yalurker's comments

Guys, he's a troll. Stop feeding the troll. His profile claims he's 13 years old, whether that's true or just part of the trolling I don't know or care, just beware you're getting pulled into someone who is trying to have an argument for the sake of having an argument.

"I don't see why being too sensitive is seen as somehow worse in the startup/developer community than being too insensitive."

I'll venture a guess: because many of us find it incredibly tiring and annoying to have to constantly stop and think "is there any possible way the following sentence could be interpreted as prejudiced against any group?" when communicating.

If person A says something non-sexual and person B finds a way to make it so (ie "that's what she said") we think person B is the dirty minded one, not A. However if person A says something non-racial and person B finds a way to make it so, we act like A has committed a grave offense and needs to apologize.

Too many people in America can't look at an ink-blot without seeing sexism or racism or discrimination of some stripe. Being "too sensitive" is often just causing controversy or problems where none needed to exist. It also makes it so that legitimate discrimination is harder to notice because it gets lost in a sea of false accusations.

The tl;dr is: save the outrage for legitimate discrimination, don't waste time & energy trying to manufacture it everywhere

There was a time when people thought the primary purpose of an mp3 player was to play pirated music, would you claim that an article about a new mp3 player was "advocating piracy"?

Stating that a piece of software exists is hardly "advocating" using it for illegal purposes. Most of the usage of torrents probably is copyright-infringing downloads, but that's not its only purpose and that doesn't mean a journalist can't talk about it.

What if you are moving from a low cost area to a high cost area?

I just checked out an online cost-of-living calculator and my salary in Austin would have to increase by 2.6x to have the same quality of life in Palo Alto.

How many HR types are going to realize that 50 in Austin is 100 in San Fran or Manhattan?

Wow, reading this didn't give me any sympathy for her at all. I'm reminded of the episode of South Park where Cartman feels bad only about getting punished, no actual guilt or remorse for his crime, and fails to understand how the other kids can feel bad in any way other than because of punishment.

She steals someone else's work, gets caught and sends an arrogant, rude email with absurd claims (web is public domain) and then when she is hit with the internet backlash, she writes a post that it's not her fault because she was overworked and throws in an insincere apology where she still clearly doesn't believe she did anything wrong ("I think I did a nice job for you").

The original article didn't irk me nearly as much as her rebuttal. Quite frankly, if this really does put them out of business, they deserve it.

While you are correct that almost everyone believes themselves to be "above average", the HN demographic likely is mostly above average individuals.

Also, not everyone claiming high intelligence is just arrogant or deluded. I'd estimate myself at high intelligence for fairly simple reasons - scoring in the 99th percentile on standardized tests, graduating summa cum laude, etc. I suspect a good number of HN posters have the same (or better) educational achievements I have to base our self-assessments on.

The whole gender wage gap issue tends to set me off, as it is filled with "lies, damned lies and statistics" and half the arguments seem to exist in a fairy tale world, so this may get a little ranty, but I'll try to keep it on the level:

OF COURSE THEY DO! As someone born in the 1980s, the gender norms of the previous generations had already been blown away. Schools are filled with female teachers, administrators and policy makers. The bias inherent in the system is already in favor of females, and yet we pile on extra focus and opportunities for girls at every level from kindergarten through college. We celebrate every female accomplishment while any sign of male over-achievement is viewed as being a manifestation of discrimination.

Today, women are more likely to graduate high school, get a phD, go to law school, go to medical school. Less likely to go to jail. How is anyone surprised when women therefore end up making more money? The horribly flawed, over used statistic about women making less than men has been shown many times to be due to hours worked, aggressiveness in pursuing promotions and raises, and other similar factors.

To compensate for women born before the 1970s getting the short end of the stick, our culture has given girls born in the '80s and later every possible advantage. This news article isn't shocking, surprising, or novel - it was inevitable.

/end rant, goodbye karma

I don't think eating out is really "conspicuous consumption" (unless maybe you're dealing with very-high end, trendy "see and be seen" destinations).

What you've presented seems like a perfectly rational choice: by moving to a lower-rent apartment they have more money to allocate towards their food budget. If a $5 burrito saves me 30 minutes of cooking, that's a great trade for my time/cash budgeting.

If it's in a roth account, isn't your investment horizon decades away (assuming you're not already in your 50's)? Why is "a 5 year investment to see a decent return" a negative?

Interesting read, a couple things come to mind though: how does "the people who have ok cupid profiles" vary against "the general population". Several things I suspect are skewed because of the population bias.

