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Re:This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup on Friday January 24, 2014 @07:13PM (#7119139)
You owe Merritt an apology

No way. Meritt clearly attempted to shame her for writing about something that, for whatever reason, she didn't confront immediately.

He's a censor. He's shaming her for protesting outside his designated free-speech zone. Fuck him.

Re:This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup on Friday January 24, 2014 @06:38PM (#7118981)
No. what Merritt said that if you don't say something right there and then you should never be allowed to say anything.

He's an asshole and a bully. If a victim doesn't protest withim his designated free-speech zone he doesn't want them to protest at all.

Re:This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup on Friday January 24, 2014 @06:19PM (#7118889)
I'm not dumb enough to try to change the stripes on a proudly bigoted jerk like Meritt.

I just want anybody who sees his spew to know that his opinion is not the only one. I want any human who is harassed to know that if they share their story after the fact, that's good.

And they shouldn't worry about the fact that some utterly worthless assholes like Meritt will try to shame them for speaking out. They shouldn't be ashamed if they were too afraid, too shy, or too confused to respond in the moment.

It is GOOD that we share these stories. It is GOOD that we move towards a world where these things happen less often.

And the utterly worthless assholes like Meritt who want to shame people for sharing their stories... they might be well represented in HN, but they're a minority of normal humans.

And I'd like other potential Meritt's to realize how utterly disgusting it is that he tried to shame the victim into silence.

Re:This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup on Friday January 24, 2014 @06:09PM (#7118840)
Meritt absolutely made blaming statements. Even the most charitable reading of his post is him complaining that she decided to make clickbait.

He tried to shame her and degrade her for having shared her story instead of doing something else.

He's an asshole. Fuck him.

Re:This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup on Friday January 24, 2014 @05:46PM (#7118713)
I think it's absolutely disgusting that you criticize the victim for documenting what happened to her.

It's despicable and downright fucking evil that you basically accuse her of sharing her story solely because she wants attention.

The worst part of your god-awful post is that it's currently pinned to the top of this board.

The fact that your disgusting, insensitive post is at the top is why women don't work in tech. They don't want to have to deal with assholes like you who have nothing better to do than say "she should do X instead of sharing her story", or whatever else you want to do to silence her, and shame her for sharing her story.

She is brave for doing anything, because she knew the world is full of assholes like you: cowardly bigots who will criticize ANY action she takes.

I'm sorry she had a problem. And I'm more sorry that HN has degraded to the point where a cowardly attack from a piece of shit like you is pinned to the top.

Re:Uber rival accuses car service of dirty tactics on Friday January 24, 2014 @12:24PM (#7116077)
I sincerely doubt that a company as unethical to the bones as Uber would ever consider firing them.
Re:Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1) on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @04:29PM (#7098548)
Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you lack empathy for the challenges faced by women in Silicon Valley because you're a white male whose local culture is globally famous for being tolerant and inclusive?

You haven't experienced the problems personally, and you probably haven't even seen them locally. But they're real.

Re:Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1) on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @04:20PM (#7098474)
I've been involved with several country/region specific immigrant entrepreneur conferences.

For example, the famous video of Guy Kawasaki speaking about the Art of the Start was filmed at TiECon, which is run by The Indus Entrepreneurs.

Re:Economics Simulation on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @09:27AM (#7095371)
Such a simulation would reveal a lot about the creator's beliefs, and essentially nothing about reality.
Re:Dropbox raises about $250 million at $10 billion valuation on Friday January 17, 2014 @05:21PM (#7078853)
"The company uses more than uses more than 10,000 physical servers to manage user content, along with Amazon Web Services."

source: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/10/23/how-d...

I was trying to find a comment on HN where one of the dropbox employees references their datacenter, but my hnsearch-fu wasn't up to par.

Re:Tell HN: Server Status on Thursday January 16, 2014 @09:30AM (#7069546)
why don't you move to a more reliable hosting, like AWS?

As a fairly heavy ($x00,000/month) user of AWS, this is the funnniest and most-misguided thing I've read in a long time. AWS is horrible. It's extraordinarily bad, with all sorts of insanely complex failure modes to account for. There are some reasons to consider using it, but reliability is most definitely NOT amongst them.

Re:Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @07:05PM (#7067150)
DRM is not slavery.
Re:Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential on Monday January 13, 2014 @10:12PM (#7055139)
> you should not be okay with DRM. It's as simple as it's: DRM is the form of slavery.

Sorry Ivan, but voluntarily agreeing to access encrypted content is not comparable to slavery.

Re:Overstock.com Is Now Accepting Bitcoins on Thursday January 09, 2014 @03:51PM (#7033133)
There's a difference between using legal tax structures to reduce (or eliminate) your bill, and simply not paying your taxes.
I've heard of other scenarios where the government prevented competition, but they nearly all boil down to the same core: the constituents want X, but some sort of market failure is occurring (or likely to occur) and a temporary market intervention was able to resolve it.
Re:Ben Horowitz Explained on Thursday January 09, 2014 @07:15AM (#7030001)
"Is anybody else genuinely annoyed that sites such as angel.co use these as legitimising signals of worthiness?"

Absolutely. AngelList is all about institutional brands, and that's kind of sad. Teams are summarized by where they studied and worked, not what they accomplished, or what people think of them.

It always struck me as a lazy 'old boys club' method of filtering people and ideas.

The government regulations aren't there to create or protect monopolies. They're there to control monopolies that were likely to occur anyway, so that the monopolists can't use their position in an overly extractive manner.

