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maconicon ‘If I disappear’: Chinese students make farewell messages amid crackdowns

I think the pragmatic answer is that unless the country cares about the stick (sanctions, tariffs, military conflict) or the carrot (financial aid, access to markets, military alliances), you can't do anything. How long have we been talking about human rights in China... 1989? They don't care, and why should they? It works better in smaller countries that are easier to isolate like North Korea or Venezuela, but even there it doesn't work great if a larger country like Russia or China is willing to support them. Beyond that, it's just symbolic gestures like expelling diplomats or lodging protests with the ambassador.

maconicon ‘If I disappear’: Chinese students make farewell messages amid crackdowns

They all do engage in some form of it... show me a modern Western country that doesn't have long sentences including death for sedition, subversion, or treason against "the State?" I think the only question is who gets to decide what are violations... because those charges are vague and arbitrary. Tax evasion or corruption charges have the same problem... I smile every time I read an article about someone arrested for tax evasion in Russia or corruption in China.

maconicon ‘If I disappear’: Chinese students make farewell messages amid crackdowns

I think the second idea is the correct one, there are many counterpoints to the first one: you can see the same thing in any culture with the right ingredients, such as Germany in Nazi era (the movie "Downfall" captures the psychological difficulty very well), American prisoners during riots that all lie on the floor because there are consequences for not doing so, or "bending the knee" in Game of Thrones. Any situation where you risk harm to yourself or people that you care about by failing to be obedient, you will do so unless you are willing to suffer whatever the known consequences will be for failing to do so.

> As a westerner, I find it truly amazing that these systems survive at all.

It shouldn't be amazing, as a Westener, considering slavery was legally allowed and enforced in the West for longer than any alternate authoritarian regime in modern times. Just consider slavery in American from 1776-1865... I can't think of any authoritarian regime that lasted that long... North Korean regime (1948-present), Soviet regime (1917-1989), Chinese regime (1949-present), were/are close but still haven't yet achieved the length of authoritarianism exercised over some arbitrary portion of its populace.

maconicon ‘If I disappear’: Chinese students make farewell messages amid crackdowns

Being banished from social circles is certainly one reason, but in this case I think it's fear of life or liberty by an authoritarian regime that has complete discretion to do so if you come across as speaking out against them.

If you saw the recent HBO series on Cheronybl, you can see the pains with which one person is trying to relay the seriousness of the situation without making himself a target, opposition figure, enemy of the state, etc. I also remember hearing that Sadam Hussein underestimated how easily Iraq could be toppled in case of invasion because his military generals were too scared to speak truth.

maconicon Undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many

I'm a little late to the conversation, but this seems to be hijacked into an anti-Israel/anti-Semitic discussion rather than about spying, so I'd like to suggest one (hopefully obvious) point: nationality and ethnicity seems to intermixed too much. If I don't like the Syrian regime, it doesn't mean I'm anti-Arab or anti-Alawite. Similarly, it should be possible to oppose actions of policy of a nation state without being accused anti-WhateverTheEthnicMajorityOfThatNationIs. I assume if someone opposes a U.S. policy, it isn't because they are anti-WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant)... they just genuinely dislike American policies :)

maconicon Shame Storm

I don't know if there is a good fix for it, but labels are a very potent weapon. In the U.S. a few decades ago, calling someone a communist sympathizer was a dangerous label. In China in the 1950s being called a rightist was a dangerous label. Today being called a racist, a pedophile, a Nazi, etc. are still dangerous labels. In this article cited the author was labeled a sociopath by an ex-boyfriend and also of being cruel ("cruelty-based view of the world"). These labels are difficult to undo because they are so easy to remember. If you live in a small village and, let's say, get labeled a derogatory term like a "slut" ... that quickly propagates until every villager accepts it as common wisdom that you are. So I do like the discussion about how to engineer a better social system, but it would require censoring label accusations until they had been proven, and this goes up against another part of the social system of supporting free speech. So I think you'd have to ban negative labels in the way that we don't legally allow hate speech (in the U.S.) despite the First Amendment because of the way it causes disproportionate and long-term harm to the victim. I don't see any other realistic solution to a problem that has existed ever since humans formed social groups and speak languages... being ostracized, exiled, or worse has been the outcome of shaming for the last 100k years. I don't see a great way to avoid it other than to just walk on eggshells and always be really nice to everybody or develop the reputation of a maverick... tough but honest and fair (like Sen. John McCain was known for). Regardless, you have to fit yourself into some admirable persona that society values to avoid shaming. If there are other people that get shamed because they don't fit into one of the socially admirable personas, perhaps the best way to address it is to expand the list of socially admirable personas.

maconicon The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

We were all a burden on our family since day one weren't we? It takes a few takes decades to repay that burden, if ever.

