Hacker News: mikeash

New comment by mikeash in "Stallman Still Heading the GNU Project"

mikeash — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 02:24:42 +0000

And that explanation was that he’s done a bunch of valuable stuff. But your first answer to me was “justice.” These don’t match at all.

The comparison with the African kid went over my head because approximately none of the people pouring so much effort into being outraged that Stallman got fired have a close personal connection with him. Sure, I’m more upset when a friend suffers than when a stranger does. But you’re not friends with Stallman, are you?

New comment by mikeash in "Stallman Still Heading the GNU Project"

mikeash — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 20:44:47 +0000

You seem to be saying that it’s not really about “justice” at all, but rather that it’s purely about defending people who have done a lot of visibly valuable things. Did I get that right?

New comment by mikeash in "Stallman Still Heading the GNU Project"

mikeash — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 14:31:32 +0000

I don’t think it’s a false dichotomy at all. This same community discusses other things, far worse things, and we can compare them. When this community discusses victims of harassment who get fired for reporting it, there isn’t nearly this much time and energy spent on it. When an article about a drone strike blowing up an Afghan wedding made the front page recently, there wasn’t this much outrage. Uber covers up actual crimes and the discussion degenerates into arguments about whether there’s any duty to report crimes to the police. People get fired all the time for far smaller infractions and everybody just shrugs.

Why does this community care so much about what happens to this asshole?

New comment by mikeash in "Stallman Still Heading the GNU Project"

mikeash — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 13:24:54 +0000

Sorry, I’m going to call assholes assholes. I don’t know why people get so upset at swear words. People are saying all sorts of heinous shit in these comments, but apparently this is fine as long as you don’t use one of the Seven Deadly Words.

Your mirror question is missing the decades of context that led up to this.

Edit: I should note that “asshole” isn’t a random insult. It’s highly relevant. People get fired for being assholes while at work. For jobs that involve interacting with other people (which is just about all of them, including Stallman’s) this is not only factual, but perfectly reasonable. Asshole loses job, what’s the big deal? The only surprising thing is that it took this long!

New comment by mikeash in "Stallman Still Heading the GNU Project"

mikeash — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 13:18:43 +0000

There are millions of more pressing injustices going on right now. The people attacking him didn’t do anything wrong either so who cares at all?

New comment by mikeash in "Stallman Still Heading the GNU Project"

mikeash — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 12:38:20 +0000

Here’s what I don’t get: why are you all so concerned about what happens to this guy? He didn’t get lynched. He’s not going to prison. He had a comfortable life and he will continue to have a comfortable life. Why does this asshole deserve so much of your time and energy?

New comment by mikeash in "How climate change is melting, drying and flooding Earth – in pictures"

mikeash — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 11:53:56 +0000

It will until it doesn’t. What troubles me is that it’s hard to tell whether the risk is 1% per year or 0.000001% per year.

New comment by mikeash in "How climate change is melting, drying and flooding Earth – in pictures"

mikeash — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 18:40:14 +0000

Nukes are not that powerful. See: https://what-if.xkcd.com/15/

New comment by mikeash in "How climate change is melting, drying and flooding Earth – in pictures"

mikeash — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 18:37:26 +0000

“In the cold war people built concrete bunkers in their basement for fear of a nuclear Armageddon.”

It’s not like this threat went away. People just stopped paying attention to it.

New comment by mikeash in "How climate change is melting, drying and flooding Earth – in pictures"

mikeash — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 17:48:46 +0000

Probably because satellites in LEO are too low to get such a broad view, and the camera-equipped satellites that are higher up are all over the equator.

New comment by mikeash in "If You Run a Small Business, Park in the Back of the Parking Lot"

mikeash — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 22:28:50 +0000

Reminds me of a time I was searching for parking in downtown Washington, DC. Block after block was full. I eventually came to a street that had no cars parked at all. Jackpot, right? Must be some obscure rule prohibiting parking there. I kept looking. Still no luck, so I finally went back to the empty street. I carefully studied the signs and concluded that it was legal to park there. I got out of my car and paid. By the time I was done paying, the entire block was full of parked cars!

New comment by mikeash in "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection (1995)"

mikeash — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 21:04:52 +0000

And what’s the term for a figure that’s hard to estimate but which you guess at anyway? An “assumption.”

New comment by mikeash in "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection (1995)"

mikeash — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 21:03:40 +0000

There’s always an implicit (or explicit) “if conditions X, Y, and Z hold” on these statements. That prediction wasn’t wrong, conditions just changed, largely because predictions like this managed to wake people up to the dangers.

Ignoring the unstated assumptions in these statements isn’t really skepticism.

New comment by mikeash in "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection (1995)"

mikeash — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 19:56:31 +0000

The Drake Equation is perfectly reasonable. You just have to interpret it as “these assumptions imply aliens” rather than “there are definitely aliens.”

New comment by mikeash in "If You Run a Small Business, Park in the Back of the Parking Lot"

mikeash — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 18:56:05 +0000

Yes, sometimes things go wrong. But if you’re always late, then you need to get started earlier.

New comment by mikeash in "The Saudis Are Lying About Their Oil Production?"

mikeash — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 12:14:16 +0000

One is about a year, the other is close to five years.

New comment by mikeash in "Travel without a phone"

mikeash — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 00:14:20 +0000

Wasting time and money getting lost, getting separated from companions with no way to find them again, significantly reduced transportation options, having some sort of emergency and having a much tougher time dealing with it.

I have a decent amount of experience traveling internationally before the smartphone era. It was mostly fine, but with the smartphone is way better. And I had a couple of difficult unforeseen circumstances that would have been made far easier with one.

New comment by mikeash in "The Saudis Are Lying About Their Oil Production?"

mikeash — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 00:10:45 +0000

Why every 4-5 years?

New comment by mikeash in "Podcast sponsorship revenue continues to fuel NPR’s financial growth"

mikeash — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 12:32:11 +0000

Anymore? Advertising has been the major source of newspaper revenue forever.

New comment by mikeash in "Will America's debt doom us?"

mikeash — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 18:20:56 +0000

Historically, progress has resulted in more environmental damage and CO2 emissions. Relying on progress to fix these things is counting on a fundamental shift to happen. By comparison, progress historically has always increased GDP, so counting on progress to grow away our debt is just expecting the historical trend to continue.