HACKER Q&A
📣 ericmay

What is a true contrarian position that you hold?


What is a true contrarian position that you hold?


  👤 Ecco Accepted Answer ✓
I think democracy isn’t so great, at least not under its current form.

Voters judge candidates’ charisma a lot more than their ideas.

And many people simply don’t care so much and will vote for stupid reasons, yet have the same impact that people who put a lot of effort and thinking into their decision.

I think we should come with a way to vote for ideas more than persons. And that we should have some form of weighted voting.


👤 partisan
I believe that public service should be limited to 12 years. All public service. All of it, combined, and ever. Want to be a police office, and a senator, and president? You can, but all of those have to be limited to 12 (not necessarily consecutive) years.

An influx of new people will do the following:

- Reduce graft and nepotism and corruption as a whole.

- Constantly bring fresh eyes to old processes.

- Increase and improve knowledge sharing.

- Provide people with a safety net while bringing them working skills that can be applied outside of government.

- Give more people a chance to understand how and why the government works. It will make them more sympathetic for others when dealing with bureaucracy of government and make them feel like they are a stakeholder in the process.

The concept of professional politicians is a new one. It is a sign that we have all given up on our ability to understand and participate in the democratic process. We should all be engaged and feel like we can be part of the process, at any level in the process.


👤 poormystic
All my life people told me to "look after Number One" but that's not how I do things at all. I'm more interested in looking after others, because that's what brings me happiness.

👤 not_knuth
Large open source projects should be regarded by nations as infrastructure required for innovation. Just like roads are subsidied and maintained by governments, so should software be subsidied.

👤 mindvirus
Maybe not so contrarian here, but in general (USA centric - not American but I live here)

On tech:

- Social media companies should be legally responsible for stopping mob justice and harassment on their platforms, since it would create financial incentive to make better tools and policies.

- Social media companies shouldn't be responsible for censoring political speech (edit: by major politicians), that should be up to the government itself.

On government:

- Every citizen should be allowed to vote regardless of circumstance (i.e. even people in prison for heinous crimes), since I don't think the government should have much power over how it's elected.

- The national debt isn't as big a deal as the media or politicians make it out to be, since the USA is primarily in debt to itself in its own currency.

- Major government officials should be paid a lot more, and in return have major life long restrictions on what they are allowed to do financially both during and after their tenure.

On life:

- Veganism is the only moral choice for diet (non-vegetarian [so total hypocrite] here). I think we're going to learn an uncomfortable amount about animal cognition in the coming century, not to mention the climate impact.


👤 ggm
The bazaar model has a lot of problems. Its often much less efficient than 3 smart people working the cathedral.

👤 austincheney
* querySelectors are about 462x slower in Chrome than static DOM methods and 250,000x slower in Firefox.

* in JavaScript you don’t need classes, ever.

* you are executing slower using a framework and probably writing code an order of magnitude slower as well

* expert developers don’t do popular things


👤 ilyas121
Unsure if this counts, but I really dislike ppl who use the phrases “jack of all trades, master of none” or “put your head down for awhile” when they talk about work or life.

👤 ggm
Sender pays in email, from day one would have made the spam problem moot.

👤 forgotmypw17
A website should aim to support every browser in existence.

Telling a visitor that their browser or configuration is not good enough, when it was obviously good enough to view the page with that message, is ablist, anti-accessibility, lazy, incompetent, and just plain rude.

In many cases, HTTPS is overrated and creates more problems than it solves.


👤 mr_cyborg
I strongly believe that Fahrenheit is the best temperature scale

👤 ggm
Geographic ip address distribution has merits. BGP is mostly bunkum and most routing is static. The internet is 30,000 valid routes at worst, nothing like 700,000

👤 ggm
I miss broadcast news at six o clock, not timeshifted.

👤 gradschool
Inverse imposter syndrome: I suspect most people of being incompetent at their jobs and just faking it.

👤 ggm
AT&T might have been better not fragmented by states

👤 stevenalowe
if an act is immoral for an individual, it is immoral for a group