tossmeout's comments

These are archetypes, i.e. popularly associated examples of particular actions. But I'm not sure if they're full-blown stereotypes, where they get over-applied to members of that group. People don't believe that all Chinese and Russians are hackers, that all Nigerians are email scammers, that all Mexicans are drug overlords, etc.

Stereotypes tend to be more insidious. Many people (in America) do believe that Blacks and Mexicans are criminals, that Chinese are great at math, etc., to the degree that it changes how they actually treat people. So I think these are much worse and shouldn't be equated.

That said, despite the above analysis, I can see how being Chinese you would still cringe when you see the phrase "Chinese hacker" being used casually. I'm an ethnic minority and have felt similarly in similar situations.

IMO, if one can't make the point that something shouldn't be said without inaccurately labeling it as racism, then one shouldn't make the point. The only thing they're accomplishing is watering down the negative connotations of racism.

How is this not true? Genuinely curious.

> In an America where rural Asian-ethnicity people are facing discrimination because of covid being called "Chinese Virus…"

That's because of the specific context of who is saying "Chinese Virus," who their audience is, and why they're saying it.

This context is different. Nobody on Hacker News who encounters the phrase "Chinese hacker" is going to suddenly start discriminating against Chinese people, any more than we discriminate against Nigerians despite the fact that "Nigerian scammer" is a cliche in tech circles.

As such, a more accurate comparison than "black man stealing a bike" would be to something like a "Nigerian scammer," which is an archetype I don't think most of us have a problem with. Other examples I never see complaints about: "Russian hacker," "American imperialist," etc.

I agree with the second half of the comment. Facebook has been capricious, and thus it's hard to trust building on top of them for the long term. But the first few paragraphs just seem like unsubstantiated gossip.

Additionally, being above or below someone's "league" is a bit of an oversimplification, because there are multiple axes to attraction. It's quite possible to be physically yet not mentally attracted to someone, and thus authentically enjoy sexual encounters with people who you'd prefer not to date seriously, let alone marrying.

If you accept both of these situations, it's not difficult to imagine a world in which many women are having sex with men where there's mutual sexual attraction but no possibility for a relationship, because the man is only interested in sex. Of course this happens the other way too, although I'd guess much less often.

An ex of mine (who I'd remained friendly with) once showed me her Tinder messages and it was full of attractive, confident, successful men who clearly were only interested in sex with her, and who didn't mind being almost offensively direct, presumably because they all had lots of other options for sex.

Why is it a problem that university endowments and state pension funds aren't allocating some of their investments into virtual items? It's not.

> I want to invest money into games, but I can't. Other people want to get paid to play games, but they can't. How exactly is that not a real problem?

You can already invest money into games and/or get paid to play games via a variety of methods. It seems like you're shoehorning the blockchain into the equation unnecessarily.

Besides, solution-in-search-of-a-problem doesn't mean you're failing to target real problems. It means you came up with your solution first before analyzing the specific problems you're now trying to apply it to. That's almost always inferior to starting with the problem and then working backwards to craft the perfect bespoke solution.

Almost all of the problems that blockchain obsessives point out are either (a) trivial problems that few people care about, or (b) are better solved without needing a blockchain.

1. People realize the label is powerful.

2. They begin applying the label to as many things they don't like as they can get away with.

3. This changes the definition of the label, causing it to become some blanket umbrella term.

4. The label loses its power, because it now describes many lukewarm behaviors instead of just the worst offenses.

For example, it's popular nowadays to say "everyone is racist." Well, if everyone is racist, is being labeled a racist really that bad? Not compared to what it used to imply about you.

For example, let's look at the spacing. The padding and margin in each section are inconsistent, almost random. It forces you to do mental work to separate them in your mind, and it doesn't allow you to take mental breaks, because it's hard to find your place if you look away, almost like reading a book. The header literally just runs into the body of page, like a single wall of text. And at what benefit? Slightly less scrolling? Scrolling is trivial.

Copywriting is part of design. Tell me, what purpose does this copy serve? "Welcome to sourcehut! This suite of open source tools is the software development platform you've been waiting for. We've taken the wisdom of the most successful open-source communities and turned it into a platform of efficient engineering tools." Most of this is useless and can be cut. People skim on the Internet. Give them bite-sized and useful info, not a paragraph that says welcome.

SourceHut is capitalized in three different ways: SourceHut, sourcehut, and Sourcehut. This is not really communicating to me great attention to detail or professionalism. If you think that's not important, then you probably don't understand why restaurants with clean floors and well-maintained exteriors inspire more trust in diners than dirty or dilapidated restaurants. We look at exteriors to get an idea of what's going on behind the scenes.

Typography is important, too. There's no main heading on the page, nothing to call your eye to, except the blog post at the top. I have to hunt to figure out where to start reading, and I'm almost guaranteed to start in the wrong place and then adjust. The headings in the main body also aren't sufficiently bold to stand out and draw your eye. Even the indentation of the testimonials is inconsistent. Why aren't they indented along with the bullet points to convey that they fall under the headings?

Where color is used, it's distracting and misleading. My eyes are drawn toward random links and testimonials rather than to important parts of the page that I should read first. (For comparison, look at how Stripe.com uses color to draw your eye to headings.)

The clickable buttons are tiny. The images are tiny, too -- far too small to be useful. They also lack captions, and clicking on them takes me to random and confusing places. Compare to the highly readable code examples on Stripe.com.

I could go on. It's not a terrible homepage. It's functional. I've seen much worse. But it has many obvious major design flaws that make it a worse experience for reading.

Developers have a norm of loving minimalistic, simplistic, text-heavy, old-school, nostalgic interfaces. That's fine. I'm partial to them, too. But it's important not to get, "I like this," confused with, "This is good design." It's not. A good rule of thumb is that if you have to be inculcated with the beliefs of a particular tribe in order to find something good, and everybody outside that tribe finds it repulsive, it's probably not good.

EDIT: I spent 10 minutes in the dev tools and made a better version: https://i.imgur.com/AoOy50x.png