phillmv

It's ironic that you'd pick Airbnb, since there is a very straightforward argument that the same effect is in play there - Airbnb is successful because of regulatory arbitrage.

It's not like "booking places to sleep in foreign countries" was waiting for a new technological innovation; rather, the existing regulatory frameworks in play placed a cost floor and a high barrier to entry for competitors.

Much the same way that a municipality artificially constrains the amount of cabs on the road, a municipality artificially constrains hotels by zoning specific parts of town for hospitality use. Most cities won't let you open up a bed and breakfast in any given residential neighbourhood.

--

In this view, as articulated by TFA, both Uber and Airbnb owe their success to a) being cheaper and b) having greater supply, both artifacts of their ability to _skirt existing regulation_ their competitors can't avoid.

Can you think of a different successful 'Uber for X'?

We're not discussing social media. We're discussing whether to extend the graces of polite society to people with abhorrent views.

It's not clear to me whether you understand the spirit of the Popper quote.

As I interpret it, it can be boiled down to: it's OK to not tolerate those whose unimpeded actions would to destroy your tolerant society.

I'm afraid that in that context I don't understand the rest of your comment about sincere tolerance.

I suppose I just don't understand why you'd consider proselytizing abhorrent views to be an insufficient cause or behaviour. They occupy space, and are capable of terrorizing others just all the same.

To extend my other comment, which you've read:

Suppose you and I were friends. Suppose further that I discover that you routinely have over Mr Qux, who has an extensive archive of Medium posts suggesting that society would be better off if my ethnic group were to be exterminated.

Mr Qux doesn't say it needs to happen. He spends a lot of time recommending that people not act on his words. But there it is, essay after essay carefully explaining how all of society's ills would be solved if my ethnic group were to just disappear overnight.

Why, you reply, we only ever discuss software architecture. He's charming and effusive, and exceedingly polite whenever in the presence of others of your ethnic group. His medium posts never come up for discussion!

He's a brilliant software engineer, you go on. In fact, I'm sure he'd be a great hire at my company and have forwarded his resume.

It'd be irrelevant to me how pleasant this person is. He considers me unworthy of breathing the same air. Should he ever be in a position of power over me, how could I possibly trust him to be impartial? How am I supposed to believe that his impressively well articulated views on my inferiority would never impinge on his ability to produce an objective assessment of my abilities?

It'd be hard for me not to interpret your behaviour as implicitly condoning that man's views.

--

Nobody's ever threatened to extinguish my ethnic group, tho there are some negative stereotypes. But it's rather easy for me to empathize with the above scenario.

Yes, of course, obviously.

I would not associate myself with, say, someone who in their off time writes long diatribes about how my ethnic group is lazy, incompetent, undeserving of legal rights and fit only to be exterminated or enslaved.

I'd be a fool not to shun this person and encourage others to do the same, however nice and pleasant they may be in person.

For one, social shaming can, occasionally, be an effective way to change behaviour: it's a short hand for "your opinion is wrong, because all these respectable people say so". For another, I don't have the time and energy or personal obligation to graciously engage with every single person who may be a complete asshole.

What you describe is not a new problem. To quote Karl Popper,

>Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them

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

You're not OP but I can't dignify an asinine Yudkowsky quote with a reply, so you get one instead.

Why are essays non-actions in your view? Suppose someone had a lengthly career writing $MAXIMALLY_REPUGNANT_VIEW essays and promoting them on the internet. Indeed, was famous for it.

Is there no $MAXIMALLY_REPUGNANT_VIEW that would cause you to feel awkward about being known to associate with this person?

Thought experiment:

Is there no set of personal views sufficiently abhorrent to dissuade you from associating with a given person?

Aha, that's fair. Judging by the site it seems you'll have to take care to demonstrate that you're not shifting UK derived profits; but either way you'll want to chat up an accountant.

In my jurisdiction, to my knowledge and experience, they're considerably more lax.

>You can't just open a new company in another country and expect to start moving your revenue to it, it just doesn't work like that.

It kind of does work like that? Granted, it depends on how you structure it.

I confess I'm not privy to how taxes work in the UK, and that further I'm not an accountant but: I too am responsible for a US and non US corp. You may have to declare your US corp as an asset in the UK, for all I know.

That said, if you have a US legal entity that is booking revenue then HMRC doesn't have any jurisdiction. That USCorp pays US corporate taxes just like any other.

If you move any of the US income to your UKCorp or your UK resident person then the Crown will happily takes its cut.

In js, are obj field names stable on insertion?

Normally I wouldn't expect getOwnPropertyNames to return them in the same order.

That sounds like he was job training to be a manager/owner later.

I strongly doubt a fluent, well educated westerner in China was going to be stuck with working on the factory floor as a career plan.

It's not like bitcoin is free, either.

A lot of someones burn a lot of electricity 24x7 in order for bitcoin to hold any value, too - and bitcoin holders pay for it just the same.

Just make sure you went to an elite school, preferably Stanford or MIT.

Last time I checked Go didn't really have a package manager, so I think the joke here is that most web apps are semi disposable and people haven't hit the upgrade cycles for their Go apps either.

I've heard this claim before and it feels like a mixture of stockholm syndrome and wishful thinking.

In my experience, it's a bit of a shit show. You end up with libraries that are subtly incompatible, or have overlapping functionality, or strangely large holes of functionality that require overlapping combos of libraries and therefore nobody's written.

If you get your socks off writing shims and glue and maintaining it against a thousand moving targets, power to you.

In my opinion, what you really want is someone to bundle composable libraries for you. That bundling has incredible value. You know that everything more or less works, in ways that you'd expect, because someone else managed to test it.

