hnaccount141

Both tech companies and their users already pay telcos for the bandwidth they use. Where's the free ride?

> That doesn't seem to be working at all. Or maybe, just maybe there isn't some grand conspiracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

The part people are taking issue with is the fact that they chose to put out marketing material highlighting his past usage of RPis for covert surveillance like it's some cool hobby project. If it were just a case of a company hiring an ex-cop I doubt anyone would bat an eye.

I do think that cigarettes in particular are a bit different than previously prohibited drugs, both due to their rapidly declining popularity and their lower effort/reward ratio. I can see someone turning to the black market for marijuana or alcohol due to their much more intense and desirable effects as well as their social/cultural significance, but I struggle to see young people doing the same for cigarettes, especially when vapes are still available.

From the guidelines:

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

If you have an actual response to the points they're making, please share. Otherwise this comment doesn't contribute anything productive to the discussion at hand.

It's "free as in speech", not "free as in beer".

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

> 1) Any feedback is viewed with the fear, real or imagined, that it could lead to some sort of hiring discrimination claim.

My favorite is getting ghosted by the recruiter when asking for feedback after an onsite only to get an automated email a few days later asking to fill out a survey about their hiring process.

> Like, how do so many young people have a favorite island in Hawaii? How is everyone out there affording new cars?

The reality is that oftentimes they simply can't, at least according to a responsible definition of "afford".

All we see from the outside is the brand new Jeep, we don't see the fact that they're underwater on a 72 month loan with 6% interest. The average car loan term in 2019 was 69 months, that's insane. Something like 30% of trade ins have negative equity.

Even ignoring debt, I've spoken to a surprising number of people who make great money and live lavishly but have effectively no retirement savings. The level of financial literacy in the US is abysmal.

That doesn't feel like a particularly charitable reading of their comment. I don't think they're suggesting we just burn everything down with no plan for what comes after, they're simply stating that they believe we need to find a better alternative while acknowledging that they don't know what that alternative is yet.

You can have free markets without capitalism. Consider a system almost exactly like we have now, with independent companies competing for profits in free markets, but where those companies are worker-owned [0]. Such a system could have the benefits of capitalism with regards to innovation and resource allocation while reducing some of its negative effects (inequality, worker alienation, etc.)

No idea if it would work in practice, but we need to move beyond this mindset that there are only two possible options for how to structure an economy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism

Top 20 language is an, uh, interestingly narrow request. Is being the first computer programmer ever[0] not enough impact?

In programming languages there's of course Grace Hopper, one of the early advocates for machine independent languages, who implemented the first linker[1], and also created FLOW-MATIC[2], the first english-like data processing language. FLOW-MATIC was was a major inspiration for COBOL which, incidentally, was partially developed by Jean Sammet, also a woman.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#First_computer_pr...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_compiler_constructi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC

The difference is that train tracks are designed primarily for trains. Before cars existed, streets were primarily for people and horses. Cars were, as the title of the article suggests, intruders into this space. The push to popularize the term jaywalking was an effort to reframe streets as a space for cars first, where it's the responsibility of pedestrians to stay out of their way rather than the other way around.

Seems like they fell out of favor years ago. Their DAS products were popular back in the day but as NAS became more popular in the SMB space they failed to compete with Synology/QNAP/etc on pricing or features. They also had a pretty bad reputation for poor reliability, which was especially problematic when combined with their proprietary RAID solution.

Maybe referring to the source tarball github generates for releases?

This series from Strong Towns does a good job of explaining the idea (with case studies). The gist is that the specific pattern of infrastructure design we've been using since WWII (car-dependent sprawl) isn't financially sustainable without relying on future growth. We got away with it for a while due to the rapid growth seen in the 2nd half of the 20th century, but as growth has slowed, we're finding ourselves falling behind.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-pon...

> We need to form a collective around the idea that all organized social structures are evil! Unite in disunity!

Anarchism, as the term is used in this context, is absolutely not about opposing all organized social structures. It's specifically about opposing coercive structures. The goal is typically organization through bottom-up, cooperative means rather than via an authority enforcing structure from the top down.

If you're interested, here's a piece from Bookchin responding to this exact point: https://libcom.org/library/anarchy-organization-murray-bookc...

For a long time they were the most complete EVs on the market. The competitors may have offered better QC but oftentimes worse range and performance and were reliant on rather poor third party charging infrastructure. This has really only begun to change in the last year or two as more competitors have started releasing purpose built EVs (rather than retrofits of existing ICE platforms).

Correct. His first involvement was as an investor in their series A. He does, however, say[1] he's a co-founder, so I guess the quote is technically accurate.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/elon-musk

> This will be proven to be false in the long run. This was the same argument against Linux back in the day vs. Windows. The bazaar will win against the cathedral in the end.

