temphn

Hi Larry,

I for one thank you for your contribution. Hacker News can be a bunch of jackasses at times.

You are absolutely right: distributed version control led to git, which completely changed programming. And though Satoshi didn't cite it by name it was almost certainly also part of the inspiration for Bitcoin and the blockchain, which has led to another $30B in collective market cap.

If you want a suggestion for what to do next, or what to advise, you can probably have a lot of impact (and make money) by getting involved in some of these new distributed ledger/ICO projects. You have the technical ability and it's now possible to monetize at the protocol level. Here are some links if you're interested:

https://www.smithandcrown.com/icos/

https://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-crow...

http://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols

Several points:

1) Google has Android because they did something very similar to Apple: Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board and used his inside info to drive smartphone development at Google. A massive lawsuit then transpired, but for Google on balance it was worth it to steal the Android IP from Apple.

http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/20/steve-jobs-im-going-to-destroy...

2) For that matter, David Drummond was on the board of Uber and arguably took info from there to Google as well, using it to start their ride hailing project. Uber did not sue at that time.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-02/exclusive...

3) Google was very slow on self-driving. Levandowski and others tried to get Google to ship a real self-driving car product for years, but only Uber actually had the cojones to do it in Pittsburgh and Arizona. That is what finally lit a fire under Google to spin out Waymo.

The FDA is not elected, or even indirectly elected. They are career bureaucrats with career tenure who cannot be fired. How would you even know that they are doing a good job? Last I looked, Americans have terrible health care relative to other countries; the FDA has no responsibilit for that?

The answer is to stop arguing with words and start targeting Gawker's business model. Their advertiser list is in plain view. Go to their about page to see all the megacorps that have done sponsored ads with them. Now take the worst things Gawker has ever written and send it to the people who run the advertising accounts at those companies (you can get their names off LinkedIn or whatever).

For example, send the #GawkingatRapeCulture hashtag to the Coke rep who chose to advertise on Gawker and ask them whther Coke is intentionally supporting rape culture by donating to Gawker. Make sure not do this purely as a solo op; once you have the data on their advertisers, pull together a website that makes it easy for anyone to chip in via one click.

Those who run sites with advertising inventory can also donate ad slots at lower CPMs to the sponsors of Gawker in order to pull revenue away from Gawker.

They profit from clickbait. So we need to hit these people in the wallet.

  What Silicon Valley does better than anyone is create 
  exits.  They know how to get people who they have made 
  money for to turn over a lot of that money to buy the 
  companies they have invested in. They know how to put on a 
  show to get a company to an IPO. They know how to go out 
  and get hundreds of millions of dollars to bridge companies 
  with 10s of millions in revenues to their IPO and more 
  importantly to make sure the IPO happens.

https://www.quora.com/What-was-Broadcast.com

  startups which provide deluxe on-site benefits could extend 
  their daycare, meal and on-site walk-in health care to 
  people who have WIC or EBT cards and can show that they 
  live in the neighborhood. The bonus here? You can meet 
  actual people in your neighborhood.

Let's also make sure the person criticizing said "assholes" is not paid to be a professional asshole themselves, like Sam Biddle or Nitasha Tiku at Valleywag.

Hank Greely is not a "genetics prof", he is a bioethicist in Stanford's Law School. He doesn't develop new genetic technologies. This is like calling a film critic a director.

http://www.law.stanford.edu/profile/hank-greely

How many women and non-Asian minorities does Matasano end up hiring with that process?

The fundamental upstream question here is whether men and women should show the exact same patterns of ability and interest given their measurably different organs, hormones, chromosomes, lifespans, physiology, and so on. Much of the rest of the body differs systematically, visibly, and predictably between genders; it is unlikely a priori that the brain would remain invariant. Here's the late Doreen Kimura of McGill and Simon Fraser on the topic:

http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/behavior/sexdif1.htm

  Men and women display patterns of behavioral and cognitive 
  differences that reflect varying hormonal influences on 
  brain development

  By Doreen Kimura (May 13, 2002)

  Men and women differ not only in their physical attributes 
  and reproductive function but also in many other 
  characteristics, including the way they solve intellectual 
  problems. For the past few decades, it has been 
  ideologically fashionable to insist that these behavioral 
  differences are minimal and are the consequence of 
  variations in experience during development before and 
  after adolescence. Evidence accumulated more recently, 
  however, suggests that the effects of sex hormones on brain 
  organization occur so early in life that from the start the 
  environment is acting on differently wired brains in boys 
  and girls. Such effects make evaluating the role of 
  experience, independent of physiological predisposition, a 
  difficult if not dubious task. The biological bases of sex 
  differences in brain and behavior have become much better 
  known through increasing numbers of behavioral, 
  neurological and endocrinological studies.