> "Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke crack, and loiter all day on some street corner, while living and buying drugs at the taxpayers' expense, while people I know work back-breaking jobs at low wages, strikes me as a total injustice, brought about by people who manipulatively employ the victim narrative to perpetuate the current paradigm."

I think you're painting all homeless people with the same brush which is grossly unfair. The person that you're replying to said she was a military wife, I doubt she is one of these people you're describing that have crack smoking friends or loitering in the street. I assume you live in SF and have generalized all homelessness to what you see in certain parts of SF? The movie Pursuit of Happyness was based on a real-life homeless person based in SF. Sounds like you should watch that ;)

maconicon Palmer Luckey’s defense company Anduril already leading to arrests at the border

Didn't he make enough money to follow his honest convictions? I take it at face value he wants to achieve the mission because he believes in it.

maconicon Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

I believe it was Sam Altman who had proposed a good solution to this, which is that you start off with a high number like that for employee #1 with decreasing numbers as the employee count goes up. If you are Instagram and become worth $1B with only 6 employees then everyone should benefit massively. On the other hand, if it takes 1000 employees to get to a great outcome, then obviously the founders and first employees will have been diluted by the addition of all the future employees required to achieve scale or an exit.

maconicon Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

I don't agree with that... I would want all the early employees to be rewarded for taking a chance on that. I would want to go the other direction and give restricted stock (which can be early exercised) when the valuation is low and with less than 10 year vesting (such as the standard 4-year vesting with 1-year cliff), it's in the employees' best interests and costs the company nothing. Of course, down the road after later rounds the common stock valuation becomes prohibitively expensive and then it probably makes sense for stock options. But at least back in my day it seemed the common thing was to give restricted stock to founders and stock options to employees. Not sure if that's still a common thing or not?

maconicon Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

Well, but then don't look for generic cookie cutter startups that everyone wants to work at :) Go after the startup where you as employee #1 are uniquely positioned to negotiate for. If you're employee #1 and you just graduated from college and this is your first job, and you have no special abilities beyond every other CS graduate across the United States, then yeah, you really don't have much negotiating power... nor do you at any other large company like Google either.

maconicon Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

I would recommend making a distinction between a startup that manages to get acquired as a small team for building a good product (Instagram is an extreme example... but I know of a few startups that few here have ever heard of where the outcome for employees was substantially better over the same period than if they had worked for Google or Facebook).

There is perhaps a warranted disdain for the behavior of founders on this thread, but I would also like to point out there are founders that genuinely care about the people on their team and would either ensure the equity was sufficient upfront or--if the total size and scale of the startup was miscalculated initially such as assuming the startup needed 100 employees when it really only needed 10--ensuring they receive ample compensation from the acquirer or not taking the deal. These types of founders do exist too, and I think there is an onus on an employee to figure out what kind of boss they have signed up to work for. If I had a few interactions with Steve Jobs, for example, I'm 100% sure I would have quit.

maconicon Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

That doesn't have to be true, there are many decent and honorable people that decide to start companies. But I do certainly think you need to walk away as soon as you feel a founder doesn't recognize or value you or your contributions

maconicon Mr. Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children

I am not religious so I won't make any comment on that part, but I do hope we can culturally somehow figure out how to avoid someone like Mr. Rogers being considered a pedophile (and maybe he was a pedophile or a serial killer I don't know). Otherwise, all of our kids will be trained by AI robots that aren't capable of emotion to avoid any possibility that a human being could have a sinister motive as opposed to just trying to leave humanity in a better place than what they were born into? :) I haven't checked all of them, but I suspect if you search for any famous people that worked with kids (their fault for trying to influence the lives of more kids on television of course) and add the word pedophile to the search query, you will never fail to find results. So I don't want to speak about Christians specifically, I do very much appreciate people willing to teach the next generation, likely for a lot less money than they could earn elsewhere, out of some sense of compassion or duty.

maconicon Gitea – Alternative to GitLab and GitHub

Time for a decentralized blockchain of code commits...

maconicon Gitea – Alternative to GitLab and GitHub

Exactly :)

maconicon Gitea – Alternative to GitLab and GitHub

Fair enough, but there is still a hosted solution, it's just hosted email instead :) I know Linux used that approach, which is seemingly ironic since Linus made git, and previously used BitKeeper. There seemed to be some problem that emailing patches to a mailing list wasn't solving to motivate the invention of git.

