jeremysmyth

...or your association with "Occupy" or some other political protest movement that someone in power disagrees with, or that your wife bullied some politician's wife for two weeks in school, or that your interfering neighbour with a petty dislike of how you landscape your garden works as a government clerk and can access your data.

There are many reasons why some individual might want to know private things about some other individual. When individuals with some tiny (or vast) power want to wield it over anyone else, especially when they can do it with little oversight, it's very tempting.

That "the government" has access to my private information does not mean it's blind and faceless. It's made up of people with complex motivations.

- The EU ruling finds that Ireland broke the law.

- The penalty is that Ireland gets a boatload of money.

- Ireland is appealing the ruling.

The moral/ethical viewpoint is being addressed here, not the legal one. If the law is out of step with the moral viewpoint (as it so often is), then folks on the moral side apply pressure to change the law. The law is supreme in our part of the world, and arguments that ignore it are simply beside the point.

An appeal is exactly the right way to test the law, so we'll see at the end of this process if the EU is actually challenging Ireland's tax law and its legality in the context of the EU, or if there was, in fact, some illegal activity on the part of Apple and the Irish government (as is suggested by the extant ruling).

- Wild Thing, Josh Bazell

Sure, some sites limit who can view them based on visitor preferences. Analogy: Some restaurants have a "no shirt, no service" policy. It would be ridiculous to impose a blanket ban for all people on such restaurants just because you refuse to wear a shirt.

If you want to pick a more sensible fight, try going after links to paywalled sites (whose content is blocked through their decision rather than mine). However, bear in mind HN policy already has those covered: "It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds."

The Lisbon treaty was a result of complex negotiation, and Ireland was an outlier, requiring a constitutional change to implement the change. The change hadn't been effectively communicated, hence the negative initial vote. When it eventually passed, it was after a number of small concessions had been made to the terms of the negotiated treaty, and after a massive campaign to let the people understand what was at stake. The referendum also made it absolutely clear what the "next step" was for politicians, exactly what their mandate was, and exactly what the procedural effect would be.

Brexit, on the other hand, stated a simple (probably overly simple) question, with absolutely no details as to what the exit strategy would be (and actually no legal status either; parliament could legally choose to ignore the referendum results). There was no date attached to the question, no procedural detail, no mandate to perform the exit in any particular way, no bureaucratic clarity whatsoever. There were no "conditions" that could be "slightly changed" in a re-run. This was a blunt-force thwack with no nuance, no subtlety, and no room for renegotiation with the people.

In short, the Brexit referendum was about the least EU-like thing the UK could've pulled.

"User-friendly" depends entirely on the user in question. I find Gnome 2 to be considerably more "user-friendly" than Gnome 3, because Gnome 3 frustrated my attempts to do what I expected to be able to do.

For that matter, I consider bash (and coreutils and family) considerably more user friendly than Gnome, for a given value of "user" (me).

This is pretty much the same argument as "We don't know what's occluding that star, so it must be ALIENS."[0], or most of the speculation around sailing stones[1]. If you don't know what made them, and there's no evidence (other than that they exist), then you cannot say what caused them.

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/34926314/nasa-may-have...

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

This is why it's always OK to call BS. Sometimes you're calling BS, and sometimes you're spouting it. Debate works until it doesn't, and then you get out.

If I sell and then disclose a failure in regulatory compliance that requires a redesign, or buy and then disclose the R&D breakthrough, I've won.

Stephenson said this about the relationship between Cryptonomicon and its different-timeline "sequels" (not yet written at this point): " I'm trying not to give the idea that it's a tightly locked together set of books... There are always a few strange little corners of the story that may not make sense outside of the context of the full series, but 99% of it can stand on its own reasonably well, I hope."

http://www.locusmag.com/1999/Issues/08/Stephenson.html

Man A might tell a racist or bawdy joke, and Man B might tell one that relies on in-group knowledge. Each charms one group and alienates another.

His "no-filter style" frequently results in him saying things that are factually incorrect, based on mistaken beliefs, describing illegal policies, or in contradiction to things he's already stated.

His words describe his vision, and by extension, his vision lacks integrity and stability. A company with a CEO like that would not last long, and the CEO of a country could cause a lot of damage.

This means that if one car in a densely packed column fails (blowout, engine seizure, ...) then the car immediately behind it is still subject to its mechanical ability to avoid a collision (swerve into empty space or brake to a hard stop at speed) no matter how fast it reacts.

This is only true locally. I can derive a huge amount of happiness by being the best singer at a party, or the best at telling jokes in the pub, or the best at $SKILL in my team.

Even if you consider global geography (as with competing on the Internet as a startup, or looking for a job as a remote worker), you only have to be the best in that narrow area of what is available at that time (or the best at marketing it, or the best at selling it, or just the best at turning up and being presentable).

There are many, many opportunities to be "amazing" locally. You just need to define what, and where. The article uses the word "mindset", because happiness about what you think more than anything else.

"Smart" has little or nothing to do with it. It so happens that whether you're smart or not is not a predictor of your happiness. The article might as well be called "Why so many people born on Tuesdays aren't happy."

No earlier generation had anything like X Factor or the Kardashians. They are phenomena as large as or larger than the nearest equivalent cultural omnipresences of earlier days (Elvis, The Beatles).

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/050615...

Interestingly, this is less likely to be the case in wealth terms; many people globally with a lot of wealth (e.g. in agricultural land) have relatively low incomes, and the opposite is also true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraversion_and_introversion

[1] Sadly, many are voiced prescriptively despite the fact that neither S&W nor any other manual of style can claim to be the final arbiter of our ever-evolving language.