pgsimp

Could you elaborate? I'd really like to understand why you don't have any spare money, despite of two good earners in the household?

"A joke" is also incorrect, the guy is trying to make money. Nevertheless, if you reframe it as "for fun", vacations presumably should count. I rather doubt you would be unable or unwilling to spend 1000$ on a vacation?

Nobody says that everybody should be willing to spend money on an emoji email project. That just happens to be that person's interest, so they spent money on it. Don't you have any interests at all that cost money? I personally wouldn't spend 1000$ on many things that other people spend it for, but that is not the same as not being able to afford it.

There is a difference between trying to determine the highest price somebody may be willing to pay and auctioning off to the highest bidder (with an AI trying to guess the auction prices also being a kind of auction). The point is exactly that somebody with a heart attack has the option to pay more so that they can a ride. Yes it would be nice to be able to detect "this person has a heart attack, let's give them a free ride to the hospital". But it is not really viable in practice yet. So giving them an option to pay more is the second best option.

Now they decided to remove that option, so how are people with heart attacks supposed to get to the hospital?

If the places are already zoned for housing, NIMBYs are unlikely to be able to prevent it.

Of course people have more than property rights. Like access to clean drinking water, infrastructure, and so on. It's wrong to assume their rights should stop at the border of their property. Like if they have a water pipe to their house, other people shouldn't be allowed to cut off that pipe. (As a simple example).

You are talking about a kind of societal contract of society having to provide housing for people. Likewise, there are other societal contracts.

"I don't celebrate anything but people are born in increasing numbers, the whole economy and governments rely on this trend so I think it is only fair to the new generations if we at least return to the respect of the private property which is long gone."

The argument "the economy depends on more people being born" doesn't really fly in a discussion of how more people cause problems (like needing a place to stay). I don't think most people are asking other people to have lots of children.

Even if you assume everybody should be provided with such a place, why in my backyard (or anybody else's)? Since you seem to have given up on the notion that people might deserve a nice place to stay in, why not just build ugly skyscrapers somewhere else (other than my backyard), and house people there? How about starting in your backyard?

I get that scenario, just trying to gauge the maximum price a customer might be willing to pay. But that wouldn't be surge pricing, or would it?

I suppose a "nice" company would not try to do that "price maximization" thing at all to begin with. Auctions seem fair, though.

"we would never build a system that might “learn” that people whose destination is a hospital tend to be willing to pay higher fares"

I'm sorry, but wouldn't that exactly be the point of "surge pricing"? To allow people who REALLY need a ride to be able to pay a higher price and get where they need to be?

"Surge pricing" would kick in because of scarcity, as in, not enough rides available for everybody.

The person who needs to go to the hospital needs it more urgently than the person who wants to meet her friends at the pub, so she should be able to pay a higher price to get where she needs to be (the hospital).

The alternative is that she doesn't have the option of paying a higher price out of "ethical considerations", and has a high probability of not actually finding a ride to the hospital. How is that the better variant.

If you want to get all ethical about it, maybe you can set up a system where people get their money back if they can prove they needed to go to the hospital (or health insurance could cover it). But it is unlikely to cover all possible cases of urgency ("needed to flee from a terrorist attack", "needed to catch the love of my life before she marries somebody else" and so on) . Much easier and more effective to regulate by market prices.

It seems to me yet another case of misguided socialist ideology causing harm in the real world.

An even more cynical interpretation would be that companies prioritize "looking good" over saving lives, so they rather implement the virtue signaling "no surges for hospital rides" than actually letting people catch their ride to the hospital.

If you are worried people might not be able to afford the ride to the hospital, you could give them credit.

So if people make babies, they are entitled to take your stuff away? I think that is too simplistic.

I think it makes sense to give people some rights. For example if you build a highway right in front of their house, it devalues their investment, and they could deserve compensation. Or make it a garbage dump. Are you really of the opinion the the government should be allowed to simply create a garbage dump in front of your house? What about a garbage dump in a poor black neighborhood, would you consider that OK?

It's possible there was a promise of "quiet surroundings and lovely views" when they bought the land from the government. So the government should stick to those promises.

"research supports that conclusion" - from some marxist think tank perhaps. Definitely bullshit. People are not better off without property rights.

And with your attitude, I guess you celebrate colonialism. After all, those were people looking for new places to live.