  Sex differences in problem solving have been systematically 
  studied in adults in laboratory situations. On average, men 
  perform better than women at certain spatial tasks. In 
  particular, men seem to have an advantage in tests that 
  require the subject to imagine rotating an object or 
  manipulating it in some other way. They also outperform 
  women in mathematical reasoning tests and in navigating 
  their way through a route. Further, men exhibit more 
  accuracy in tests of target-directed motor skills--that is, 
  in guiding or intercepting projectiles.

  Women, on average, excel on tests that measure recall of 
  words and on tests that challenge the person to find words 
  that begin with a specific letter or fulfill some other 
  constraint. They also tend to be better than men at rapidly 
  identifying matching items and performing certain precision 
  manual tasks, such as placing pegs in designated holes on a 
  board.

http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/images/00018E9D-879D-1D06-8E49...

Here is Louann Brizendine of UCSF:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine/dp/...

  Review 1: Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist at the 
  University of California, San Francisco, explores 
  groundbreaking issues in brain science...Brizendine 
  graduated from the Yale University School of Medicine and 
  draws on research done at the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood 
  and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF in 1994.

  Review 2 :This comprehensive new look at the hormonal 
  roller coaster  that rules women's lives down to the 
  cellular level, "a user's guide to new research about the 
  female brain and the neurobehavioral systems that make us 
  women," offers a trove of information, as well as some 
  stunning insights. Though referenced like a work of 
  research, Brizedine's writing style is fully accessible. 
  Brizendine provides a fascinating look at the life cycle of 
  the female brain from birth ("baby girls will connect 
  emotionally in ways that baby boys don't") to birthing 
  ("Motherhood changes you because it literally alters a 
  woman's brain-structurally, functionally, and in many ways, 
  irreversibly") to menopause (when "the female brain is   
  nowhere near ready to retire") and beyond.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime#Crimestop

  Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by   
  instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It 
  includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to 
  perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest 
  arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being 
  bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable 
  of leading in a heretical direction. 

  The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous 
  thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, 
  instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.

  He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He 
  presented himself with propositions -- 'the Party says the 
  earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than 
  water' -- and trained himself in not seeing or not 
  understanding the arguments that contradicted them.

Huh? Nature Publishing Group, where Rowan Manning works, makes its profit margins from extorting scientific libraries rather than superior code.

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2010/06/boycotting_the_n...

  Boycotting the Nature Publishing Group

  The Nature Publishing Group publishes not only the 
  prestigious journal Nature, but also many others. When this 
  company bought Scientific American, it raised the 
  institutional subscription price seven-fold. Now they are 
  insisting on quadrupling the fees for 67 journals to which 
  the University of California subscribes.

  Right now, we pay them an average of $4,465 per year for 
  each journal we subscribe to. After the increase, this 
  would soar to $17,479 per year. In response, the University 
  of California is considering a system-wide boycott of the 
  Nature Publishing Group — for example, cancelling 
  subscriptions to all their journals.

https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint/blob/master/lib/rule...

Well, it looks like the mediocre developer's qualities are on display in this tool, as Rowan Manning sure seems to care a great deal about whether you drink beer or not. We are talking about the kind of person who thinks "cutting edge" in a job description is a "fail" because it sets a competitive expectation.

is totally a fascist looking to hunt down fellow citizens for the state.

That is exactly what it is.

http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/

I'm sure he doesn't. Just as I'm sure we don't want to work with religious fanatics. Go forth ye neo-Puritans and build a startup without a competitive environment, where no one can curse or drink beer and must be "professional" at all times. I'm sure you'll set the world on fire!

This is the same kind of person who would write software to find anti-Islamic comments had he been born in Iran, or to hunt down dissidents if born in China. The kind of person who reflexively genuflects towards the current state-sponsored ideology, whatever it is (quick test: is Obama on your side?), because he loves the rush of feeling holier-than-thou.

As an example, the lint checks that "bro culture" is bad, but female-friendly (like Minted.com[1]) is assumed to be good. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Very predictable. Like any neo-Puritan, he then comes after profanity, and beer, and even (god forbid) competitive-sounding job descriptions! His vision of the startup future: an HR drone stamping on a programmer's face, forever.

So how about thoughtlint? Avoid hiring rowanmanning, or anyone on their helpfully provided list:

https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint#thanks

People like this will spend their time being Adria-Richards-esque thought police rather than shipping code. Contrast with Max Levchin, who actually sold a startup for a billion-plus dollars:

http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-...

