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What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC

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Re: What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC

#101

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #79
calibraxis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends, have you spent some of that long life fighting for those who don't have your privileges? (Assuming you haven't been unable due to intersecting factors like mental illness or poverty?) Noam Chomsky's an old white man. Doesn't thrill him to spend half his time helping the human race end its wars and self-destruction, but he takes the responsibility. (Even if you did apologize, what difference would it make?)

For a long time, you've been using HN primarily for political purposes. That's not a legitimate use of this site, and we've already asked you to stop doing it. In addition, many of your comments (like this one) straddle if not cross the line into personal disrespect. That's also an abuse of this site, so please stop doing that too.

[deleted]

Re: What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC

#102

Post by neom »

econner wrote: post #22
neom wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are building toys for children, some people are building tools for humans. Both are fine, in moderation. I think we see more and more the NYC tech culture feels like they are trying to build real things, the valley is stuck in consumerism and has lost the ability to push the needle, much of this is due to poorly considered greed and linear thinking. :(

What a sweeping generalization. Can you provide any justification that the valley has "lost the ability to push the needle?"

Just look at the general investment philosophy of any VC below T1.

Re: What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC

#103

Post by neom »

pohungc wrote: post #21
neom wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are building toys for children, some people are building tools for humans. Both are fine, in moderation. I think we see more and more the NYC tech culture feels like they are trying to build real things, the valley is stuck in consumerism and has lost the ability to push the needle, much of this is due to poorly considered greed and linear thinking. :(

What are some of the most impactful things being built in the NYC tech scene?

pinterest, etsy, fab, digitalocean, buzzfeed, any media platform, guilt, foursquare, seamless web, app nexsus, etc. I could literally list 100.

Re: What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC

#104

Post by neom »

yodsanklai wrote: post #23
neom wrote: post #9

Yes, you are totally correct. I love my SF friends are starting to come over to NY, leave the old white men in the valley and burn it down, vive la revolution. ;)

> leave the old white men in the valley Should I apologize for being old and white?

Depends, have you actively spent your time trying to dismantle the patriarchy? If yes, no, if no, absolutely.

Re: What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC

#105

Post by yummyfajitas »

stephancoral wrote: post #100
yummyfajitas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a NY (and India) guy who occasionally visits the west coast, seriously? NY loves tech but the valley only wants to make money? Consider the blockchain. Out west they try and rebuild the world with it - consider the (thiel funded) urbit. Back east we just replace banking clearinghouses with bank built blockchain. What makes you feel differently? Also curious what the ancestry of the people doing tech has to do with…

Urbit, to me, is an elitist joke filled with needlessly obscurantist terminology. If it takes off I will eat my foot but I doubt it. To me it's just another example of the Valley bubble where they want "to change the world" but have no connection to the world they so desperately (for mostly egotistical reasons) seek to alter. The NYC scene I've witnessed at HOPE is not nearly as pretentious as SV people. Whenever I h…

Urbit may or may not take off - I'm skeptical myself. But unlike most of the NY tech scene it is an attempt at replacing democracy with cryptographically secure monarchy (which I may be misrepresenting as "blockchain"). I can't imagine anyone in NY even attempting something like that - can you?

Algorithms failing to detect black people is not "racist." It's simply a reflection of the fact that contrast matters. Any algorithm out there will detect `5f(x) + noise` more accurately than `0.5 f(x) + noise`. Black people reflect fewer photons than white people, that's just how physics works. Why do you believe Black Americans can change this? And why can't dark skinned Tamils (probably the stereotypical data scientist) do the same thing?

I have absolutely no idea why you consider some specific demographic breakdown "just wrong". What's your underlying moral principle? The most I can come up with is some kind 1930's Italian style corporatism with certain specific ethnic groups as the corporates, but that seems uncharitable.

Re: What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC

#106

Post by elgabogringo »

lmmlzxx wrote: post #98
elgabogringo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replying to your aside... You are absolutely correct. Thank you. I'd add that implementing security "at the border" is the lightest touch option available and doesn't infringe on the rights of any citizens. But our leaders won't do it. Instead they create the TSA to eliminate free travel and get access to our emails & phone calls to eliminate privacy. Also, while I see both sides of the gun argument, it worries me th…

The US government commits terrorist attacks on a regular basis. I may not convince all of you about the air strike in Syria the other day, or the hospital that was intentionally hit a few months back, but can any of you deny that the Shock and Awe bombing campaign at the outset of the Iraq war was terrorism? Shock and Awe was the "use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy's per…

that's not the common understanding of Terrorism. That's just war.

I'm sympathetic to anti-Iraq war views.

Less sympathetic to those actually against the war. Most seemed like they didn't want any response to terrorism at all, which is unacceptable.

There's an ideology out there that wants to come to my country and kill me and my family. I'm perfectly fine killing those people first - or at least making sure they can't come here and commit the ultimate hate crime.

Re: What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC

#107

Post by oxide »

elgabogringo wrote: post #106
lmmlzxx wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US government commits terrorist attacks on a regular basis. I may not convince all of you about the air strike in Syria the other day, or the hospital that was intentionally hit a few months back, but can any of you deny that the Shock and Awe bombing campaign at the outset of the Iraq war was terrorism? Shock and Awe was the "use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy's per…

that's not the common understanding of Terrorism. That's just war. I'm sympathetic to anti-Iraq war views. Less sympathetic to those actually against the war. Most seemed like they didn't want any response to terrorism at all, which is unacceptable. There's an ideology out there that wants to come to my country and kill me and my family. I'm perfectly fine killing those people first - or at least making sure they can…

You can't respond to terrorism with overwhelming force, its a concept. A tactic. It just goes underground when stamped out or gets taken up by other idealogues who act alone.