You have all the functionality basics down pat. The shims you do have to write work at higher levels of abstraction. Etc, etc.

>If you think so, then donate 100% of your income to the government and live on public assistance.

I've always found these arguments to be poor attempts at a reductio ad absurdum.

While some people do take vows of poverty, by and large this is not what's meant by advocates of public institutions.

The thing is that there is a large body of services and capital investments that are most efficiently - for both economic and political reasons - conducted by accountable, democratic institutions. The canonical example are roads and firemen but also education and public transit and healthcare and some kinds of housing.

We can debate over the legitimacy of particular governance mechanisms (NIMBYs in the Bay!) or political actors in given jurisdictions (State senators in NY!) but by and large in North America people have some sort of say in outcomes that affect them.

The problem is precisely that by

>following the law and organizing his affairs to retain control of the money he earned

his gift is a considerably less selfless act. It's one thing to "eradicate malaria". It's another completely to "try to make the world resemble what Chan Zuckerberg want".

You're allowed to do this with your own money, of course. But it's considerably less altruistic of you. If you were anywhere at all already suspicious of his intentions given the product his company has developed, the idea that he will be dedicating billions of dollars towards his own (political) agenda is not exactly heartwarming.

That's some tight @ProfJeffJarvis shit right there. Excellently placed satire.

The lack of affordable housing is an intentional policy. Take https://twitter.com/bryan_kirschner/status/66776075183092940...

>I'm having a hard time with the statement as a super-majority of economists agree that liberal trade is a net boon

Not the OP but familiar with some of these arguments.

Free trade is held to be pareto optimal outcome - you and I get cheaper tshirts, people in bangladesh get higher incomes because of tshirt manufacturing, everyone is better off because of comparative advantage, etc.

However, if we distinguish between development or industrialization, then free trade provides strong disincentives wrt investing in capital intensive industries where one does not have a comparative advantage.

If I have capital to invest in Bangladesh, it does not make sense for me to try to create a high-end equipment factory; German manufacturers are way more efficient and effective, so it will be very hard for me to compete.

The competitive advantage of my region is cheap-labour, so all investment will be biased towards that. Unfortunately, this means that it's very hard to create high-value-added industries that can substantially raise average incomes.

If we look into the historical record, we find that the industrial revolution was a period of high tariffs and protectionism; the British empire had a great advantage in acquiring raw materials but IIRC, the French textile industry was more efficient at the time.

As a result, they were incentivized to export raw resources and import high value added materials. This is a loser's game. Instead, with the application of high tariffs British manufacturers were now able to compete and thus were incentivized to develop their own industry.

Again, IIRC, you can basically take every well-industrialized nation and look back to the period where they gained their industrial edge and you will find high tariffs and protectionist policies aimed at protecting and developing their own internal industries.

(This is a decent segue into talking about how pareto optimal outcomes, without taking the initial distribution of resources into account, aren't automatically moral or just http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5537.html )

TLDR: free trade makes things cheaper, and spreads money around, but it does not automatically make poorer countries substantially richer.

Eh, yes and no. Python at least has `elif` statements.

When execution control depends on the order of nested arguments, I find "c" style to really enhance the following contrived example, even with rainbow parens:

  (if true 
    (whatever this is an (example
       that is (kind of hard)
         (-> to 
           (read %))))
     (this is an ELSE but hard to figure out))

It speaks to the challenge of good design and of changing organizations.

But I got a soft spot for the meatball. Today, the worm reads as cold and clinical, and potentially kind of out of touch with NASA culture. The meatball kind of exudes a certain optimism.

Astronauts fill their jump suits with patches, and all mission patches are fundamentally dorky, committee like things. And even while the new logo was in vigour, people still wore the old one! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Nelson_(astronaut)#/med... This one is from 1985, the year after they won their award: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/276615main_BarbMorgan_5.j...

I wonder whether the new logo wouldn't have had better adoption had they used the new logo type where appropriate but showed it off inserted in a cleaned up, subtler version of the meatball.

Hello friends,

I'm one of the founders. Zero-days are exciting but we're especially good about the things that don't stay on the top of HN all day. Silent killers as it were.

Today we support Ruby and Ubuntu but we're expanding quickly! And if you're interested but don't have the time to try us out today, we also made http://isitvulnerable.com/ to demo what we can do.

Cheers,

a) You are not a company. The incentives and the amount of relative power each entity has in this relationship is skewed.

A job to you is life changing. To a large enough company, you're just a conversion or churn metric.

b) That happens all the time. For instance, in order to get an H1B, a company has to document that they can't fill a given position in the local market. Which you accomplish by putting out hyper specific job ads.

If you want to be nice about it, don't pull that game on small startups but that's about it.

Wouldn't be the first time you sent us a PR, Egor :D.

But yeah, we do need to find the time to clean it up.

We thought about this.

We don't associate any gemfiles with user information, so at best… all you could get is a list of vulnerable gemfiles, somewhere, out there :).

Oh no! I'll have to take a look at it. Thanks!

It's a been a long couple of months :).

>Thinking of supporting package.json and bower files?

Definitely! We're building a service to monitor your app and server's dependencies, and we currently support Ubuntu and Ruby.

Our goal is to cover basically all of open source :).

I think developers could use way better security tooling.

It seems like a lot of people would love to have an easy way to integrate this into their continuous integration services, for instance - and we're working on making that a Real Thing That Exists.

That's the plan! We're going to be rolling that out in the next little while.

If you want to get a personal email when it comes out, put "API" in the platform field in the email form on the link above.

Yep! We started that project alongside postmodern_mod3 about two years ago :).

We figured we could do a better job all around if we managed to productize it.