We are almost at 2022 - a virus originating in one country spread across the world within months. We are dependent on each other much more than any other generation. Unless the human race acts united, huge problems like climate change aren't going away. Instead of classifying problems based on borders, we should look at all problems as human problems, not Chinese, American, Russian or whatever.
Immigration should be massively increased in the US. The surest way for the US and west to grow its international influence, economy, and live up to its values is through immigration. It’s not a zero sum game: immigrants create jobs for everyone. They increase many forms of diversity and expose us to may PoVs. Multiculturalism works, as exhibited by the higher social capital in major cities compared to the ethnically homogenous rural areas. The West would increase its economic competitiveness with other powers (ie China) that are less likely to increase immigration. This will strengthen the security and influence of western powers, giving them also a worldly outlook compared to those with much less immigration.
Faux immigration like H1B and other guest worker visas cruelly create a second class workforce. It would be more humane to allow more actual immigration.
It’s an obvious policy win, I wish more people would vocally support radically increased immigration.
That it is pointless to ask that question on HN or any social site because actual contrarian opinions will be downvoted and hidden.
The most popular "edgy" opinions will be voted as the most contrarian and be rise to the top.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28407598 - Recent overview of the argument against
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17441773 - I come away appropriately looking like an idiot in this one because I made many wrong assumptions about Haiku's package system, however I still maintain it was a bad decision
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17268775 - Some more argumentation about how to do things better
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24776127 - Related
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937228 - Vaguely related
I know I have several more, but there doesn't seem to be a good way to search one's own post history on HN. (This statement has since been made obsolete by CRConrad)
If a corporation is responsible for the death of a person, the CEO, CFO, COO, and members of the board should serve prison time.
If the corporation is a repeat offender, then the corporation should suffer the death penalty. The assets liquidated a public auction. Also Corp Officers and board members go to jail and are forbidden from ever holding such position again.
I look forward to your down votes.
* All programming languages suck. We are not there yet as humanity. I can not think outside of the box enough to make the breakthrough that should be made, at least as of now. While looking at other programming languages, I see the same issue: inability to express thoughts in concise and straightforward manner. Unsolved issue.
* The only idea in programming that I consider definitely good is pattern matching. Note that I'm talking about the concept here. No particular implementation strikes me as "yep, this is it": be it limitation to strings only (regex) or syntax-only implementation (preventing composability of the patterns) or some other sh*t.
Have a nice weekend!
2. Government should be 100% transparent in time of peace and offset by 1 year in time of war.
3. All government content creation should be public domain.
- Alcohol does not make people more aggressive to a large extent. In the vast majority of clubs/festivals almost everybody is inebriated but violence is fairly rare (in my experience). (I'm a non-drinker btw so I have no horse in this race).
- David Bowie's music is unremarkable.
- We should keep Linux unpopular because the more users it gets, the more malware/spyware/advertising/telemetry it will attract. It is fine where it is now in terms of its userbase.
Fight me.
Sinularly, many people are mad about countries doing "unethical" things, but countries do not have ethical norms, they merely have interests, and that's what they'll advance towards. To think that countries for example shouldn't spy on each other or assassinate their enemy leaders is also a misunderstanding of human nature, and more largely of geopolitics.
We are pushed thru the ed system as future labor, but lack the tools to coexist in a very large and complex society.
I'm well aware that I'm simply not owed anything. However the worst human beings I've ever met are the 20 to 30 year olds who are still being taken care of by their parents, but don't appreciate it. They relentlessly complain about how poorly their being treated. A free place to live at 25 is great treatment as far as I'm concerned.
I learned the hard way these folks just think everyone in the world owes them. They treat having a job as optional. They create endless amounts of unneeded chaos.
As a related point, you need to set extremely high standards for anyone you enter into a relationship. You can't think oh it's okay, I really like this person, it's fine that they don't want to work. Nothing good comes from associating with people like this.
With that said I've been exceptionally lucky in the last few years. Almost everyone I've dated recently has been independent and career driven. The girl I'm currently dating is easily everything I've ever wanted in a partner, she has a master's, knows 3 languages, and has a great job.
I think there are better ways. We cannot, for example, teach kids about democracy in environments that give kids often less agency than prisoners in prisons. Democratic schools like Summerhill, Sudbury or unschooling are good starts. Kids at those schools have control over their schedule: if they want to keep a more structured schedule, they can, if they want a more relaxed schedule, sure. Each kid also has a vote in how the school is run, including in a judicial system for administering discipline.
At the very minimum, ending age segregation policies at schools would be a good start for more dynamic learning.
