The negative encounters get lots of loud attention, rightfully so. This author is making the point that women don't have to protest, speak up, or report all the totally normal, healthy encounters they have with men.
If you are an investor you look elsewhere for a date.
If you actually need to worry about something being considered sexually harrassing, you definitely need to reconsider how you approach women. It's really not that hard, I've dated numerous co-workers over the years and never had any fears over that or issues when we broke up. Be polite, not over bearing and be respectful. The time will either present itself to ask or it won't. If it goes your way, great. If it doesn't move on.
"Marked you as a spammer" and "promote fraud" is your interpretation, and I believe it's wrong. A single person called your comment "link spam", that's it. And nobody even mentioned fraud.
You seem to think fraud could be the only reason for a flagged-off comment. It's the rarest reason. I cannot remember a single clearly fraudulous comment here.
And I'm sure the people who flagged my submissions and comments from time to time didn't think they were fraudulous, either. They thought they were obnoxious. Or combative. Or mean-spirited. Lots of reasons why someone might flag something.
For what it's worth, I don't think you're trying to defraud anyone. Still, I believe that this cryptocurrency you mentioned is probably fraudulous, as are all of them. :-)
Yes, you linked to ycombinator. Among other links. Nobody ever said anything about that particular link. Again, it's your imagination.
Thanks for full-quoting your comment, but that wouldn't have been necessary. I have already read it. Before flagging it.
I don't care much about you taking your words back, and your pathetic attempt at blackmail doesn't change that.
Finally, yes, HN has changed a lot. In my opinion for the better, but you're in good company, many readers lament that change. Personally I don't particularly respect (or disrespect) Paul Graham, and I'm glad this isn't a Paul Graham fan site.
Maybe it really isn't for you. Do you really want to put more energy in this fight?
I think HN went pretty much to the left, if not far-left. HN readers are pretty much on the side of Paul Krugman, Thomas Piketty's world view.
I'm on the side Milton Friedman, Paul Graham's world view.
The left consider what I believe as total shit and at the same time call me intolerant. And this irritates me a lot. There is no way of being in peace with left without being submissive or self-censoring. And I don't want to be either.
> I believe that this cryptocurrency you mentioned is probably fraudulous
So do you believe YCombinator promotes fraud? Because cryptocurrency I mentioned was on blog.ycombinator.com.
Your other comments on this topic, though, have been off-topic and tedious. Please just don't post like that, no matter how frustrated you are. If you think a post is being treated unfairly, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
(On another note, I'd be careful about assuming that pg's worldview is the same as Milton Friedman's. That doesn't sound right to me.)
As tensions with USDT rise, my prediction is that MakerDAO decentralized stablecoin will take over the market in 2019. You can see how issued DAI market cap pumping up steadily all year long almost with no break:
Since 2016, I spoke with many greeks, spanish and it looks to me that vast majority of them believe in wrong things. Therefore they will continue to vote for left or right populists no matter what. Their left and right are anti free market, anti fiscal conservatism, pro spending, pro welfare, against businesses.
In very long term, EU is unsustainable. Too many countries with different interests and huge moral hazard.
Since 2001, I spoke with many Americans and they believe in wrong things. Therefore they will continue to vote for left or right populists no matter what. Their left and right are warmongers, anti-internationalists, anti-peace in the Middle East, anti-immigration, anti-poor people, against universal access to medicine.
In very long term, US is unsustainable. Too many states with different interests and huge moral hazard.
(Of course, I don't really believe this; I'm just showing you how your populistic generalizations can be equally applied to any federal state on the planet. Please try to see beyond the propaganda you are subjected to.)
Usually, people who trade smarter than those who vote. So stock market is constant voting machine for expected future earnings, it's fair to say that indexes provide pretty accurate overview of economy.
With that in mind, if you look at SPY (US) and compare it with EWI (Italy) and EWP (Spain), you will see that Italy and Spain are not going anywhere since 2008 and US at that time made huge progress.
US has populists but their debt denominated in their own currency and on top of that US economy is very diverse and strong. US is much more business friendly than Italy, Spain and Greece. And their debt denominated in currency they can't print.
If you are anti-business and pro-welfare, then your business won't flourish and at the same time you will accumulate huge debt.
Apples to oranges; I can get the same results if I compare EU numbers to Nebraska or Louisiana. Please don’t insult your intelligence with these false equivalences.
I lived in Sweden for almost one year as an expat (I'm a software engineer). Now, I live in the Netherlands for more than two years.
