Even if only a few women are abusive and gossiping, they will doxx a lot of innocent men. At that stage, that entire app should be treated as illegal and shut down, instead of hoping that Apple legal will find the time to settle each complaint. The entire app is a toxically bigoted concept that gets a pass because the term 'women's safety' is attached to it.
I'm failing to see how this app is legal. States like Arizona have recently passed anti doxxing laws. Posting any information on this app with the intent of social pressure, harassment, etc is illegal in those states.
At the very least, the app itself might be legal using the "public forum" argument but the content posted on there definitely leaves the users in a legal gray area.
I can see the argument on both sides but this is asking for a case to be brought just so the law can be fleshed out.
I recently saw a screenshot from one of these apps (so I can't guarantee its authenticity. But it's not an inconceivable scenario). Someone posted a man in there with his photo. The elephant in the room is that the man is dead! His ex-wife (with whom he had children) is enraged by this and is demanding to have it removed. Instead of addressing her concern, one of them decides to report her!
Now this may be an anecdotal argument. But when it pertains individual rights and human dignity, even a single violation is sufficient to question the ethics and legality of such endeavors. An important fact here is that nobody has absolute rights. Any rights are valid only as long as they don't infringe on someone else's rights. So, smearing, maligning and vilifying someone cannot be justified in the name of 'women's safety'.
This is one of those cases where you can't find a balance between both sides. One side is objectively wrong. Ruining the lives of any number of innocent men must not be an acceptable compromise for ensuring women's safety. There must be ways to achieve that without causing such widespread collateral damage. Their argument to the contrary is not just lazy, it reeks of hubris and contempt.
I don't usually care about downvotes, but it's alarming when those votes are in support of a bigoted stance like in this instance. I don't support doxxing, defamation or bullying of any innocent person, including women. But why is this utterly detestable act being justified and upheld when the victims are men? Would the response be the same if the genders in that message were swapped? This is just a single example of how unabashedly sexist the HN crowd in general (and the corporate world in general) has become. I hope that the individuals who strike at the opposition to such toxic behavior are very proud of their irrationally lopsided sense of justice and their contributions to a very fractured and bitter society.
> someone marketed viral phone apps targeting teenagers, engineered app engagement mechanics targeting kids, and openly used every growth hacking trick in the book to manipulate App Store charts
Just curious. Any YC companies that have engaged in these tactics?
I wonder what's optimal for me as an employee. I am working in a O(n) startup where colleagues are nice, work is streamlined yet challenging, and I do see growth potential in the long term. Several O(n^2) founders have reached out recently and the pay is attractive(even after accounting for a move to an HCOL area).
Or, really, to say the unsaid bit out loud: there are lots of important considerations when taking a job. The author seems to assume that money is the only driver, when, for many top candidates, money is not their primary motivation. The ability to plan well and thereby reduce stress is a good measure of the management experience. Other non-cash incentives tend to be given out more readily at well-run non-enterprise companies, including remote work, longer vacations, and more strategic control, to name just a few.
I can say that for me, at some point, you just really want a team with good vibes and low BS.
I took a 20% pay cut 3 years back and moved from one startup to another because the vibes were better with an older founding team. It was fantastic and we built some amazing stuff at an incredible pace.
That startup recently folded and the original startup reached out and brought me back at 150% comp of the other startup. But day to day I don't enjoy it as much and the vibes just aren't the same with this crew.
My lesson: team vibes are severely underrated and sometimes even more money doesn't make it better.
Modern society tends to severely overemphasize money as the optimisation goal. This is an emergent behaviour of our good capitalist system.
Your time is precious. You spend it once and you can't predictably get any more of it.
I suggest you choose your optimisation goal function very very carefully to suit the outcomes you want (money is only an intermediate step). It's hard to decide what we really want. Money is the default game that we see our peers playing (and it's easy to gain moderate success at the money game). It requires more attention to find and learn from people that have had success playing less common games.