Why should people living at some place even be concerned about diversity? I find your comment almost surreal - after relentless media campaigns, people really believe "diversity" should be their top priority in life?

I think it is understandable if people don't want the surroundings of their property cluttered with buildings.

So you root for people based on their technical expertise, not for their cause?

Interesting. I guess I don't feel sorry for poor people anymore. They have poor skills, so they don't deserve to earn a lot of money. (Same logic).

Then why don't the universal health care people advocate for the abolishment of such laws?

Why, what would have happened if they hadn't? Say they promised it for some time, and then don't deliver on time. Then what?

They would have had to survive long enough, though. Profits in the future don't help you to pay your bills in the present.

"routinely hired armed security services to threaten and ultimately murder people organizing to get their share of what wealth they created"

To be honest that sounds to me as if those people "organized" to take by force what they thought they deserved. In that case, hiring security for defense seems justified.

It just seems too simplistic to me. Sometimes there is struggle.

Taking an extreme example, soldiers at war. Are they generally being treated well? I'm not sure they are, and I don't necessarily mean deliberately. I don't think generals want their soldiers to be killed, in general. It just happens that situations arise where there is struggle and soldiers get killed.

I remember complaints about CD Projekt Red (makers of Cyberpunk 2077) who had to ask for death marches despite of initial promises to ever do so. I don't think they liked doing that, but presumably the business situation made it necessary.

Wait, what - you say it is "regulation" that there is no universal health care? How so? It seems to me "universal health care" would be the regulation.

What is stopping people from getting together and forming their own "universal health care" group? There must be millions who are in favor of it? Get 100 million people together, and offer health care to each other. What's stopping you?

Presumably companies that don't pay you well are already struggling, so their problems (that you were put to work on) were also more of a struggle.

Of course companies who are doing well can also afford to pay more and give all sorts of perks to their employees.

I suspect often that is the actual causation, not vice versa. People like to point at successful companies and say "see, if you would treat your employees like that, you would be just as successful". That seems a bit silly.

What is an equal opportunity?

It's nice if you can create opportunities for less able people, but I also think it should be people's right to employ the best person for a job. I don't think you should be able to demand from anybody to hire the less able person.

Creating jobs for less able people is probably an entrepreneurial skill in itself.

Just imagine you are building a house (your future home), and you have to hire people to build stuff for you.

Perhaps you can get a better deal by hiring less able people, but then you also have to be able to manage them properly, I presume.

The article seems to confuse several things.

For example, companies not having a universal test for talent does not imply talent does not exist.

The Polgar sisters are interesting. However, their parents were very intelligent, so it is unknown if the same approach would also work for children of "less intelligent" parents (if such a thing exists, as supposedly we can't measure it). And studies in that line of thing seem to point to children starting a specialty at an early age (see Ericsson's book "Peak"). So unless you can repeat the experiment with some older people (make somebody a chess genius at age 30 who has never played chess before), it doesn't really matter what part is nature and what part is nurture. You still have people with different talents applying for your jobs. I mean the Polgar sisters ARE better at chess than other people, and there probably isn't an easy way to hire somebody as a chess player and bring them to the level of the sisters.

So far, people seem to be benefitting from Amazon.

Well no, she didn't have to. It just was most convenient for her.

I don't understand what you mean? Somebody offers to sell the stock for X, somebody else (with the money stored on the stock exchange) offers the buy for the price X. Person A gets the money, person B gets the stock. That probably happens a billion times every day. Why should it make a difference which stock is being traded?

I think we are here because of PG and YCombinator, not because we don't want to run our own servers. Many HN users probably do run their own servers, even discussion servers.

The real problem is how to attract the right people. YC is a fascinating case, actually. WHY are we here, and not on some reddit forum?

Even though it seems PG is not very active here anymore, it seems the seeding community has stuck to some extent.

Of course they also have their theory of how to maintain a community and did some coding and moderating to try to maintain it.

To my personal taste, they have overdone it, and ruined it in a way, but I haven't found a good alternative yet.

The next iteration of online news and communities will perhaps take more than dedicated servers, it may require a usability leap. Maybe some convenient way to filter messages, that is not centralized (Twitter/Facebook algorithms don't optimize to my benefit, but to the benefit of their owners).