Viewing profile — hammerzeit

If you see a piece in the NYT that's making fun of those weird tech nerds , odds are high it's in the styles section. Choire Sicha, formerly of Gawker, took over the section last y…

Please, before this degrades into the inevitable shouting match, let's please consider that there are two things that can both simultaneously be true: 1.Tech is less bad than many,…

My spouse is a doctor as well, and I've also observed the issues the author discusses. I don't think your read of the causes here is correct. It's worth reading more about the hist…

I really enjoyed the frustration of the article's author in trying to attribute Ted Chiang's writing to his personal life or history. We as humans seem to have this unceasing tende…

This is a really interesting question to ask, but survey-based responses only tells us how venture capitalists think they make decisions. Obviously this is a secretive industry but…

This is a problem we've managed to solve for dozens of other dietary preferences, from kosher status to gluten-free, without insisting on mandatory labeling. Why is GMO so special?…

That's ridiculous. Excluding the subway, there's still approximately 110k riders each way on the LIRR[1] and 90k each way on NJ Transit[2]. Plus amtrak, you're talking about ~450,0…

This article, and its reflection on the creative process, on the insecurities felt by those who take part in it, on the pain of how long it takes to get anything done resonated ver…

I have a young child at home. He eats bamba, peanut butter, and a worrying amount of New York City dirt. That said, this is such a dangerous article, and I'm honestly surprised the…

100 times this. Eliminating structure just transfers the heavy lifting to informal mechanisms -- i.e. your "culture." No culture is sufficiently well-defined that everybody has a c…

There's already an internet-scale mechanism to avoid seeing ads while ensuring that publishers are compensated for the content they're creating -- it's the very ad exchanges that s…

Forget ethical questions, then, and let's talk economics. If you're not generating revenue for them, why should anybody who hopes to make money off of content choose to show you an…

Forget ethical questions, then, and let's talk economics. If you're not generating revenue for them, why should anybody who hopes to make money off of content choose to show you an…

But... why? I don't understand why an entrepreneur would prefer crowdfunded money to venture capital. And if he can't raise venture capital with the glut of money in venture right …

While this doesn't invalidate his arguments in and of itself, but it's worth noting that John Gray's core philosophy seems to be diametrically opposed to even the idea of Pinker be…

I'm sure there's a point you're making here, but I'm not interested in finding it among all the insults you're slinging my way. Chill out, dude.

There are certainly plenty of folks in silicon valley who could care less about quality as long as it hits the numbers. It may or may not be the case that the new management at TNR…

Evgevny Morozov is a great place to start; he can go a little off the rails but much of his critiques of technological determinism are well-located. I don't fully subscribe to all …

There are many, many critiques of silicon valley that are relevant and problematic and need to be heard and engaged with more. This is absolutely not one of them.

If Wieseltier's aim was to provide an ex post facto justification of what went down at the New Republic, he's certainly nailed it. The strawmen he constructs without a whit of evid…

This reads like a classic Graeber piece, in that he's starts off by tackling some fascinating questions -- why are there 2x the administrative workers in the US as in Europe -- but…

I applaud this article for challenging the received wisdom in libertarian communities that our prison problems are a function of drug laws -- indeed, if there's one thing this arti…