Since these regulations occur at a local level, some of the rules are more effective than others, and some of them are straight-up corrupt. But the common case is not government creating monopolies, but rather government restraining them by regulating them.

I strongly suggest that if you're going to espouse these opinions, you do some math first.

In this case, I suggest you model rural America's density, and the cost to lay down a wire, or fiber, or whatever in a town, along with all the needed infrastructure.

Then I suggest you model the financial returns of that investment under conditions where there are multiple players.

If you do this well, you'll find that as you add competition, you add marketing cost, and you're also forced to amortize the fixed infrastructure costs over smaller and smaller numbers of consumers. And you'll also find that whoever was first to market in that area has a dominant position from a game theoretical perspective, and can make moves that would make it essentially impossible for any competitor to enter the marketplace profitably.

Natural monopolies aren't made-up things.

For future reference: there is a small downward facing arrow that can succinctly express your opinion.
Can't we both agree that corporations and governments abuse their power as a matter of fact?

All people and institutions that have power sometimes abuse the power. Sometimes the abuse is knowing, sometimes it's accidental.

This is not terribly interesting.

You're taking what he said and swinging it so fully in the opposite direction it makes you look as crazy as him.

In my defense, I wasn't commanding the HN audience to place 100% of the blame on one party or another. I was just illustrating how insanely idiotic it was for OP to command us to absolve the corporations of their sins, and instead place 100% of the blame on the government.

Absolutely. Corporations do nothing but good. They bear no responsibility for their purposeful misuse of the funds.

And government does nothing but bad.

Swear on your stack of Ayn Rand books that the world would be better if we had more corporations, because they are perfectly ethical and never screw anybody over.

Yes, that's right. Never blame the con artists^W^Wcorporations who didn't do what they promised. Instead blame the government for trusting them.

Re:Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women? on Saturday January 04, 2014 @11:31AM (#7011590)
There's an over proliferation of all conferences, and this includes niche conferences.

The answer to her headline question appears to deviate from Betteridge's law, in that she concludes that some of the initiatives help women.

Re:Does Snapchat's CEO Need to Go? on Friday January 03, 2014 @05:51PM (#7008811)
Punditry is not journalism. Journalism is not punditry.

That said, I find it morally repugnant that 001sky seems to want to quash the right of either to engage in public speech, simply because said speech calls some entrepreneur's credentials into question. It's fine for any person (be they a research-oriented journalist or a bloviating pundit) to raise these sorts of questions, even if I think their position is weak and a tad ridiculous.

If you, as an entrepreneur, are too weak to handle public scrutiny (including scrutiny from people who are quite unlike yourself), then you should find another line of work.

If the companies didn't want you to do this, then they wouldn't let you do this.

They do not want you to do this. What your friend did is considered to be a form of return fraud and abuse. The industry term for it is 'wardrobing' or 'renting'.

It's a big enough problem that there is a company, http://www.theretailequation.com, that helps large firms blacklist people like your friend, though these defenses are fairly recent.

Returns require a receipt.

Not always.

Re:Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death on Thursday January 02, 2014 @11:36PM (#7004187)
Every Libertarian I've ever met believes in contract law, and that essentially ANY penalty can be attached to willful violations of contract.

Under a Libertarian regime, the whole thing would've been simpler, as no theory of justice or societal good would've been involved. It would've simply been JSTOR and MIT extracting whatever revenge they'd considered.

Re:Bitcoin Is a High-Tech Dinosaur Soon to Be Extinct on Tuesday December 31, 2013 @09:54PM (#6993943)
If I'm understanding that correctly, every node would experience peak traffic of around 50mbps, and constant traffic of at least 10mpbs. It's not clear to me what happens when you have nodes that lag (and that would certainly be a common occurrence at those levels of traffic).

Beyond that, I found their choice of reference level of traffic oddly low given the stated ambitions of most serious BTC proponents.

Re:Bitcoin Is a High-Tech Dinosaur Soon to Be Extinct on Tuesday December 31, 2013 @08:54PM (#6993815)
I'm such a person. I've been active with BTC, I've mined and traded (both to a nice personal profit), but I think BTC is a loser. I invested in BTC the same way I invested in one-hit wonders like Zynga: very temporarily.

Perhaps we can ask each other some questions:

My first question: BTC is designed with very limited bandwidth for transactions (right now it can only do 7 transactions per second). Is there an actual solution in place to deal with this? All I ever see is hand-waving about how the limits could be raised or eliminated, though that appears that it would create a problem with block chain size and bandwidth.

Is there a proposal someplace that actually addresses BTC's current lack of capacity that doesn't just create a rather massive bandwidth and storage problem?

Re:Peter Thiel’s Graph of the Year on Tuesday December 31, 2013 @10:57AM (#6991078)
Yes! The point could've been made honestly, but Thiel used several different 'how to lie with charts and statistics' techniques instead.

My respect for people naturally declines when they've gone out of their way to deceive me. This happens regardless of whether or not I agree with the goal of their deception.

The Bible doesn't say 'Thou shalt only lie if it helps you further your personal agenda', it says 'Thou shalt not lie.'

The PreCheck program isn't just a fee; it's a rather thorough background check. And being approved for it doesn't actually guarantee lower scrutiny, as PreCheck'd travelers remain eligible for the random high-security selection.
Re:ATF uses rogue tactics in storefront stings across nation on Monday December 30, 2013 @02:43PM (#6986425)
It probably depends on whether you believe guns are more likely to create liberty or destroy it.

There are some very reasonable arguments that guns destroy more liberty than they create, and thus it is liberal to be against tools that make violence so easily accessible.

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