.

Most left-leaning cities do this and then turn around and complain that rent-prices are too high. I often wonder if they tech econ 101 anymore.

This will only hurt the science community. You need money to fund these publications and the scientists that are leaking the publications aren't actually funding the research with their own money.

A better idea would be to fund publications yourself (with your own money) and release all of the information for free.

But it takes much more talent, intelligence, and discipline to do something like this, which most people don't have.

It really depends on the data you are scraping. My main business relies on scraping and my data mining application has been running for over 5 years. If you have enough IP addresses available to you, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish it from normal users hitting the site...and bandwidth has gotten so cheap, the overhead is very affordable.

I've noticed that most sites actually don't change that often. I deal with changes once or twice every 3 months.

"If you scrape for a living, only do it as a side job."

This is true if you are scraping the low hanging fruit. I scrape 40+ sources (I do have access to a few APIs as well) and then have to extract the patterns/data I need to then integrate it into my business model. This is all automatic now and I only work on upgrading for speed and efficiency.

If you have to scan millions of urls daily from 1 site, it's probably not going to work out. You need to figure out clever ways of getting the data and using it without breaking any laws or pissing off the site owner.

Is his contribution just the idea and you are building the product out?

I won't partner up with an idea person anymore. I have found that they always feel entitled to more of the equity and I suspect it's because they are insecure about their own abilities (which usually ends up being something you can do yourself).

I will, however, partner with an idea person if they also offer a sizable investment into the company.

Your cofounder should be bringing something to the company. Either money, connections in the industry, or some other type of skill.

If you are both developers or one person has just the idea, you will run into issues at a later stage in the development of your company.

You should replace 'unfair' with 'competitive'. I have many competitive advantages, but I don't consider decades of sacrifice and hard work that contributed to these advantages 'unfair'.