About remembering which letters I type to go to which site, I assumed that's just the latest and greatest with browsers, and loved it without noticing that I do. But now that I know it's a Firefox feature, I'll knowingly love it now.
You don't get to call something you said "profound." Others can find it profound, but you can't. It's like a comedian finding themselves funny. It's normally the audience that finds the comedian funny.
Since we're talking health outcomes here, how prudent is it to measure these outcomes based on respondents' self assessments of how healthy they are, as this study does, rather than empirically measuring those outcomes?
I don't follow chess, and I didn't know it's gendered. That doesn't make sense. Why would chess contests be gendered? That's like a gendered photography contest.
It's not strictly gendered - women are free to enter any tournament and hold any title. There are a number of women-only tournaments and titles, purely to improve the visibility of women in the game. Without women-only tournaments, you'd see very few women at major events.
Only one woman has ever qualified for the world championships (Judit Polgar in 2005). Hou Yifan is the best female player in the world, but she's ranked 105th overall. The second highest ranked female player is 303rd.
Gendered tournaments aren't ideal, but the alternative is worse. Most countries do a dismal job of promoting female participation in chess, with China being a notable exception. Western women just aren't being encouraged to take up the game and aren't made to feel welcome when they try.
As the article states, the top 100 chess players in the world are male. The field is incredibly male-dominated and even though women and men should be equal, the reasoning between splitting it tournaments by gender is that women would otherwise get discouraged.
What law is he being above? The article says he checked with the US embassy in Oslo before travelling, and they said it was all good. He isn't trying to be above the law, he double checked with the law first.
Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They have, and do, sell products and services. Celebrating Warren Buffet is analogous to celebrating someone who was a provider of capital to Microsoft rather than the people who provided the products and services. The people who found and build companies are "Makers". Warren Buffet is not a "Maker", he profits off of "Makers".
For some reason, it really sounds like you have an axe to grind with Mr. Buffet or maybe with captialism in general.
From my perspective, the problem with finance today is the tendency to think short term. The endless pursuit for profit next quarter. This is not the method Buffet uses... I find it refreshing to hear someone like him suggest that a longer term view is needed.
Sure, he isn't changing the world directly by running a massive software company but he contributes in the way he can and that's all you can really ask of anyone.
I have no axe to grind with Buffet in particular. He just happens to be the topic of this post. What I do take issue with is the making of what I would call "meta-money". People making money by doing little more than manipulating the money of others. Warren Buffet just happens to be a great example of this. If you think of the world as producers and consumers, then what is it that Warren Buffet produces? What is he doing to add value to the world such that he is justified in making billions of dollars doing that?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he is a bad person or that he is not highly intelligent or even shouldn't be successful. What I am saying is that it's hard to justify that he has added proportional value to the world that is worth the money he has made. To each his own, but if this were a world full of people who only wanted to benefit upon the production done by others, then this would be a troublesome world. Just imagine, could Linus Torvalds have chosen to turn Linux into a profitable venture? Could he have been all about the money and not about producing a truly great OS that people could build upon? I just don't think it's wise to put Warren Buffet as a success story above, say, Linus because he made so much more money. I'd rather live in a world of mostly Linus' than a world of mostly Buffet's.
Buffett's a poor example of the meta-money problem. A lot of the finance industry probably adds negative value and is a problem. Buffett does add some value. If you think sound finance has no value take a look at Venezuela, Argentina, the dot com bubble, the housing bubble and so on.
He makes capital. Capital is a resource that you need to run, say, a software company. Makers don't usually go too far without it. And they, makers, are the ones who put their creations on the market, for good reason.
Hacker News is not a trade union or some other special interest group where the nature of discussion topics is predictable and consistent. It's a group of people who start off with a special interest, tech, but are more broadly interested in life. If you want a forum exclusively about tech, HN is not it.
As to worshipping rich people, anything you consider worth people's time can be similarly dismissed as perfunctory worship of it.
