<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: twofornone</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=twofornone</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:58:55 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=twofornone" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "What every programmer should know about solid-state drives (2014)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Speaking about backing up...if one were interested in long term archiving, do magnetic platters offer longer lasting data integrity than SSDs in cold storage?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 May 2022 18:12:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31495559</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31495559</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31495559</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "Now Monkeypox"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a numbers game. 83% of gay men report having more than 50 partners, majority of whom are strangers. 23% report more than 1000 partners. That last stat is hard to believe but this link [0] has many damning publications.<p>You cannot elevate protected groups above criticism. That's a dangerous privilege and as we see in this instance, condoning this sort of irresponsible behavior puts greater society at risk. Straight people on average are not having <i>nearly</i> as much anonymous sex with <i>nearly</i> as many partners and, ergo, not spreading nearly as much disease.<p>It's probably a manifestation of sexual dimorphism. The average woman is not as willing to sleep with a stranger. Not sure about how much lesbians get around though.<p>0. <a href="https://carm.org/homosexuality/statistics-on-sexual-promiscuity-among-homosexuals/" rel="nofollow">https://carm.org/homosexuality/statistics-on-sexual-promiscu...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 May 2022 02:52:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31487496</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31487496</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31487496</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "Now Monkeypox"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>...imagine the millions of dead people? What are you implying exactly, that if behavior from a protected class is the source of a major social issue/catastrophe, that we need to avoid making that link, and allow this class to continue engaging in antisocial practices, because we are worried about stigma?<p>That doesn't seem like a sane ordering of priorities.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 May 2022 19:09:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31483624</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31483624</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31483624</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy and unscientific – research (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't have space to respond to your whole commend but upon skimming these two points stood out:<p>>Big tech hiring focus on diversity is much the same - the bar is NOT lowered for women or anyone from a minority race.<p>When employers industry wide are tripping over themselves to hire minorities, then yes, the bar is absolutely lower and pay higher. Its a classic perverse incentive.<p>>The last step of hiring before an offer is an objective test of programming ability.<p>Having been on both ends, there is absolutely nothing objective about interviews, and its perfectly possible to even pass a hard leetcode interview while lacking hard/soft skills. This is the basis for the diversity overcorrection: the allegation was that the system was implicitly biased against minorities, and the solution was to apply bias in the other direction.<p>Except the fundamental premise, all of the "proof" upon which the justification for racist/sexist hiring is a giant conflation; inequality of outcome is not strong evidence of discrimination. Especially when you have a glaring and obvious pipeline problem.<p>You can't snap your fingers and decide that you're going to hire up a bunch of minorities to senior positions tomorrow when they don't even exist in college today without sacrificing merit. Statistics and the normal distribution guarantee that a smaller pool of candidates will have a disproportionately smaller pool of high achievers and once those are vacuumed by corps virtually signalling for ESG Goodboy points you are forced to either abandon quotas or draw from closer to the mean. It is a statistical inevitability that minority hiring quotas lead to reduced average competence.<p>Something about the road to hell and pavement.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 May 2022 22:16:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31473354</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31473354</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31473354</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy and unscientific – research (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think its absolutely certain that  thousands of generations of specialization for local geographies post africa lead to disparate dietary needs. Yeah, humans can pretty much eat anything, but regularly consuming the same diet may may be ideal for one ethnic group and unhealthy for another.<p>Hell, look at the distribution of lactose intolerance. Is drinking milk racist?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 May 2022 22:07:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31473288</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31473288</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31473288</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy and unscientific – research (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>These are dark days for supplements. Although they are a $30-plus billion market in the United States alone, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, beta-carotene, glucosamine, chondroitin, and fish oil have now flopped in study after study<p>Since the byline brings up race, its kind an aside but I'm almost convinced that a lot of our large scale nutritional/alternative medical studies give mixed results (and are not reproducable) because researchers are unwilling to sufficiently control for genes. High level categories like "black, white, hispanic, asian" are not enough.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 May 2022 19:31:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31471835</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31471835</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31471835</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy and unscientific – research (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I strongly disagree. These accusatory virtue signals are <i>everywhere</i>, deliberate, and most importantly antithetical to reason. Ignoring this stuff is how we ended up with diversity quotas. We should all be pushing back at this point, meritocracy is literally at stake when people are hired for race/gender, and the dysfunction is already visible across many of our institutions.<p>I came here to read an article about sunscreen, not be implicitly lectured with distilled identity politics.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 May 2022 19:24:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31471758</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31471758</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31471758</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mean, there's a name for it, I don't think its a new phenomenon: autogynephilia. If it becomes so severe as to interfere with daily life then I don't think indulgence is an appropriate treatment, any more than I would expect telling a schizophrenic to listen to the voices in their head to be responsible medical practice.