skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're responding to points that the author hasn't made. Any time you're writing, you can absolutely not afford to explain to readers all of the things which you are _not_ talking about. You have to rely on a reader's ability to discern that there may well be other valid points besides the one(s) that you're writing about.

> but taking them as a chance to generalize about most boys or even a small percentage of boys seems incorrect.

This points was made in the article. The author points that that boys committing mass killing is extremely uncommon. That most are okay. That nearly all will turn out fine.

That doesn't seem to me to be the point.

> We should be concerned with school shooters, of course

That (it seems to me) is the author's point. That all of the mass killings are committed by men. And since we are concerned with school shootings, masculinity in the context of modernity is one topic worth discussing.

Yes, it's only one topic amongst many. This article isn't about those topics. It's about one of the many topics. We can discuss how the world is getting better all the time (a statement I agree with), in some other article.
Gangs are fascinatingly effective and persistent social structures. I suspect that they and the three/four man squad form the minimum viable products for defensive and offensive operations, respectively.

The conclusion from that is that it can be rational to want to join a gang when in a situation where larger forms of political or military organization are undesirable or ineffective, and particularly when they're suppressed or are active adversaries.
Can you mention one or two alternatives? Summing something like log-happiness doesn't help (and really isn't much more than objecting for the sake of objecting.) Thresholds for dignity just raise the zero-bar, and inequality metrics argue _for_ the repugnant conclusion.

Maybe mean/median/minimum happiness? They don't intuitively appeal to me, but I'd like to hear an argument for them from someone who believes in them (as well as arguments for systems I haven't considered.)

Of course there are plenty of non-utilitarian systems to choose from, but I'm sure few their proponents would like to describe as maximising happiness :-)
Bravo, took all the words out of my head!
Or we could make more of an effort to foster a civilized environment so kids like you don't have legitimate grievances so severe that gunning down a group of people seems like the only solution.

I don't have any problem with the idea that folks don't need semi automatic assault rifles. But that is mostly not the framing I am hearing when gun control is mentioned and it appalls me to hear the argument you are making that someone victimized like you were should simply be deprived of a means to fight back and that is something good.

I am incredibly uncomfortable with the argument you are making. My dad was career military and I grew up with guns in the house. Having guns does not cause people to go postal. We need to stop being okay with a culture that routinely gives people a reason to go postal.

That doesn't happen overnight because of a single ugly incident. It is the outgrowth of years of things going wrong. And we should not be okay with that and taking the position that bullying is fine as long as the victim can't get an assault rifle.
I'm just waiting until Oracle offers something called "blockchain" in their database products. That way you can have the buzz, without the fuss.
You forgot political parties. That's the tribalism for the masses.
I dont understand why. How can they see school shootings and see that toxic masculinity in the form of guns is so bad for society. Do they just value different things culturally?
Well, of course something that skirts around regulations will require less red tape. Once the government catches up, you'll be required to do similar hoop jumping for cryptos. Exchanges suffer this problem already, don't they?
There is a large body of research and a wide variety of actors across the political spectrum who are all in agreement that the US is one the largest tax havens in the world. I can only assume that you've never been exposed to any of that and are simply making a knee-jerk reaction comment.

Here's one recent report from just the past few weeks: "Report Says US Is World's Second Biggest Tax Haven": https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/u-s-seen-...

There are many, many more such things written over decades. Here's a 2009 article from The Economist on the same subject of America's status as one of the world's premiere tax havens: http://www.economist.com/node/13382279
Why not explicitly define strength, aggression and competitiveness as measurable quantities and provide reproduced studies proving males would be stronger in these qualities even without socialization in childhood, rather than leave people guessing?
And yes, the writer probably may buy bitcoins after other people who read an article like this sold them.
“We must do something even if it’s the wrong thing.”

Sorry, that’s a fallacy I can’t get behind.
> It feels to me a bit like claiming in the 90's that the internet isn't the future because you can't download that much stuff at 56k speeds.

The internet had tremendous utility at 56k speeds. The blockchain so far is mostly just useful for propagating itself and propping up the value of cryptocoins. There are some exceptions, such as using the blockchain to notarize documents (although has any court actually accepted blockchain-notarized documents as having legal power?), but the author's criticisms are well-founded. Even Ethereum Smart Contracts aren't particularly useful because in order to affect anything not on the blockchain you need an oracle, which destroys the whole decentralized 'trustless' concept.

> They mention "immutability" being a problem - so much so that it somehow disallows typos or undos. That's just not true - you just represent the updates as changes in their own right

The author already covered this. You can't undo a transaction without the cooperation of the other party. Accidentally send 10BTC to someone when you meant to send 1BTC? You're entirely beholden to the whims of the recipient to decide whether to refund you. Nobody else can do it. Or perhaps more importantly, if someone steals money from you, it's impossible to recover (because you can be sure the thief isn't going to refund it).