If I could redesign popular OSes in god mode, blocking the UI thread for more than a few 100s of ms would crash the app with no workarounds.
I have to admit GC is a grey area...
Others that would cause some heated debates.
- All transportation should have a weight multiplier to the base price since every kg adds to the fuel usage. Nobody should have to pay out of their own pockets for you.
- Social welfare should not be free. There are low skilled jobs that can be done by most. Missing both arms and other serious things are valid reasons not to do anything. Arachnophobia is not- I can vouch for this one personally. Panic attacks and all.
- Immigrants (like me in UK) should not have a right to vote until they get citizenship. This is the proof that you actually understand the country you live in.
- Election campain "propaganda" should be legally binding
- Voting should be done with "personal" digital security certificate. Anyone involved in electrion fraud should have all assets confiscated and put in prison
- Prisons should not be "free meals". You either work or study for a qualification in a field where there is a skill shortage.
- Internet should be declared public utility and nobody should have the right to kick anyone off it. In most civilized countries you're as good as dead without it.
- All platforms that reach the level of google search in peoples life should be declared public utility and punished for biases and manipulation of any kind.
- All big + small taxes should be merged into one (for example 50%)
Psychological therapy is the snake oil of the 21st century. See an actual doctor instead.
I say this having recovered from a suicide attempt.
- we don't want flying cars, it was a brainfart of sci-fi of the 60s, a linear combination of what was cool at the time, planes and cars. we dont want faster planes either - people happily spend the majority of their trip in airport waiting lines and getting to/from the airport
- we instead want our 140 characters because we are informational creatures. We are basically an entity living inside a brain with extra legs. it doesn't matter if we can't travel across the world if we can 'travel' instead. The real world doesn't matter much when our basic needs are covered, instead we get our rewards swimming in the sea of information and ideas. Therefore there are 2 worthy goals for humanity now: longevity or brain computer interfaces. either fullfills the ultimate desire of a conscious mind: to 'live' forever.
* Small UI changes (eg moving a button) don’t make me have to relearn the UI from scratch.
* If an app developer has a way were I can get my work done faster, I want to know about it. Getting shit done is more sacred to me than the workflow I built myself.
* Related: devs do achieve the above.
* Most documentation doesn’t explain anything that can’t be learned from a code completion engine. When I do have questions, Stack Overflow is more likely to have a concise explanation that the official docs.
* Native apps are something only us devs give a shit about.
* Functional programming isn’t catching on for two reasons: the on boarding experience is missing things (mostly the big picture aspects of structuring an app) and b) Haskell is the post child of functional Languages.
- The narrative that the US and other Western nations' participation in white supremacy and slavery/colonialism is the main societal influence today is overblown and is likely leading to unnecessary political violence and turmoil.
- I don't think abortions should be banned, but generally speaking, it is incredibly easy to not get pregnant. Don't have sex. Unless you were raped, no one is 'forcing' anything on you, those were your decisions. It is baffling to me that no one says this out loud.
- There are only two genders.
- Kyle Rittenhouse acted in legitimate self-defense. The popular understanding of the case is beset with misinformation about what happened.
Go is a good language for many uses (contra junon). C++ is also a good language for at least some uses, but requires more care to use well.
Cheap food is killing us.
AGI is a mirage, and the singularity is a fantasy.
Software, like every other area of endeavor, contains no inherent barriers to major advances relative to regular advances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
Many laws of "can't" are just dressed up pessimism. Many things never happened before they did.
I am not saying such an advance will happen. Just that it could.
We've got about 5 more years before everyone catches on to that fact, and things start to get better.
The insecurity of general purpose computing has been a major factor in the walled gardens that most people stick to when using the internet.
People don't realize the freedom we had back in the MS-DOS days when you could write protect your OS and try ANYTHING in almost perfect safety.
The core problem here is that it’s hard to test if you don’t know what is the expected outcome (we don’t know how much the temperature is supposed to increase - we expect the model to tell us that…). In such cases, you don’t do black-box testing (i.e. just writing a bunch of test-cases), but rather have to resort to doing a painstaking and rigorous analysis of the code itself. We’ve done it in the past (e.g. on early space flight code), but the scope of the codebase was way smaller.
Also, I suspect that, a lot of the time, people work on the model (tweak parameters, find and fix numerical problems etc) until it starts giving responses which match their apriori expectations. That’s pure scientism (bs masquerading as science).
A - The majority of data science insights is kinda useless for guiding software product direction. Much better to have a well defined strategy and just execute on that, tradeoffs and all. I have to engage in the game because that’s what my boss expects.