I can say for sure that Europe is nowhere near Silicon Valley in terms of compensation for ambitious software engineers. Sweden went total nuts with taxes, anything above $6500 per month would be taxed at 55-60% tax rate. It's effectively cap to enforce equality of outcome.
60% tax doesn't mean that ultra-high salaries will be taxed at this rate. It means that ultra-high salaries will not exist in job market in the first place.
The best Swedish startup threatens to leave Sweden because of regulatory and tax burden [1].
The Netherlands recognized importance of highly-skilled expats by introducing tax discounts called "30% ruling". I do respect their efforts to attract talent. That's why I moved from Sweden to the Netherlands in 2016.
However, as non-EU citizen you can work only for publicly registered sponsors [2]. Usually, it's boring well-established companies. So I missed some cool opportunities due to this limitation.
As I learned dutch local job market, I found that almost nobody will pay you 10'000 EUR per month.
Aside from tax and regulatory burden in Europe, there are cultural things like Law of Jante [3]. I can't imagine how society with such mentality can attract highly ambitious people.
Also, talking about money in Europe is kinda taboo. And dutch automatically repeat "money is not everything". It wouldb't annoy me if someone committed to work for open source software. Or being great painter. But when recruiter respond me "money is not everything" when I'm asking "too much", it annoys me a lot.
With that in mind, I decided to abandon idea of living in Europe, getting citizenship, learning dutch language etc. It was tough decision for me but it's time to move on. It's not kind of a society where I want to spend rest of my life. Sorry dutch and swedes, I don't fit here.
So I decided to move to Hong Kong. I've just got very lucrative job offer in Hong Kong (in HFT). The size of compensation is far beyond of what Europe can offer me. Now, I'm almost on par with US (I couldn't get into US because I don't have any degree). Now, I'm just waiting for my HK visa getting approved.
You might troll me saying that, I'm whining. OK, I have answer to that. Just look at my net salary increases:
Russia -> Sweden (2015) +28%
Sweden -> Sweden (2015) +15%
Sweden -> the Netherlands (2016) +63%
the Netherlands -> Hong Kong (2018) +83% (and possible bonus up to 300% of yearly salaries!)
I will work like crazy fanatic and in next six years I will be well over $1M of liquid net worth.
So Europe lost me. Europe is perfect place for people who just want to work from 9 to 5 and put family as their top priority. It's not suited for risk takers.
Thanks for the insight. I don't think all societies can be all things to all people, but I don't 100% agree with your final conclusion. Europe has a great safety-net which allows people to take on risks that would be nuts to do elsewhere especially if you have a family.
For the kind of people like you who want to work long hours and reach the stars, I can agree Europe is probably not the place.
But there are many talented people with families who want a work-life balance. For them places like Hong Kong is not going to cut it. My wife has family there that have visited us, and IMHO they have zero work life balance there. It may be good for making money, but not for having a family.
They speak of kids committing suicide because they are so insanely stressed out about their life.
Still I found your perspective very interesting to read. I wish I get to hear sometime in the future how your life in Hong Kong turns out. I have always been very fascinated by the city and hoped to visit it some time in the future.
While I find your perspective interesting I disagree with some of your conclusions.
> It's effectively cap to enforce equality of outcome.
It isn't so much to enforce equality of outcome as to enforce equality of income. What you are experiencing is to a large extent being on the wrong side of inequality. Just that isn't income inequality, but rather things like wealth, real estate, inheritance and education. Inequalities which people in Sweden largely aren't aware of, or accustomed to. If you had arrived 10 years earlier you would have, at least to a larger extent, been set for life. Other than that I can certainly see your perspective because it is almost impossible for a "salary man" to catch up in Sweden.
"as to enforce equality of income". This is what puts me off of Europe!
I don't mind if group of people voluntarily decide to live in communism and share with each other everything they earn. Like hippies who lived in сommunes.
If high taxes (>33%) are not voluntary then it just means that social democrats are not confident that most successful people in the country will share their ideals.
If European social democracy is so cool, then it should work on purely voluntary basis.
Let's re-frame conversation from arguing to selling. I mean there are lots of top technical talents in India and China. How are you going to convince them to go to Sweden instead of US? It should be pretty damn good reason to decline $300k offer from Silicon Valley and go to Stockholm instead!
P.S. I think selling/pitching society ideals is much more positive and productive than arguing.
> "as to enforce equality of income". This is what puts me off of Europe!