If you're using the blockchain in a manner where you can trust the recipient to be on board with correcting any errors, what benefit are you getting from the blockchain?

> I just think blog posts like these aren't really making compelling points other than "the current technology today has many flaws", which I think is uninteresting to most.

The only two points tied to "current technology" in the article are complaints about the blockchain speed and the blockchain size. But it turns out the first problem is going to be solved by literally not using the blockchain for most stuff (which pretty much proves the article's point), and the second problem is still a legitimate problem. Even if you can mine without having the full blockchain, someone is going to need to have it in order to actually validate the whole thing periodically. If we get to the point where the blockchain is so large that only a few major players can afford to have the whole thing, then we've lost the 'trustless' aspect because now we have to trust those major players when they say the blockchain validates properly.
It also depends heavily on whether you believe people who work in construction (i.e. blue collar workers) are an currency expendable on behalf of people who have cushy low risk jobs.

I’d be inclined to agree with you if we all had the same chance of risking our lives for the greater good and we could mutually agree on what the odds should be, but I feel like that’s why we’be come to the conclusion that it’s probably best if people didn’t die on a construction site for the same of innovation. (Also, I’d bet negligence is probably a more proper cause.)

Clinical trials for cancer are less fraught with the ethical problems of the construction worker since presumably the patient is that desperate for a cure, but we have general standards for these things like IRBs, protocols, and physicians trained to “do no harm” just to make sure the final product is safe and won’t guarantee a sooner death.

Also, while we may be at a disadvantage since we can’t just throw money at the problem, we’re still making remarkable progress: https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/therapy/availability
You can't think of anything? There's a half dozen use-cases that immediately come to mind that aren't possible without a blockchain.

One obvious use case is collectible items for games. People spend thousands on games like Hearthstone or Clash Royale. Imagine if the cards you collected in such a game were ERC20 tokens. Instead of all that value being locked up within Blizzard or Supercell's servers, you could freely trade or sell your in-game items. I think that would encourage players to spend even more money on these types of games, and could open up huge new marketplaces for digital goods.
I don't think there's any single thing responsible. But when I contrast growing up in the fifties and sixties versus today one difference stands out and that's the nuclear family.

Did you know that you're twice as likely to live in a single family household in the USA than Canada? That might be part of the reason why Canada doesn't have school shootings and we do.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-inequality-we-do...
How and why I started angel investing
Your analysis and link proves my point. When accounting for job title there is virtually no pay gap. You cannot compare just the salaries when many women choose to stay home and enter the workforce years later. That makes no sense.
There's a few options between not shaving at all and removing the nose together with the eyebrows.

Teaching gun culture and demanding gun safes (like it's done around here) would probably be a safer and more efficient route.
Opening this article, I was hoping to get a technical discussion as to why an application might or might not need blockchain. Unfortunately, I was met with a ranting article with a few straw man arguments about why blockchain is flawed.

The first point the author makes is the disadvantage of immutability. Claims that few systems benefit from immutable transaction records. First of all, I don't think that's true. Many systems do, not just financial systems with double entry bookkeeping. Event sourcing is a well defined architecture pattern in back end systems, and it turns out that immutable event logs are actually incredibly useful. It's also pretty well known that you don't erase history in financial systems. That is one of the pillars of double entry bookkeeping.

A more balanced article would point out the pros and cons of immutable systems, but to flippantly argue that immutability is useless? That's just lazy.

Tracking shipment of goods on a blockchain has many advantages. Namely, you can create a shared protocol for the data of shipment tracking, and you can open that blockchain up to certain parties to sign as the good moves along the supply chain. It doesn't have to be "trustless". A particular app's blockchain might only be open to a few trusted parties to write to. Not all transactions have to be written to a single, global, immutable ledger. There are still great benefits to sharing a common blockchain among specific, trusted, cooperative entities.

On POW and the electricity argument, I think we waste electricity on lots of frivolous things. I'm willing to bet Christmas lights also consume more than the state of Delaware. However, it's not the processing of transactions that the electricity is being spent on, it's the creation of new coins.

POS is a good alternative. I think many coins are starting to leverage POS. Ethereum will be switching to that soon.

Still, POS vs POW has nothing to do with "why you probably don't need a blockchain". These are implementation details that vary per blockchain/coin.

Scale also varies dramatically among coins. Ripple already processes 1000s of transactions / second. Lightning network on BTC is growing rapidly. Ethereum has scaling solutions in the works. Other chains have completely different properties than the top two and have different answers for the scaling issues. These issues will be solved with time.