B - In 100 years we are going to look back at pet ownership with disdain, especially cats, because how could we keep these animals in an environment that’s so restrictive if they are indoors, and how could we unleash them on the ecology if they are outdoors?
C - If you want to help the poor, and save money on prison expenses, then funding public defenders is really the way to go.
D - I love the US and what it stands for, but if there hadn’t been a revolution then no big deal, we’d probably be in the same place more or less.
E - Govermentment intervention didn’t solve the great depression, it made it worse.
I hold these all equally strongly.
- The idea of "limits to growth" (as promoted by the Club of Rome) is a fallacy that - although since the time of Thomas Malthus it has been proven wrong time and again - remains bewilderingly popular.
- The EU is a cold war relic that's ridiculously ill-equipped for the challenges of the 21st century. Though motivated by misguided ideas, petty nationalism, and selfishness, given time Brexit might prove to not have been such a bad idea after all.
- Nuclear power at least in the short term should be considered a vital component of combatting climate change.
Regarding software:
- Web standards are actually quite decent. The web and web technologies are great way of providing and distributing applications.
As for more some recent events:
- Lockdowns and civil rights restrictions in general are neither an effective, nor a reasonable or sustainable approach for dealing with a pandemic.
- Zero Covid / No Covid / a Covid elimination strategy is an unsustainable dead end.
- Negative COVID-19 test results, not vaccination passports, should be relied on as an access requirement.
As a corollary, western society peaked in the 80s
I propose a grace period of maybe 250 ms after a visible change.
Let's say I click a button but the window poof! disappeared just exactly then and revealed a different button beneath the closed window. Aargh! Now I caused something else!
My contrarian opinion is that we should try out this: if a button disappeared visually it is still there for 250 ms more. So we aren't caught by the GUI change.
After 250 ms we can react and cancel the intention to click.
I am sure we need to experiment with the time needed and make it configurable.
To be honest though, it is thought provoking to skim though all of these out of the ordinary ideas and responses.
The US would be much better off today although that would have come at the expense of the new country.
Humans are an apex invasive species at this point. We are all plugged into a *-industrial complex. We sell dissatisfaction to each other to promote consumption to keep the whole thing going.
There is no nobility in bearing children or even in continuing living.
Because evolutionary pressures on governments produce stability and power instead of 'goodness of people', I suspect any random system that sounds remotely sensible would probably be superior to anything we have now. If we actually designed something that took into account new knowledge and technology, we could do much better.
Expectation of future profits is equivalent to belief that markets are inefficient. (Which of course they often are.) Open source economic planning could yield massive economic gains and doesn't require centralized power or use of force. (Pacifist governance is one of those unexplored spaces) An open public ledger would allow for resource allocation and incentivizing work without needing a monetization strategy.
If we track and account for externalities doing a good thing funds itself. You don't need a way to take money from the people you're helping. This also disincentivizes negative externalities.
As an example of how bad things are: We still debate on natural language forums instead of using structured arguments that link to common datasets and simulations. These comments get 'points' instead of bayesian probabilities, and there's no way to filter or rescore anything based on it's epistemological support or new data.
See that 12-year-old kid killing it in the NFTs? See that AI startup IPO'ing?
Just offer the market what it wants.
Relatives should be somewhat culpable for the repeat violent crimes of their parents/children/siblings, anyone who shares at least 50% of their genes. With, of course, escape clauses if they're distant, estranged, or never heard of them.
Religion should be as personal as sexual behaviour.
Case in point, look at this thread - "what grinds your gears?" is the theme, and while some come through with what one might expect from HN (programming hot takes, critiques of entrenched systems), we're also getting quick responses espousing castration, the death penalty, imperialism, Trumpism, etc.
We, my friends, are a cluster.
Donald Trump, raging narcissist, charlatan and fascistic bigot that he was, was also the most authentically American President America has ever had. He embodied the American spirit - it's true spirit - unmasked and exposed in its full lunatic glory, and it should surprise no one that some Americans loved him enough to form an actual cult around him.
edit: yes, I'm talking about climate change.
1a) There never should have been a Covid lock-down, nor should there have ever been a vaccine created.
1b) People's income tax rates should be based on how healthy they keep themselves and how healthy they eat, their lack of smoking and drinking and if they are parents, how healthy their children eat and how much exercise all of them get.
On HN, downvotes serve little purpose, assuming that the user base actually believes the notions of superiority and quality of discussion here compared to other sites on the internet.
For explicitly off-topic or guideline violating comments, flags exist. Downvotes seem to serve no other purpose than as a low effort “I disagree” or “I don’t like this” which wouldn’t be an acceptable reply if it were a comment.