Also, they say most of their users are urban, but I'm curious if people aren't prone to list themselves as the nearest big city rather than where they really live. For instance, I suspect everyone within 45 minutes of Des Moines is listing themselves as living there, rather than the tiny farm town / suburb they really live in.

Am I the only one who thinks 'household income' is a terrible measure for this? Isn't a single person making 60k/year living a more affluent lifestyle than a married couple at 75k?

Isn't it a huge confounding variable that they are using a single value for the money, but that may be for just a single person or shared among an entire family?

I'd suspect it's less to do with cognitive dissonance, and more intentional lying to meet social norms or out of fear of future problems.

Anything controversial, highly personal, or with stigmas attached will get biased results from self-reporting. Alcohol, drugs, sexual history, religious views, political views, racial prejudices, etc will almost always be biased towards what the person thinks is the right answer.

There was an article posted here a while ago that talked about this "scene vs p2p" dynamic, but presupposed the audience knew what "the scene" was. I'm still confused as to what it refers, is "the scene" just private file sharing / piracy?

Also, wintermute - great username. Had a momentary "that's familiar..." before it clicked.

"Common sense will always trump "science" in our understanding of areas such as this and will allow us to sense intuitively what we really don't need people in white lab coats to tell us."

Wow, there is so much wrong with this sentence I can't believe it got up votes. This particular study may have flaws, and/or there may be errors in extrapolating the results of this isolated game to general workplace dynamics, but that doesn't mean science is bad.

"Common sense" does not, ever, trump science. "Common sense" is a lazy excuse for "I have an opinion that I can't back up with any data". How many times haven't we all read someone trying to make a claim like "It's common sense that marriage should be between one man and one woman".

Different people might have wildly different ideas backed up by "common sense". That's why we do studies - to find out what the truth is, even if it disproves our initial guess or we are uncomfortable/unhappy with the result.

I would think the exact opposite of this. Gold, from my perspective, is at absolute peak hype. You have Glen Beck and a thousand infomercials selling gold to the most absolute novice of investors at this point. Everybody and their mom has heard about gold's rise in value recently and "safety" from every imaginable financial disaster.

Maybe I'm seeing things from a skewed view point, but from where I sit, gold is the absolute ultra-hyped fad investment right now.

It looks like we interpreted the author differently. I took the "more degrees" coupled with a graduation age of 21 to mean the son had a Bachelor's and the father had only a high school diploma.

I was looking at it as college vs no college, not college today vs college 30 years ago.

Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless. From the article: "Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at 21? And whatever the difference, was it worth the $50k-$200k he paid to get you it?"

Yes. Yes I was smarter. And I didn't pay 200k because I went to a state school. I graduated a wholly different person with a completely different world-view and a ton of applicable skills that landed me a high-paying software engineering job instead of doing the manual labor or trivial office tasks that I was qualified for before college.

If you go to a private school to get a history degree then sure, it was 4 years of expensive partying that doesn't leave you any more employable. Go get a science/engineering/JD/MD heck even an MBA and you damn well better be smarter at the end.

And why the heck would a kid in band go to Harvard? He should be getting in a van and going on tour. And why would a kid in the chess club go to Yale? He should be playing chess. And why would a kid on the baseball team...

The typical over-achieving student is going to be in dozens of activities, none of which necessarily correlate with their future career. Agriculture might seem really weird or foreign to you, but for much of America being in FFA/4H/Eagle Scouts/whatever is just as normal as band, chess or sports.

You've missed the point. The "fairly obvious point" would be that ALL whites are disadvantaged by providing a certain quota or advantage to non-white applicants, but that's not the point here.

The significance of the recent research is that low-income, rural, red-state whites face discrimination relative to high-income, urban, blue-state whites. That is, given two white students of equal merit, the admission is more likely to go to the one born in Manhattan than the one born in Iowa.

The tragic thing is that apparently this is new information to some people, when everyone in the midwest has known this for years. I was valedictorian of my high school, had very high standardized test scores and a dozen extra-curricular activities with leadership roles.... but I didn't even both to apply for any Ivy/prestigious schools because I knew being from a small town in the midwest I had no chance. How's that for institutionalized discrimination (or bias inherent in the system)?

I'd question you even need to qualify your statement about perception of the police as "poor or ethnic minority communities".

My social circle is mostly educated, upper-middle class white males. Most still see police as oppressors, many have had negative experiences with police abusing power & harassing them.