As for rants on ICOs and scams, etc. I mean, do you know how many people have been scammed from phishing e-mails? Does that mean we should not use e-mail? No. As always, caveat emptor, do your own research, and don't take unnecessary risks.
If you were building a full SPA I'd suggest http://vulcanjs.org, but if you specifically don't want to deal with React and Meteor then maybe you need something closer to https://github.com/stimulusjs/stimulus ?
I thought I'd stay away from commenting this article, but the more I consider what was said the more I'm concerned.

A few points:

1. The article starts off with putting down the behavior of other men. As if it was a weakness to have difficulty in expressing a displeasure. "The way to emasculate a man is to..." I wasn't as much about, lets help the person to realize this, as much as it was to embarass. (No wonder men can't be vulenerable)

2. It goes on to claim that men and only men were the problem with the violence. It didn't go on to complex situations where they may be doing it over jealously, competition for women, as the result of (Elliot Rodgers and his "women" problem), or even persuaded by women. If you're going to talk about a loopsided amount of violence by men, it may be helpful to seperate the violence by proxy. I would suggest bringing up actual crime data that goes indepth about these situations as a counter point. Brief massacures are nothing new, but they are something to consider solving.
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Mr. Black should have made a trueful effort in suggesting that we should be more concerned about the development, and socialization of boys to men.

3. The Boys vs Girls arguement in schools: If you really want to be truthful, explain where it came and how it came to be. Go on and explain how the AAUW influenced schools with faulty data to change how education was done. Explain how there is a lack of male teachers in the classrooms. (And why male teachers are by far kicked out of the schools) There have been studies (I don't have them on hand) that suggest gender seperated schools. I'm all for that.

4. "Toxic masculanity"- Again, he's trying to frame traits that are common in males, and in the presence of testotrone in a negative light. He even goes as far as to claim that "it's a model for behavior". It's not. I would suggestion how the environment attempts to surpress these traits and refuses to allow for it to be expressed completely. I.e.: boys rough housing, supression of anger, supression of male bonding, and suppression of independence (helicopter parents, sociality expectations/impressions etc)

5. Soy boys- lol. In a way I would agree with them, on the metalevel where they would claim that you are betraying your own biological configuration. (In the whole article he keeps tring to maintain a frame that masculine traits are bad) However, they're bully's and they say it because they know that they can get to you. (In a masculine world, those bully's would be beaten as that it's asocial behavior)

6. Binding the male development to feminism. Sigh. Can men ever not be compared to women? This is incredibly tiring.
Your bullying-based model for how school shootings are spurred is far from what is actually happening.

These school shooters aren't targeting their tormentors. This most recent shooting involved a 19-year-old former student.

The Sandy Hook shooter killed defenseless elementary schoolers.

> toxic masculinity

What exactly does this mean? Seems like an attack on masculinity as a whole, because it's a poorly defined pejorative that focuses on men.
> No, the school/community he was at had issues. They didn't take bullying seriously, did nothing to prevent it and did nothing to punish it when it went too far.

but that definitely has left some psychological issues in him/her and so its definitely worth talking to someone, a professional, about this. People with suicidal / homicidal tendencies should definitely seek out help.
Then the questions obviously become "how do we prove that?" and then "how do we work against the crippling effects that condition obviously has on civilization?"

Who has gotten past the first within the scientific community? Until they appear, I'll assume the less extraordinary claim that gendered behaviors are socialized
This isn't an argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

See also reddit.com/r/iamverysmart
If you've just read that collection, you have a lot of the most mind-bending PKD stories left. Try one of his novels. I'd recommend A Scanner Darkly and Man in the High Castle as two of the more accessible ones (the latter is much less sci fi - it's more alternative history).

His short stories are very variable in quality - a lot of his early stories makes you feel trapped in a 50's idea of a post-nuclear holocaust world because he repeats that setting endlessly as he churned out stories to pay the bills (but there are great gems there too), so the more curated antologies are good starting points. Pick up some more and you'll probably also recognize the plot of any number of movies you may have seen (direct adaptions from his short stories includes Paycheck - in your antology I think - Total Recall, Screamers, Adjustment Bureau, Minority Report and more), where a single idea from his stories was dense enough for a movie.
It's still considered insane to suggest that today.

> It is well known that everyone has a limited supply of willpower.

It might be well known, but it's also not true. Things aren't true just because 'everyone knows that'.
To get all my disclaimers out of the way: I don't live in the Denver area anymore (moved for family obligations). I'm an Ops / systems / network person foremost, not a developer. And I'm not responding to the OP directly, just posting my own experiences jumping off from their points.