  Max Levchin:  The notion that diversity in an early team is 
  important or good is completely wrong. You should try to 
  make the early team as non-diverse as possible. There are a   
  few reasons for this. The most salient is that, as a 
  startup, you’re underfunded and undermanned. It’s a big 
  disadvantage; not only are you probably getting into 
  trouble, but you don’t even know what trouble that may be. 
  Speed is your only weapon. All you have is speed. 

[1] http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-particular-things-Minted-...

Avatar was quite negative. Syriana, Rendition, and Jarhead were as well. Your general point definitely stands, post 9/11 at least, but those are notable exceptions.

This plot compares an inferred model to the instrumental record. Here is the study expressed in the words of Real Climate: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/paleoc...

  Over the last decades, numerous researchers have 
  painstakingly collected, analyzed, dated, and calibrated 
  many data series that allow us to reconstruct climate 
  before the age of direct measurements. Such data come e.g. 
  from sediment drilling in the deep sea, from corals, ice 
  cores and other sources. Shaun Marcott and colleagues for 
  the first time assembled 73 such data sets from around the 
  world into a global temperature reconstruction for the 
  Holocene, published in Science. Or strictly speaking, many 
  such reconstructions: they have tried about twenty 
  different averaging methods and also carried out 1,000 
  Monte Carlo simulations with random errors added to the 
  dating of the individual data series to demonstrate the 
  robustness of their results.

1) The "divergence problem". The lack of correlation between model inputs like tree rings and the instrumental record over the last few decades is acknowledged by all; climate scientists generally state that it is due to anthropogenic factors, arguably assuming the consequent.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tree-ring-proxies-divergence...

2) Serious climate model prediction failures over the past 10 year period, as acknowledged in Nature:

http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2...

In other words, key model inputs used in climate reconstructions do not strongly correlate with the instrumental record over the last 30-40 years ("the divergence problem") and climate models have so far had a poor track record over the last 15 years, with average temperatures winding up below the envelope of model predictions. These predictive failures in the datasets we can check bode ill for the prospect of hindcasting global average temperatures to within 1 degree more than 8000 years ago.

They have, just on a category-by-category basis. Many of the sharing economy companies are included.

http://cdixon.org/2012/11/23/some-problems-are-so-hard-they-...

It is easy to justify "inaction" on this.

1) This kind of article is pure propaganda, intended to make money for Business Insider by "raising questions" and selling ad revenue against the pageviews.

2) "We" aren't responsible for the decisions of people who live within a 100 mile radius. If "we" are held responsible for their outcomes, financially and morally responsible, then "we" will also demand control over their lives to a degree you'd find unpalatable. This can be trivially solved by re-institutionalization and a Boston-Bombings-style sweep and cleanup of the camp. It won't be because the idea is to give them (and Business Insider) our money without giving us any control over their behavior or the use of funds.

3) The questions raised by BI are highly selective. For example, they put expensive homes on this map: http://www.businessinsider.com/homeless-in-silicon-valley-in...

But they don't talk about quantitative easing or Bernanke's 85B/month in mortgage purchases, which have the express intent of driving up home prices.

One could go on. But the right answer is that we didn't cause this, we're only paying attention to it because of BI's SEO, BI itself isn't going to dedicate its operation to donating money, you aren't going to dedicate your life to helping them, and so on. The right answer is no action on this issue that you heard about today, will forget about tomorrow, and is insoluble anyway.

Refuse to be guilt-tripped by cynical manipulators relying on maudlin sympathy, people who want to draw your attention to an issue, blame it on you, and then charge you (involuntarily via tax) a pretty penny for not solving it. For how many billions have been spent on "the homeless" to date? The result is only to subsidize them and build a permanent caste of homeless caretakers.

The real solution is to reverse de-institutionalization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation), but that would be fought tooth and nail by "homeless advocates" who'd see their budgets vanish in a trice. Public homelessness as we know it is subsidized, it is a government-and-NGO-caused phenomenon.

There ARE people who refuse to help themselves. They do exist. The only way you can believe to the contrary is because you haven't worked with the homeless. No amount of money can currently cure mental illness or drug addiction, or make people work if they don't want to work.

That's a silly response. There are seven million people in the Bay Area. A tiny fraction are homeless. Try lifting up an adult human being sometime. It's not easy. These people are frequently mentally ill, addicted to drugs, or otherwise incapable of taking care of themselves. Example:

http://www.businessinsider.com/former-business-owner-homeles...