<p>We've gone too far with all of this acceptance stuff, because these modern acceptance movements brush off any criticism, however logical or valid, with accusations of bigotry. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then puberty blockers, affirmation treatment, and SRS are premium quality cement.<p>Edit: hilariously ironic that the wikipedia page for autogynophilia has been deleted from the english wiki, though there is a talk page discussing its restoration[0]...how uncomfortably dystopian. I can only hope that average people are catching onto the games played to justify this irrationality.<p>0. <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Autogynephilia" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Autogynephilia</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 May 2022 05:02:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31443538</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31443538</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31443538</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "What We Lose When We Don't Speak the Same Language as Our Immigrant Parents"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>I hated that people around me would put me in a category that was convenient for them. Because race is a pervasive concept in the U.S., it was easiest for people to label me as Black because I look Black. But I’m not only Black.<p>This woman is an excellent example of the ignorance, blindness, and cultural narcissism of the modern progressive movement. I am a European who grew up in Korea in the late 90s-00s, in a large city.<p>Everywhere I went, almost every korean within view would silently stare. The children would point, yell "miguk saram! (Korean for American person)" publicly, sometimes yell "puk yoo!" with middle fingers awkwardly displayed and run away laughing when I wasn't with my parents. Yet the author is completely unaware, totally conditioned to believe unquestioningly that the US has uniquely "pervasive" focus on race.<p>Based on my extensive travel across Asia, the US until recently was one of the least racist countries I have been to. The grand irony here is that it is the identitarian authoritarians who are forcing intersectionality down everyone's throats, and breeding racism.<p>I'm flagging this post because it is ignorant, narcissistic, political propaganda, and the flawed, accusatory assumptions upon which it is based are flamebait.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 May 2022 22:46:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441148</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441148</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441148</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The magnitude and duration of exposure is probably lower, since plastic is a western and relatively recent invention.<p>Moreover, it is precisely because transgenderism is primarily a cultural (rather than biological) phenomenon, that rates between two otherwise identical populations are going to differ based on the culture's attitude toward transgenderism and the likelihood that a doctor is to diagnose someone with gender dysphoria.<p>That latter point is severely understudied because transgenderism is one of the wests many recent sacred cows which are beyond criticism. But overdiagnosis should be a much greater concern than it is. Especially since puberty blockers and hormones given to adolescent boys will undoubtedly exacerbate any feelings of dysphoria and I am astounded that no one is talking about the reinforcing effects of these "treatments".<p>But I digress. Point being comparing rates of transgenderism between first and third worlds is like comparing apples to oranges because transgenderism is a cultural phenomenon.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 May 2022 22:28:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31440980</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31440980</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31440980</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>bisphenol A mimics the hormone estrogen and can lead to damage in sperm development.19 Further research has shown that microplastics, and not just those with bisphenol A, can cause damage to the testes and lead to the production of deformed sperm cells that have a harder time reaching eggs.<p>I'd more interested in hearing what microdosing xenestrogens on a large scale does to our collective psychology. I think this is an extremely important but understudied effect. Much like birth control, which is known to influence decision making and behavior, and probably affects collective behaviors like vote outcomes and such.<p>I have a haunch that a number of modern western ills are influenced by or rooted in the psychological influence of BC hormones. We know [0] that fertile women have different preferences in men, different risk tolerance, and different social behavior (increased mate seeking)...imagine what dosing tens of millions of women does to a country's politics? Now imagine dosing the entire population with chemicals that mimic estrogen...<p>0. <a href="https://magazine.tcu.edu/fall-2020/hormonal-birth-control-brain/" rel="nofollow">https://magazine.tcu.edu/fall-2020/hormonal-birth-control-br...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 May 2022 14:04:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31434804</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31434804</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31434804</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What I don't understand is that the verbatim option still exists, it just doesn't seem to do anything. And quotes don't seem to work anymore either. It's all very insulting.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 May 2022 16:28:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31424711</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31424711</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31424711</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "AI job hiring outperforms human hiring, but humans don't want to use it"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Dr. Grace Lordan, Associate Professor and Founding director of The Inclusion Initiative at LSE: "There is evidence that current hiring processes are plagued by cronyism and bias. It is time that humans hand over the hiring process to machines who do not have these tendencies. Biases embedded in algorithms can be mitigated somewhat with more care from those writing them, and compliance folk, who do not have skin in the hiring process can monitor the process to abate any concerns on fairness. Let's progress AI in recruitment and workplace inclusivity at the same time."<p>Translation: we "fixed" the bias by rebiasing the neural nets to favor "diverse" candidates. It's still racist, just against the right demographic now, and if you want those ESG goodboy points you'd better use it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 May 2022 13:07:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31422298</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31422298</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31422298</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "Half of Joe Biden's Twitter Followers Are Fake, Audit Reveals"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is currently trying to buy Twitter, has expressed concerns about the number of fake accounts and a potential crack down could see users such as Biden lose a huge number of followers.