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I enjoyed your response to quirkyquark's comment. Your insults are creative and entertaining. The part about Google devouring the corpse of Uber's entrails was

I enjoyed your response to quirkyquark's comment. Your insults are creative and entertaining. The part about Google devouring the corpse of Uber's entrails was especially humorous. Are you having a bit of fun, or are you genuinely passionately against Uber? If you are in earnest, what is your personal connection to the Uber scandals? If in earnest, it seems a bit out of character from your previously dispassionate posts here on HN. Since you are a frequent poster here, this isn't the first time I have noticed your writing. Edit: after a second read, I'm finding it pretty unlikely you were being serious. I am not as good at discerning sarcasm on the internet as I should be.

matt4077 9y ago
Thanks–it was indeed harsher than anything I would usually write. Mostly because I didn't actually expect anybody to ever read it, and because I thought I could bring some balance to the cosmos by giving them the sort of comment that their comment seemed to address :) I think I'm actually quite compassionate, and borderline aggressive in many of my comments. Uber always gets that treatment because they somehow managed to position themselves at exactly the confluence of number of seemingly disparate trends I find worrisome. Among them the loss of trust in institutions that are for the most part functioning better than they ever did in the past (media/government/science/etc.), the Ayn Rand-style glorification of individualism to the point of denying any legitimacy to the role of society ("I never voted for the constitution"), and this rather strange backlash against the empowerment of previously disadvantaged groups. I'm trying to argue these points with the lightest touch possible, especially that last one. But I'm actually quite scared by the changes I've seen in this community, and I'm both at a loss for how it happened and what to do about it, as well as fundamentally convinced that HN is among the places where the next generation finds their ideological bearings, and that it is among the few remaining rays of light that the current leadership in technology has a humanist bend. I'm pretty sure, for example, that Bill Gates' humanitarianism is the result of the culture he experienced in the tech community (because there's really no sign of it in his earlier writings etc). To think that the next generation could follow not in his footsteps, but in Kalanick's and Thiel's is scary, especially considering the growing power of technology... Anyway... On HN you'll never find anyone saying black skin makes you immoral, or that jews are secretly plotting...something. It just so happens that this community always finds extremely good reasons to defend this or that fundamental right (free speech, due process, investor protection, whatever) when these powers are used for the betterment of white male cis-STEM-dom. It's definitely not obvious, and I may have a somewhat myopic view. But I'd love to find some statistical method to surface these trends.

matt4077 9y ago

Thanks–it was indeed harsher than anything I would usually write. Mostly because I didn't actually expect anybody to ever read it, and because I thought I could bring some balance to the cosmos by giving them the sort of comment that their comment seemed to address :) I think I'm actually quite compassionate, and borderline aggressive in many of my comments. Uber always gets that treatment because they somehow managed to position themselves at exactly the confluence of number of seemingly disparate trends I find worrisome. Among them the loss of trust in institutions that are for the most part functioning better than they ever did in the past (media/government/science/etc.), the Ayn Rand-style glorification of individualism to the point of denying any legitimacy to the role of society ("I never voted for the constitution"), and this rather strange backlash against the empowerment of previously disadvantaged groups. I'm trying to argue these points with the lightest touch possible, especially that last one. But I'm actually quite scared by the changes I've seen in this community, and I'm both at a loss for how it happened and what to do about it, as well as fundamentally convinced that HN is among the places where the next generation finds their ideological bearings, and that it is among the few remaining rays of light that the current leadership in technology has a humanist bend. I'm pretty sure, for example, that Bill Gates' humanitarianism is the result of the culture he experienced in the tech community (because there's really no sign of it in his earlier writings etc). To think that the next generation could follow not in his footsteps, but in Kalanick's and Thiel's is scary, especially considering the growing power of technology... Anyway... On HN you'll never find anyone saying black skin makes you immoral, or that jews are secretly plotting...something. It just so happens that this community always finds extremely good reasons to defend this or that fundamental right (free speech, due process, investor protection, whatever) when these powers are used for the betterment of white male cis-STEM-dom. It's definitely not obvious, and I may have a somewhat myopic view. But I'd love to find some statistical method to surface these trends.