I loved living and working in CO, and am passively looking to move back there if the right situation comes up. Anyone trying to compare it to SF or NYC is not being serious. Those cities are in their own tier and we all know it. But Denver is a very active job market. Once I got some sufficiently "hot" technologies on my resume / LinkedIn, I had no shortage of recruiter hits, even when I had minimal experience.

It's true the traffic is HORRENDOUS and only getting worse due to the influx of people to the state every year. I would encourage anyone looking to work in Denver to negotiate part-time WFH unless you happen to live super close to the office. Mass transit isn't really a thing unless you luck into your home and office both being on the minimal light rail routes.

I absolutely had NO issues with people pushing drugs on me or making a big deal about drug use. If anything it's a bigger issue where I work now on the east coast.

I had no trouble making friends with people of diverse interests. Some of my buddies in CO were major contributors to OpenStack or Ceph. Some others were PhD's in ecology, or doctors, or poets, or restaurant managers, or lawyers. It's not all ski bums and stoners.

If you're willing to expand your search into the surrounding burbs, there are some good jobs to be had at the likes of Level3 or Comcast. Some of the smartest people I know work for Comcast on uniquely challenging problems of scale, on small, nimble teams. Calling them a dino seems a bit disingenuous. Though they are a huge and hateable company, won't dispute that heh.

Agree with the sentiment that Boulder is not Denver just as SF is not Oakland. Boulder was a cool place to live in the 70's, but good luck buying a home for under a million bucks today.

So I guess I lied a bit, I am responding to the OP directly. I am absolutely NOT discounting their life experience. They lived in CO longer than I did. But since it's one of the top comments on this story, and I had such a great time living in Colorado and want to move back, I felt compelled to share another viewpoint. It felt like home to me. Obviously to them, it didn't, despite being their birthplace. And that's fine.
Anders Breivik did not commit mass murders in 10 counties.

Edit: with regards to the US being the market leader, politifact rated a similar comment by Obama mostly false.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/...
How exacty is obesity genetic when mass obesity is a recent phenomenon? Your bias shows when logic is absent.
> It feels to me a bit like claiming in the 90's that the internet isn't the future because you can't download that much stuff at 56k speeds.

You know what other things people said weren't the future? Tons and tons of things that failed.

You have survivor bias; there are far more things people say will not be the future that then fails and everyone forgets about.
Relying upon a JIT often means the ability to create things which preclude the use of static compilers, which means that accelerated hardware, like ours, cannot be used efficiently.
You don't provide sources for your claim that my claim is false is false because you claim I don't provide sources, so your claim is false.
It's not really "needing", but one of the strong use cases is disrupting escrow. If domains, car/house titles, etc. existed as blockchain objects then they could be sold securely with no escrow.
Decent point. Have an upvote. I guess I'll just go with "when your brain is working properly", then.
This is no different than cash or physical property.
A global distributed ledger is less cumbersome to develop and more efficient to run, when it uses a transactional NoSQL database, than a blockchain.

In almost all use cases, there are existing identity, reputation, and legal frameworks that a distributed ledger can depend on. Here's an article I wrote about how most of the time you're better off with a database instead of a blockchain: https://blog.fauna.com/distributed-ledger-without-the-blockc...

There are some cases where existing identity and legal frameworks can't be used, where proof-of-work has some interest. My other problem with proof-of-work is that it can't scale because it always demands that blockchains use more energy than the economic value they are protecting. Here is an analysis of how blockchains aren't immutable: https://www.coindesk.com/blockchain-immutability-myth/
> We need to stop being okay with a culture that routinely gives people a reason to go postal.

why not start with eliminating the means of going "postal"? Why even have a "right" to AR15s or any guns at all.
Sounds like we're pulling in the same direction re:improving scientific publishing. At the risk of debating an ally, do you mean to imply that preprint servers are "more archival"? I'm guessing you're familiar with CERN/Zenodo; you trust bioArxiv's continued existence more than CERN's? I rate them as similar, arguably with an edge to CERN.

My experience with publishing is that discoverability is a stronger function of advertising and (especially) getting cited than the publication venue. I do agree that bioarxiv and arxiv are nice advertising venues, but there are lots of ways to skin that cat.
And how do you propose to cool every chip to cryogenic temperatures?

Not to mention the manufacturing challenge of integrating superconductors into chips (I think InP would be the easiest candidate, and that's saying something...)
A centralized database run by the manufacturer would accomplish the same thing. The number of trustless use cases, where blockchain really shines, is just not that large. Decentralization has a huge cost and most of the time it’s not worth the overhead.
...and have the nice experience that your registrar removes your DNS records from their nameserver the same second you click "submit" to change them to somewhere else. Been there, done that.
(It's the main reason I won't use 1&1 [yes, the German company, NOT the 101 the OP mentioned] anymore)