It is one of the few ways to have an equal society. With to large income inequality the welfare state becomes unsustainable. The poor can't pay for services performed by the rich and ultimately you get a society like the US or worse. Everywhere doesn't have to be the same, no one is forced to live in Sweden. Swedes have very good visa conditions and generally do very well abroad.
> How are you going to convince them to go to Sweden instead of US?
Sweden is a small place. To the extent it needs top talent there is plenty available. People who want to make $300k shouldn't and largely won't move to Sweden anyways. This isn't a competition Sweden can win. Sweden is largely successful because it competes, or have competed, on its own terms. Not by trying to be a worse copy of something else.
Swedish society can, or could, attract people that wants things that are in line with what it is good at and not readily available in other places i.e. its unique selling proposition. Things like education, family and quality of life. There is a foundation to provide those things that has been lost in the last 10 years or so. A lot of people move for opportunities, making money is only one opportunity.
I think it is telling that you are also leaving the Netherlands as a significantly lower tax rate couldn't keep you there either. Note that I am not saying the Sweden is attractive at this point, just that I find it unlikely that taxes are the main problem.
Personally I don't like Hong Kong, but it will certainly be different. Don't miss out on going to Shenzhen.
I acknowledge that Sweden has number of advantages and benevolent government with no corruption. It's certainly one of the top countries in the world in terms of development.
My guess is that Sweden might be popular choice among people who want to pursue PhD or something like that.
I fell in love with Hong Kong first time I visited it as a tourist in 2013.
Basically, in 1990s many of us, used what was popular in 1980s in UK.
My father wasn't technical person but I fell in love with ZX Spectrum from day one! So I just learned it all myself.
Schools were terrible, I mostly skip all classes. But ZX Spectrum is very simple machine, so it's possible for 10 year old kid to learn it without external guidance.
Funny fact, I started working in Internet club in Uzbekistan in 2003 for 10 USD per month. In 2004, I discovered wonderland called Knoppix and FreeBSD. Then I learned programming in Bash. After that I learned programming in C because Kernighan and Ritchie books was so thin and at the same time all Unix/Linux was written in C.
Wow, that mirrors so much of my computer learning experience. I grew up in Eastern Europe and my parents made a huge effort to buy me a local clone of ZX Spectrum when I was 10 years old after I was exposed to these computers (and computers in general) because of the local computer club for children (all state sponsored, since it was a communist society). It was love at first sight like you said and all I ever wanted to do.
Then learned everything else on my own with whatever sources I could find (resources from the computer club, magazines, books, etc). And took part in programming contents. These were of all levels, there were town level contents, then the winners would move to county level contents then the winners going to national level. I made it to national level for years after having that ZX Spectrum clone at home. By the time I had some kind of computer class in my education path (high school then later on college) I already knew all that they were going to each. At least it made those classes easy :)
I think educational microcomputers should be reintroduced in modern schools, so kids would have easier time to imagine all path from programming language to hardware.
By the way, your username reminds me of great game on ZX Spectrum called Dizzy:
In short, I was very upset by political situation in Russia and I felt that I must settle in any relatively free country even at great opportunity cost.
But now, I became more confident of my skills and as a result I became more risk tolerant and more ambitious. I decided that in order to be truly happy I should take more risks and completely abandon the idea of stable and predictable life in Europe.
When I leave the Netherlands, all my legal time till citizenship will reset. And I can't truly settle in Hong Kong because housing prices are insanely high and I can't get citizenship there but my bet is that I will become so successful that I will be able to settle anywhere I want as high net worth individual.
> Are you asking about what I mean by "It was tough decision for me"?
No. I was referring to "It's not suited for risk takers". I was curious about where you see risks. What is the danger, what is the valuable thing you might loose by the move. Excluding trade-offs - "legal time till citizenship will reset" is more of trade-off or cost because you know it will happen. It is uncomfortable and obstacle and challenge for sure, I don't want to deprecate the difficulties involved, but it is not what I wanted to ask about.
In the eyes of SEC, ICOs are nothing more than equity crowdfunding. It means that SEC doesn't like any sale of unlisted assets to unaccredited investors.
By SEC definition accredited investor is an investor who has either $1M of liquid net worth or stable income not less than $200k per year.
Original intent of the government was to bar unsophisticated investors from high risk investments.
While I understand logic of the law - many people are completely financially irresponsible and are not capable of critical thinking (that's what politically correct term "unsophisticated investor" actually means), I find this law extremely frustrating.