maconicon Gitea – Alternative to GitLab and GitHub

Independent of Gitea (which I have nothing to do with nor have any relationship with anyone involved). Your comment "It is worth stressing that you need no software to 'host' git. Every git repository is 'self hosting', by design." worries me. Yes, technically accurate, just as notepad, webstorm, atom, vi, emacs, etc. also don't need any 'host'. If you aren't working with multiple authors, a local laptop with git plus perhaps a USB flash drive for backup is all you need. But if you plan to actually have a project that multiple people will work on, it must be hosted whether it is technically required or not IMHO :) Let's say there is no Github or Gitlab type solution... how do you send me a pull request? How do I clone your git repo? In reality, there is always a hosted repo. If you want to open your firewall and share your public IP address so that you are the "hosted" solution that I push commits to or send pull requests to then fine :) But there is always a hosted solution if there are at least two people working on the same project... whether that's gmail.com hosting your emailed zip attachments, or you opening your firewall on your laptop so other people can connect to it, etc.

maconicon Bootstrapping a startup

There are a lot of bootstrappers on the Lean Startup Circle discussion group (http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle/topics).

maconicon Did Michael Arrington Screw Jason Calacanis and the State of California?

Disclaimer: I'm just speculating

Mike Arrington presumably wanted to reduce Jason Calacanis' stake because most of the revenue was coming from TC50 and AOL didn't want to buy them with Calacanis getting half the revenue. So Arrington, acting in his own self-interest as one would expect, sacrificed his business relationship with Calacanis in order to make TechCrunch more attractive for an acquirer. These diverging interests led to their fallout and understandably made Calacanis irate. Though, I suspect that Calacanis would have done the same thing if the situation was reversed.

maconicon Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist

Thanks to everyone for the feedback and comments, Scribd just announced they are making changes: http://blog.scribd.com/2010/09/21/the-scribd-archive-an-apol...

maconicon Ask HN: Should I try Lead Generation?

From an ethical perspective, I think it just depends on how you will use the leads. If you make sure you're giving the leads to a scrupulous company who will offer the customer a valuable service that (s)he was looking for, then I don't see any ethical problem there.

From a business perspective, I think you'd need to figure out who would buy the leads after you've generated them. Perhaps you should start by coming up with a niche with a dearth of lead generators, find a company targeting that niche, and ask them if they would be interested in buying leads. By ensuring there is "customer" for your leads you can save yourself wasted time. Customer development (a la Steve Blank) for lead generation, so to speak ;)

maconicon Cost of Internet scams more than doubled in '09, report says

Supplier fraud (sourcing using sites like alibaba.com) is also a big problem on the Intenret.

It's hard to establish trust on the Internet, especially when dealing with people from other countries where you don't know which institutions you can turn to for help (i.e., who is the Better Business Bureau of China?).

People will send money to a Chinese supplier and often get nothing in return. Places like Putian in Fujian province are the Chinese equivalent of Nigerian scams.

You'll order a set of iPhones but get a pair of shoes. Why? So that the seller can prove he sent you something (to Paypal, Alibaba, etc.) and then it just becomes your word against his.

If I may, I'd like to make a shameless plug for our startup. iSafeTrade.com has an inexpensive service to help buyers to vet Chinese suppliers:

http://www.isafetrade.com/chinese-business-registration-chec...

Sample report:

http://www.isafetrade.com/chinese-business-registration-chec...

The report includes information like if the supplier is legally registered and authorized for foreign trade by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, how long they have been in business and when their website was created, which province/city their phone number is located in, etc.

maconicon Bill Gates: Chinese censorship is "very limited"

I've spent some time in China and found Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot, BBC (just to name a few) to be entirely blocked while I was there.

While it's debatable as to whether or not these Western websites are important to average Chinese, it seems like a mischaracterization to say blocking several of the top 10 most popular websites in the world is "very limited."

Another experience which spooked me a bit (I don't know if it was purely coincidental or not): I was visiting some fairly obscure websites while I was there and they were accessible. Yet, within a few days after I first visited them, some of them were blocked. That made me wonder if there are human beings checking websites to decide whether or not they need to be "harmonized" (Chinese joke).

maconicon Did Apple just become a whole lot nicer to iPhone devs?

If Apple would have made these improvements long before Google's Nexus One, it would have seemed more sincere. Doing it now just makes it seem like bowing to competitive pressures and not because they actually care about developers.

maconicon Ask HN: Is it acceptable not to pay interns?

One thing is for sure: unpaid internships are probably illegal nine times out of ten. Employers are legally required to pay interns at least minimum wage if they fit the definition of an employee. Given the way most startups use interns, they would be considered employees.

According to the Department of Labor, if an intern's work benefits the company, then the intern should be treated as an employee. There is a six factor test, more on this here: http://www.clark.edu/student_services/employment/documents/L...

A related point, I think paying employees only with stock options is also illegal for a startup. The stock options likely don't have much value in a startup, and also the employee may lose the stock options if they quit (or are fired) prior to their vesting date.

So, both interns and employees should at least be paid minimum wage unless the company literally cannot even afford paying minimum wage. That said, the company will probably only have a legal problem if the underpaid intern/employee files a complaint.