Cynically (or even conspiratorially) investigate the suggested life defaults for you by your society as though they were dark patterns designed to mislead you.
I like what Naval wrote about status games (money is only one aspect of status). Paraphrased:
Status is a zero-sum game, not a positive-sum game. There’s always a subtle competition going on between status and wealth. For example, when journalists attack rich people or the tech industry, they’re really bidding for status. The problem is, to win at a status game you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life – because they make you into an angry combative person. You’re always fighting to put other people down and elevate yourself and the people you like. Status games are always going to exist; there’s no way around it. Realize when you’re getting attacked by someone else and they’re trying to look like a goody-two shoes. They’re trying to up their own status at your expense. They’re playing a different game. And it’s a worse game.
Disclaimer: I've had moderate success at chasing money. I've had less success at optimizing for other goals (work in progress in my 50s).
Money has no maximum so it's a weird goal to try and reach. I wonder why Warren Buffett waited until 95 to decide to retire? He would easily be the richest man in the world if he hadn't charitably given so much away.
Another relevant paraphrased snippet from an interview about better lives for the elite: https://archive.ph/kF0YR
There’s this study called the American Freshman Survey [edit:snip] In the 1960s, 50% of students said making as much money as possible was a really important goal. Today, that’s 80% to 90%. That change shows that this is not human nature. It is culture.
She basically set up her own company and invoiced the "clients" for her services. To me, it appears that the clients over time pushed the envelope of illegality, that initially her company was innocent web design or something and she got sucked into doing things she very much knew were federal crimes.
They introduced the concept of top-level scripts a little while back - though I don't know whether its just syntactic sugar such that when it compiles down to IL everything just gets wrapped in a main class.
You still need to have a class to put your functions in, but they can act only as a namespace, like `Math.DivRem()`.
C# has been receiving many functional features over the years including pattern matching, composable data processing (Linq), tuples, and immutable data types. I'm looking forward to a good implementation of discriminated unions now.
I’ve heard it’s multiparadigm now, but I can’t yet substantiate that. Even if it is, I don’t know if it’s JavaScript-level (so functional they rewrote SICP in JS), Ruby-level (just a sprinkle of lambdas and pattern matching), or somewhere in between.
I’ll be sure to post an article once I find out. :-)
Another example how human civilization, in its present form, is generally incompatible with Earth's flora and fauna. Obviously, going back to stone-age is not a solution for us. But we certainly need to update/devise methods that do not harm anyone living creatures (or at least the sentient ones). Poor monkey had no idea what he got into and suffered a brutal death.
> we certainly need to update/devise methods that do not harm anyone living creatures (or at least the sentient ones)
Nature is brutal. I distinctly remember a hike where I stumbled on a mother bear (RIP) tearing apart a still-alive baby elk for her cubs. Human civilisation has done a lot of damage. But we might also be able to spare a lot of sentient suffering, bringing care to the biosphere and taking station as nature’s ethical guardians. Food for thought if you find yourself going full misanthrope.
Humans are far and away the most cruel species that has ever walked the face of the earth. No other species has the capacity to invent torture, using our analytical abilities to keep the victim alive indefinitely while inflicting the most vicious agonies possible (e.g. torturing the child in front of the parent).
Bears with baby elks, cats with their prey, orcas playing catch with baby seals... none of them come close to what humans are capable of when they put their reasoning to work in service of inflicting agony.
Have you ever visited a museum exhibit on torture? The engineering creativity that has gone into exploiting physiology and psychology to cause unendurable, unimaginable pain is astonishing. You'll want to look away. You'll want to forget, to believe once again that cats are worse... but cats are to a first order approximation indifferent to suffering, in contrast to humans hellbent on maximizing it.
JumpCrisscross is taking a techno-optimist's perspective, but while I personally believe that humans should voluntarily seek to serve as "ethical guardians" and to minimize "sentient suffering", I don't trust them to do it. Not as individuals, since empathy is a weak force compared with first-person pain. Not as cogs within societies where inflicting pain is often a means to gaining and maintaining power.