Linux is still sitting at ~2% desktop market share compared to 90% for macOS+Windows. I'd hardly call that a win for the bazaar.

Apologies, I didn't mean that as a statement about you personally. I more meant to agree that those are aspects of Trek that many latch on to (while missing some of the healthier lessons).

> Technobabble, check. Geniusus saving the day and universe, check. Moral superiority, check.

It's a shame that these are so often the takeaways from a show that is at its core about a group of people with different skillsets and backgrounds working together with mutual trust and respect to further a common goal.

> Smaller communities tend to be more familiar - people recognize each others names

It feels like there's a certain number (maybe Dunbar's like you said) at which people stop seeing a community as a group of disparate individuals and start seeing it as some sort of a collective hivemind.

You see this regularly with comments like "HN/subreddit/etc is so hypocritical. One day they're in favor of X, the next day they're against it", in which the poster seems to fail to realize that in a community of tens of thousands of people, chances are it's entirely disjoint subsets of the group taking those positions.

I don't see that kind of thing as often in smaller message boards. When you recognize everybody's name (or at least their avatar), it's a lot clearer that it's just Bob and Alice who support X and Eve and Mallory who don't.

It seems natural that such a failure to see the individuals that make up a group would lead to a decline in civility.

> So, question to all -- how have you found success at locating the fruits of this "vibrant anarchy?"

I've found that live music offers one of the best mechanisms for this. You start out with interest in <major band>, and go see their show. They're on tour with <midsize band> opening for them. You like <midsize band>'s set, so you go see them when they headline a show a few months later. Since they're a smaller band, it's a smaller show, so they have <small band> opening for them. You like <small band>'s set so you later go see them play with <local band>, and so forth.

As the shows get smaller it becomes more common for there to be 3-4 bands on the bill, so the rate of exposure increases. Combine that with the greater sense of community that's common at smaller shows as well as mechanisms like Spotify's related artists and it becomes easier and easier to find new music the deeper you get.

It would be cool if a similar thing was more common with other art forms. What if more movies were preceded by a short from an up and coming director (like Pixar tends to do)? Trailers fill a similar role, but not quite the same. Or what if books included a few recommendations from the author rather than just a list of other books from the publisher?

I don't think anyone would object to wider usage, it's just that the sysadmin community is the only group to have adopted the term so far.

Absolutely. And even among good therapists, good fit is critical. Just because someone comes highly recommended by others doesn't mean they'll be right for you.

Qt is licensed under LGPL v3

https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/licensing.html

Yeah this is the big thing for me. Technology continues to excite me as the tools to create continue to become better and more accessible, both in software (for music/photography/CAD/etc) as well as in hardware (3D printers/CNC/microcontrollers/SBCs). It's easier than ever to get started making things, and we're seeing a really inspiring explosion of creativity as a result.

The tech industry on the other hand, is increasingly a source of disillusionment. Over the last few years we've seen so many of the exciting companies that emerged in the early 2000s drop the facade of user-centricity and switch from providing value to extracting value at the expense of users. It's gotten to the point where I feel deeply uncomfortable depending on closed source software (and SaaS in general) for anything important, as it feels like it's only a matter of time until the users get screwed over.

> You have a very rose-tinted view of the historical business world.

Indeed. We're only a few generations removed from a time when we had companies enlisting private armed security forces and militias to violently break strikes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...

> The problem is that meaning is undefined and this leads you down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out what is the meaning of life, which will make you very disappointed and lead to constructing a psychological bubble of "beliefs" that you appoint as facts to find a way out of this burdensome brooding.

To be honest, this reads to me like "I haven't found meaning in life, therefore people who say they have are lying to themselves." You're free to believe what you want, and if that's what makes you happy more power to you, but don't assume your experience is universal. I assure you it isn't.

> Working around this with creative misspellings or euphemisms makes me feel like a kid trying to swear on Club Penguin or something.

It's been bizarre watching the increasing prevalence of these types of behaviors the last few years. There was a period of time when I remember seeing a number of consumer tech youtubers discussing supply chain issues but having to avoid using the words "COVID" or "pandemic" for fear of demonetization or being buried by the algorithm. You see similar behaviors everywhere on TikTok, where a whole new vocabulary has sprung up to talk about taboo topics. "Unalive" instead of "kill", "seggs" instead of "sex", and so on. My understanding is that some of the TikTok vocabulary originated among kids communicating over school-monitored channels.

The most unsettling part is that it seems like in many of these cases nobody can point to concrete evidence that a word is actively being punished by the algorithm. The simple existence of these black-box moderation tools has a panopticon-esque effect where people will preemptively alter their behavior just in case.