<p>What if Musk was simply on a narcissistic vendetta and never actually intended to go through with the purchase, instead merely aiming expose the hot air on which twitter was running?<p>>We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam, if they can't pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc)," Agrawal wrote<p>How to mislead without lying: fake followers implicitly sanctioned by twitter are not necessarily spam accounts. This could easily be typical corporate speak, deliberately conflating fake follower numbers with spam accounts to suggest that twitter is "working on a solution" as opposed to acknowledging that twitter manipulates followers.<p>In any case I would imagine that the current board is less interested in the financial health of the company than they are in its use as an unprecedented political tool. Disinformation warnings are an authoritarian's wet dream.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 May 2022 23:56:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417637</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417637</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417637</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "Picasso's self portrait evolution from age 15 to age 90"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Would they evoke these same reactions if the people weren't aware that they were looking at picassos?<p>Modern Art is a cultural placebo for the vast majority of admirers. If it has the right signature or is hanging in a museum people will dig for rationalizations of their faux appreciation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 May 2022 23:11:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417331</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417331</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417331</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I wish they would release a modernized phone with a decent processor and camera in the form factor of a pixel 2.<p>How much compute does the average person even need from their phone these days? Aren't most people just browsing the internet and checking emails?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 May 2022 15:19:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31412016</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31412016</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31412016</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do you have a source for that? Happiness I can believe, especially because of the correlation between intelligence and neuroticism, but if IQ is a valid proxy for intelligence then I think the consensus is that intelligence strongly correlates with success.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 May 2022 13:20:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31410138</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31410138</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31410138</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a shame, a couple years ago BTC was anticorrelated with markets. Then institutional investors started playing and since then crypto largely just tracks the markets. I wonder, where do these investors park their cash when they sell holdings during downturns?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 May 2022 20:19:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31402701</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31402701</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31402701</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "Employers’ Use of AI Tools Can Violate the Americans with Disabilities Act"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>You have a belief unsupported by scientific literature<p>I have repeatedly explained to you that the belief is indeed supported by a wealth of indirect scientific literature.<p>>You have a belief unsupported by scientific literature. If you want to claim that the reason it is unsupported is because of a vast cultural conspiracy against the type of research which would prove your point, you're free to do so.<p>Calling it a conspiracy theory is a dishonest deflection. It is not a conspiracy, it is a deeply rooted institutional bias. But I can play this game too: can you show me research which rigorously proves that genes and culture have negligible influence on social outcomes? Surely if this is such settled science, it will be easy to justify, right?<p>Except I bet you won't find any papers examining the genetic and/or cultural influences on professional success in various industries. It's like selective reporting, lying through omission with selective research instead.<p>But you will easily find a wealth of unfalsifiable and irreproducible grievance studies papers which completely sidestep genes and culture while dredging for their predetermined conclusions regarding the existence of discrimination. And because the socioeconomic factors of genes and culture are a forbidden topic, you end up with the preposterous implication that all discrepancies in representation must be the result of discrimination, as in the post that spawned this thread.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 May 2022 20:58:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372472</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372472</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372472</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by twofornone in "Employers’ Use of AI Tools Can Violate the Americans with Disabilities Act"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Broad averages of what? Difference in muscle characteristics and bone structure between males and females? Multiple consistent studies showing wide variance in average IQ among various demographics? The strong correlation between IQ and all manner of life outcomes, including technical achievements?<p>Or are you asking me to find a study which shows which specific cultural differences make large swaths of people more likely to, say, pursue sports and music versus academic achievement? Or invest in their children?<p>Again, the evidence is ubiquitous, overwhelming, and unambiguous. Synthesizing it into a paper would get a researcher fired in the current climate, if they could even find funding or a willing publisher; not because it would be factually incorrect, but because the politicized academic culture would find a title like "The Influence of Ghetto Black Cultural Norms on Professional Achievement" unpalatable if the paper didn't bend over backwards to blame "socioeconomic factors". Which is ironic because culture is the socio in socioeconomics, yet I would actually challenge YOU to find a single modern paper which examines negative cultural adaptations in any nonwhite first world group.<p>Further, my argument has been dishonestly framed (as is typical) as a false dichotomy, I'm not arguing that discrimination doesn't exist, but the opposition is viciously <i>insisting</i>, that all differences among groups are too minor to make a difference in a meritocracy, and anyone who questions otherwise is a bigot.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 May 2022 20:14:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372090</link><dc:creator>twofornone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372090</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372090</guid></item></channel></rss>