I'm primarily responding with skepticism to JumpCriscross about humans minimizing "sentient suffering" — which would be measured by the aggregate of total suffering inflicted by all members of a species.
The extremes contribute the most in the ledger of agonies, but I don't think they are the most relevant — rather I fault human nature for tending to produce extremes. Is it Vladimir Putin who is personally responsible for all the suffering inflicted by the Russian state, or can we say that the environment from which Putin emerged played a role?
Thanks to their reasoning abilities, humans have enormous capability to inflict violence and suffering, which is not matched by a commensurate empathy which would dissuade violence.
I think there is a tremendous amount of empathy, if one isn't blinded to it. For every person that dies a violent death, there there are thousands engaging positively with friends, family, loved ones.
If you care about sums, you must also acknowledge positive within the Russian state as well? On a given day, it also has lovers meeting, mothers nursing children, friendships.
Surely, humanity doesn't have enough empathy to dissuade violence, but that is an argument about purity, not aggregates. The typical person spends an exceedingly small amount of time engaged in violence, and this is a testament to both our empathy, intelligence, and the social systems we have built.
All those Ukrainians basking in that tremendous Russian empathy…
It only takes a moment for you or your loved ones to receive death or grievous injury, but not to worry because they’re “spending an exceedingly small amount of time engaged in violence”. Rape might be over in minutes! And besides, it only affects… how much of the population?
Those who are most confident about human righteousness are the least qualified to minimize “sentient suffering”. It is often said that one’s foes “only understand violence”, and the essential truth in that assertion is that indirect empathy is utterly insufficient compared with direct, personal pain as a motivator for changing behavior.
This is clearly a disagreement about weights. You don't seem to weigh empathy and joy very highly in comparison to violence. How much kind empathetic deeds do you think it takes to outweigh 10 minutes of violent murder? A hug? A romance? A lifetime of Love? One hundred lifetimes of kindness?
Sometimes it helps to make the context personal? How much violence would you endure for a year of kindness and love?
If Russians were sufficiently empathetic towards the suffering of Ukrainians, if they truly felt the pain of Ukrainians as keenly as if they had experienced it themselves, they wouldn't freaking invade. But since empathy is a weak force and it's human nature to not feel much about the suffering of outsiders, Russians are not dissuaded from their war of conquest.
With regards to the weight of violence: Have you considered that "10 minutes of violent murder" may mean only 10 minutes of acute agony for the deceased but years of suffering for the deceased's surviving loved ones?
The only possible answer to your thought experiment is "I don't need s1artibartfast sitting in judgment about whether my life is appropriately balanced between violence and happiness".
That is falling back to the purity tests and cynicism.
To be clear, I'm not judging your life, but challenging your claim about the forces driving human behavior, and the aggregate vale of the species.
I disagree with the idea that just because empathy doesn't prevent all violence, it is weak, or less meaningful. A bird can fly, but that doesn't mean gravity is weak.
Violence is real, and important to understand, but Empathy and good intentions are real too, and a huge part of human psychology. I would argue they are a greater driver of the two.
Yes, human "good intentions" are very, very real and a great driver of history. It is human nature to believe fervently that your own actions are just and right — to which cynicism, or at least skepticism, is the proper response.
I imagine, for example, that government officials involved in managing California water rights[1], have "good intentions" — just as good as the intentions of those in this thread offering monstrous philosophical propositions about bartering violence that trivialize its enduring damage, or the intentions of those who contemplate becoming "nature's ethical guardians" and reducing "sentient suffering".
To the extent that human social systems have evolved to reduce "sentient suffering", it has been by applying forcible restraints on such individuals, confronting them with how the consequences of their actions affect others, even when the natural human inclination is to downplay and dismiss suffering when it clashes with self-interest or "good intentions".
I already brought up orcas and baby seals in a sibling comment[1], forty minutes before your response appeared. Have you grappled with my reasoning there?