  She ended up homeless when she turned to California's 
  shelter network and hated it. ... Five years ago she moved 
  into The Jungle and says she has no regrets.
  

What is the difference in your view? Very interested to hear this. The sums involved in this case ($20000) are less than those involved in most employment scenarios.

Ha. Methinks you doth protest too much. But I'll be very precise. Show me the equations and code that Krugman wrote in 2009 that predicted the unemployment curve over the last four years. OMB (full of economists!), to their credit, at least essayed a quantitative prediction. As the first graph showed, it was completely wrong.

So: what "very old" models performed "very well"? You must be thinking of something here. I'm not talking about a Krugman blog post where he says the stimulus was too small. I'm talking about an actual scatterplot, a time series prediction with the X axis as time, the Y axis as the dependent variable, and actual empirical measurements plotted vs. the predictions of theory.

Here is another example from a different field:

http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2...

http://www.nature.com/news/499139a-i2-0-jpg-7.11335?article=...

You can see the graph halfway down the page, with theoretical predictions as the red line and actual empirical measurements as the black line. The Nature article admits they don't match well. But in other fields they do match well. For example:

http://physics.info/projectiles/practice.shtml

In ballistics the predicted time series match experimental results very closely. So I ask again: what "very well established models" in economics performed "very well"? Which of them nailed the curve?

Interesting. What's the best study you have, with scatterplots, that shows that the "very old" models performed "very well"? Insofar as we have seen actual quantitative predictive modeling by Keynesians of macroeconomic quantities, the plots tend to look like this:

http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/wp-content/up...

And the independent variables of course tend to like this:

http://m.research.stlouisfed.org/fred/series.php?sid=BASE&sh...

Neither seem particularly textbook, but you're obviously thinking of something. Given that people who think differently from you invented Bitcoin (and thus have at least a glancing familiarity with advanced mathematics, if the solution of the Byzantine Generals problem means anything) it would be great to see some plots to the contrary. Not just models, but X/Y plots or tables in which Keynesians predict something and nail it. It's not hard, after all to find many examples of Krugman, Bernanke, Goolsbee, or Orszag making quantitative predictions that turned out flagrantly wrong [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038790

Now all we need to see for the other side of the story are the Soviet archives. Given that the Soviets were behind most worldwide communist revolutions (including the Cuban, North Korean, Ethiopian, etc.), did they plan to do something with/to Mossadegh via their Tudeh puppets in Iran like they did in neighboring Afghanistan later on?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_Afghanis...

You know what, looks like you're right on this one and I am wrong. It wasn't clear on a first read whether they were saying "his father" as in "his biological father" or "his adoptive father", but on a second read you're right. I still think the statements hold in their generality but clearly not in this specific case.

  The twins' father, Walker Inman, 57, lumbered from the 
  mansion, his tattooed sleeves visible under a black T-
  shirt, drinking his morning rum ... He'd been full of 
  dangerous mischief since he was a child. As a 13-year-old 
  orphan in 1965 taken in by his aunt Doris Duke, Walker – 
  then called "Skipper" – had romped around her lavish 
  14,000-square-foot Hawaiian estate without regard for 
  property or propriety

[1] Celebrities and athletes are of course excluded from this sentence. They don't become wealthy through scaling businesses/managing people, and as such have a much higher incidence of behavioral issues. Many NBA and NFL athletes are bankrupt after a few years out of the league, in fact.

[2] http://www.yale.edu/scan/GT_2004_NRN.pdf

[3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/01420...

[4] http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/kalthoff/bio346/PDF/PowerPo...

[5] http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1737667,00.ht...

  The Minnesota psychologist and her colleagues found that 
  disparity could be due as often to innate factors such as 
  perinatal care or his birth parents' genes. "The 
  deleterious effects may quite possibly have come before the 
  adoption ever took place," Keyes, the study's lead 
  researcher, says.

Sounds bad. But almost certainly was not simply a spur of the moment decision, but rather that Lenz was on the list of people to be fired later in the day and had done things that Armstrong knew about (like leaking Patch information). Still bad to do it like that on a call where people are getting fired for real, but this gives some context.

http://www.businessinsider.com/aol-ceo-tim-armstrong-appeare...

  A few minutes later, Armstrong complained about leaks to 
  the media. He said the leaks were making Patch seem like 
  "loser-ville" in the press. He said, "That's why Abel was 
  fired." "We can't have people that are in the locker room 
  giving the game plan away."

Re: "Reforms" and "change"...it might be time to become a bit more cynical about what Obama means by these things. He was never going to reduce his power, or the government's power, voluntarily.