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Lulu: An App No One Should Accept

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Re: Lulu: An App No One Should Accept

#41
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem in this case is that in the same way women are most often the recipients of sexual discrimination, men are most often the recipient of being decried as sexual discriminators. It's so easy to look down on someone identifying as male as being discriminant but when the opposite is true, the male point of view is often ignored. Simply put, we are expected to man up, whereas women are expected to stand up.

I don't think it's quite as dramatic as you say. But personally I'm ok with it. Men have been getting the good end of sexual discrimination for centuries. Owning property. Voting. Higher education. Being allowed to practice a profession. Being favored by marriage laws. Being favored by social biases. Like Peter Parker and Voltaire say, "With great power comes great responsibility." Having received a substantial boost…

The shortest path to peace and justice is definitely swiveling the artillery.

I sincerely hope you're joking.

Re: Lulu: An App No One Should Accept

#42
How on earth could this app get funding? If it were a male->female app there would have been an outrage about it.

Moral issues aside, I can see a lot of libel lawsuits (at least in the UK) springing up because of this app. There are enough rumours in the world as it is, we do not need apps that profit from people rating the opposite sex and spreading rumours about them.

Re: Lulu: An App No One Should Accept

#43

I used to be unhappy about this app until I found an SQL injection vulnerability that allowed me to log in and access the accounts of my previous dates by only needing to know their email addresses. This meant I was able to manipulate the ratings and comments people had made about me. Now I like the app :) Thanks Lulu!

Be careful with your trivial SQL injection, if the US police find out, that's 60 years behind bars, no access to a computer and daily "fun" in the shower.

But, no sexist gossip.

Re: Lulu: An App No One Should Accept

#44

How does this even work? I assume it's a database that you search by name and location but then there's going to be all kinds of collisions. Or does it pull data from social networks? I imagine the signal to noise ratio will just be horrible, bitter ex girlfriends will just spam guys with negative tags even if they aren't true and it's information will just lose all value.

You are assuming that data fidelity is high on their list of priorities.

Re: Lulu: An App No One Should Accept

#45
post #17

It'd be interesting to see a review of Lulu that didn't seem to be mainly made of "dude with baseball cap, suddenly concerned that he might be called to account". To me, the emotional heart of this piece of writing is his concern with "men kowtowing". I looked at his other articles and his personal site, and I didn't see anything where his writing was half this passionate. And certainly nothing where he'd expressed c…

Wow

Re: Lulu: An App No One Should Accept

#46

I used to be unhappy about this app until I found an SQL injection vulnerability that allowed me to log in and access the accounts of my previous dates by only needing to know their email addresses. This meant I was able to manipulate the ratings and comments people had made about me. Now I like the app :) Thanks Lulu!

As the former CTO of that company, I really doubt this. When I was there, the app was built on Django, and I left some pretty competent people behind, so I'm quite sure they wouldn't have made a mistake so rudimentary.

However, I don't know what happened after I left, so there might have been some dubious decisions.

Re: Lulu: An App No One Should Accept

#47
The connected nature of the internet and mobile devices reduces the cost of disseminating information. It doesn't discriminate about what information is made easier to share. Expecting app stores to play gate keepers sets a dangerous precedent. Imagine if the internet was an AOL app store and Steve Case had the final opinion on everything that would be made available to their users.

You just have to roll with the punches and adjust. It's fine to be appalled at stuff like this, it goes over the top whenever you want someone to have authority to bring a stop to it for you. Adjusting your expectations and dealing with your objections are a better option than giving someone you can't really trust such long lasting power just to temporarily please your ego.

In two days you're going to forget about this app, but then you'll probably have found something else on HN to be outraged about. Maybe it will be the app store gate keeper shutting down an app you liked.

Re: Lulu: An App No One Should Accept

#48
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's quite as dramatic as you say. But personally I'm ok with it. Men have been getting the good end of sexual discrimination for centuries. Owning property. Voting. Higher education. Being allowed to practice a profession. Being favored by marriage laws. Being favored by social biases. Like Peter Parker and Voltaire say, "With great power comes great responsibility." Having received a substantial boost…

We must have grown up in drastically different times then - I'm barely 20 and for the majority of my life I have been taught that boys are smelly and girls are sweet, boys do the dirty jobs and that men are dangerous and shouldn't be left alone with women. Sure, men have had the upper hand for centuries but we live in an age where the scales have tipped - we need to be careful that instead of having a substantial boo…

Men have had the upper hand since the dawn of existence and still have the upper hand in basically every society in the world.

Re: Lulu: An App No One Should Accept

#50
post #11

In recent times I've gotten the impression that their is a double standard going on regarding certain (not all) services and events that are only targeted to women. If this had been an app for men rating and alerting them about certain women all hell would of broke loose.

There are a couple of schools around the world targeted at men, or women...

One very interesting thing, is that schools targeted at women are seem as "traditional" and "bastions" or "empowering", specially if they are ancient and do have good education...

Men schools, once regarded in the same way, are now being attacked, one of the best schools in the US for example is being sued for not taking female students, and a common tag attached to them is "Backwards" or "medieval" or "inquisitors"

If this was a US-only phenomenon, at least I would feel less troubled, except even in Brazil we had a crazy problem...

During the government ranking of high schools (that is made with a test that all high schools students in the country must take if they wish to join university), the first place was a boys-only school.

This is a problem, because it drew attention to them, now there are all sorts of discrimination lawsuits from parents of girls, and the media is bellowing how "less worse" they are, because they accept female teachers, and that when they did not accepted them they were evil, and now that they do they are less evil, but that this would be only a truly good school when they start accepting girls and change some of their authoritarian ways and become more tolerating and egalitarian.

Or some issue with bars... Female only bars in Brazil are allowed and seen as a female fun thing. Male only bars get the cops quickly called on them for refusing entry of costumer based on gender. (Female-only are illegal too, but cops ignore it).

Or one even crazier, it is common to employers to want to hire one gender or other (for example they might want a woman to be the maintenance person of the women's bathroom), yet although signs of "hiring female x" don't attract problems, if you put a sign like "hiring male bathroom cleaner" you get quickly sued for hiring discrimination (that is illegal).

I even had a business owner once complain that a woman sued him (and almost won... a judge chance that allowed he win the case) for not hiring her as attendant in a store for male intimate clothing... The first judge saw it purely in the light of law: you cannot discriminate, period. the second judge had more common sense on his head and imaginated that it would bring even more legal problems to have a woman hanging around men that might want to become naked (or almost naked depending on store policy regarding trying intimate clothes) to choose his new clothes...

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