We went to fight extremists who happen to use terrorism. We also spent most of our time and money with our dicks in our hand instead of 'killing them before they killed us.'

They don't want you dead, anyway. they want you terrified.

Re: What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC

#108

Post by pjscott »

brighteyes wrote: post #59
pjscott wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The candidates applying to those jobs are overwhelmingly male, with few blacks and hispanics. Imagine an unbiased hiring process: how would its results look different from what you see now?

That's a reasonable argument, but some of the facts don't fit it. 7% of tech roles in Apple are black [1], while at Google that figure is just 1%. A 7 times difference is very large. But let's be generous and say that the 1% is 1.5% that was rounded down. The percentage of black tech workers is still almost 5 times higher at Apple than at Google. These are massive companies, not small startups where a single hire ske…

It looks like the "tech" category reported on those graphs is including technicians, which make up very different percentages of the workforce at the two companies -- about 1% of Google's employees and 22% of Apple's, according to their EEO-1 forms:

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

https://www.apple.com/diversity/pdf/2015-EEO-1-Consolidated-...

Within the "professionals" category, which is the one with engineers in it, both have pretty similar percentages of black employees: about 1.7% at Google, compared to... about 1.7% at Apple.

Re: What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC

#109

Post by erichocean »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #99
_delirium wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump sort of has a gesture towards an answer, which is more or less: trade protectionism. The broad sketch of his argument is that free trade, or perhaps more specifically "bad trade deals", moved good blue-collar jobs overseas, and either ripping up the trade deals or renegotiating them will move the jobs back. I personally am skeptical, but it's a pitch many people are open to. In my opinion protectionism isn't go…

>trade protectionism Seems like that is the kind of thing that gets you into trade wars . Not to mention that people would be Really Really Unhappy if iPhones suddenly doubled in price because of tariffs designed to protect American manufacturing. But...I'm not an expert, so I don't know with any degree of confidence what the consequences would be. Problem is Trump's fans are so far down in the "not an expert" direct…

> Unhappy if iPhones suddenly doubled in price

Pretty sure I remember Apple saying it would cost a whopping $7 more per device to build an iPhone in the US. The real problem is that the US lacks a wealth of (low cost?) suppliers for the various parts in the phone itself, so it would be difficult to innovate at the pace Apple wants to move at.

(The example given IIRC was a change in the case or screws or something at the last moment demanded by S. Jobs that Apple believed couldn't be implemented quickly enough in the US.)

Re: What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC

#110

Post by shanacarp »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #105
stephancoral wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbit, to me, is an elitist joke filled with needlessly obscurantist terminology. If it takes off I will eat my foot but I doubt it. To me it's just another example of the Valley bubble where they want "to change the world" but have no connection to the world they so desperately (for mostly egotistical reasons) seek to alter. The NYC scene I've witnessed at HOPE is not nearly as pretentious as SV people. Whenever I h…

Urbit may or may not take off - I'm skeptical myself. But unlike most of the NY tech scene it is an attempt at replacing democracy with cryptographically secure monarchy (which I may be misrepresenting as "blockchain"). I can't imagine anyone in NY even attempting something like that - can you? Algorithms failing to detect black people is not "racist." It's simply a reflection of the fact that contrast matters. Any a…

>Algorithms failing to detect black people is not "racist." It's simply a reflection of the fact that contrast matters. Any algorithm out there will detect `5f(x) + noise` more accurately than `0.5 f(x) + noise`. Black people reflect fewer photons than white people, that's just how physics works. Why do you believe Black Americans can change this? And why can't dark skinned Tamils (probably the stereotypical data scientist) do the same thing?

Actually, it is passively racist, since many of these algorithms have nothing to do with contrast and everything to do with improper tagging and insufficient and incorrect training data. It is how black people got labelled gorillas by google, and how I can name some names of how to get through a prominent AI/ML driven filter with Japanese woodblock shunga prints from the late Tokugawa period (go look it up yourself for examples)

Dark Skin Tamils can and should be part of developing tagging. I also tend to think that for things as complicated as porn or race, you may want to even do different training data in different places for different cultures. I don't honestly know how a Tamil would take an american's view on the imagery at the temple at Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh. To many Americans, the sculptures on the temple may be outside the pale for work, but for a Hindu Tamil, it may be a place of great religious significance and may not bother them in the slightest.

> But unlike most of the NY tech scene it is an attempt at replacing democracy with cryptographically secure monarchy (which I may be misrepresenting as "blockchain"). I can't imagine anyone in NY even attempting something like that - can you?

The better question is why? Even Hobbes hated monarchies, he just thought they were the best of bad options under the conditions of you magically get a benevolent ruler, and only because he lived through too many radical revolutions in england. Almost everyone else disagrees with him.

What happens when you are on the outs with your monarch/dictator. What is your counterweight in the state to have real rights? (bitcoins and the blockchain are not them, especially for a mass group)

How do you plan on dealing with that?

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