For example, I had no chance to buy Spotify when it was well under $1B valuation because the government baby-sitting me by excluding me from opportunity to invest into early-stage startups.
If you want to downvote me on "not capable of critical thinking" and at the same time support barring people from making their own financial decisions, please think twice because it's clear contradiction.
There is a compromise: Why not lower entry level of becoming accredited investor? For example, you could be semi-accredited investor with lower capital but with limits on investments. Or making some government exams on risk taking and investing? Or having special government-approved platform for early-stage investments for unaccredited investors. There are lots of combinations.
Right now, there is a huge hunger among people for early-stage investments. And if you are not making it legal, it just go underground and as a result with more dangers for unsophisticated investors.
Even without the SEC, you would not have been able to invest in Spotify. They had zero interest in taking your money when they could raise money much more easily from professional investors capable of writing 8 figure checks.
It's very important to understand this and the adverse selection problem that would emerge if laws were changed. There's a reason that only scammers did ICOs.
There's still a token handful of us around who believe in individual rights first and foremost. Not many, but we do exist. And we will win in the end because we have better principles. Don't despair.
As an individual, the only chance you'd have to invest in a hot startup is to be an angel investor, or else close family or really good friends with the founders or VCs. Even accredited investors with 10s of millions got turned away from hot startups like Spotify and Snapchat (back when it was the big kahuna).
And let's be clear: you can still invest in a startup as a non-accredited investor. There is no prohibition on that, or else startups couldn't give equity to employees, contractors, or others (see, e.g., pre-IPO Facebook and Google, and the many famous stories of dotcom millionaires from their respective IPOs).
A year ago, I watched YC lecture for raising capital where Sam Altman or somebody else recommended startup founders NOT raise any capital from unaccredited investors because it may create problems with raising next rounds. In other words, current regulatory environment also promotes discrimination of unaccredited investors.
Employee compensation is different.
P.S. It's amazing how much Hacker News readers are against cryptocurrency, in favor of very big government, very high taxes up to 70% as their Piketty, Krugman suggest to enforce equality of outcome. This community became total opposition of what Paul Graham might thought back in 2007. The only thing is left is to change Hacker News icon to Che Guevara emblem.
Realistically, I don't think intelligent people with no connections can buy into startups or pre-ICOs (the ICO itself is now a scam) anyway. These investments are all arranged privately.
The scary thing is that while living in Russia, I've encountered many people with similar views (face to face).
I know it's hard to believe for western people but there are lots of people in Russia who completely obsessed with ideas of "unique Russian identity", "God chosen nation", "Russian world", "saint Russia vs. soulless American imperialism" etc.
Putin understands feelings of this part of society and successfully exploits this in order to push his own agenda. For example:
The solution, it would seem, is to help those who want to emigrate emigrate and let those who want to stay stay, and let the country slowly die on the vine.
Have you seen the population graphs for Russia[0] vs the USA[1]? It seems like one of the only developed countries (besides Japan) with a decreasing population. Seems like that is happening already.
In 2014-2015, I've spent great amount of energy to get out of Russia. Since I left Russia in 2015, the situation with internet freedom became much worse. Especially this year when Russia blocked millions and millions of IP-addresses in unsuccessful attempts to block Telegram.
My prediction for near future is that Russia become as restrictive as China or even worse.
I don't think VPN is viable long-term solution. Look, where are VPN servers might be hosted? Amazon or Digital Ocean? Well, this year Russia just showed that they can block 20 million IP-addresses on a whim.
And I see no signs of massive public demand for free internet. Why? Because if it's popular site in Russia, then it might be unblocked in the case of accidental blocking. If it's just random site in English, it will never be unblocked. And vast majority of Russians don't speak or read English at all.
In other words, Russia has absolutely no future as a country with free internet. RIP.
My advice to fellow Russians with brains: get out of Russia, run away as fast as possible from this goddamn place.
I was always puzzled by human's experience of "seeing". When you "see redness" for example. It was very hard for me to explain it to other people before I found that there is special term called "qualia":
And I have absolutely no idea how to make machines experience "qualia". Any sophisticated image/motion recognition is rather trivial stuff compared to achieving mysterious "qualia".
If I’m attracted to someone and I want to date. How you can ask to go out without risk of being accused of sexual harassment?
This is not sarcastic question. This is especially important if you as a male is not very good at reading subtle social cues.
P.S. I really don't see why it got downvoted. There is no hidden message here.