terryf

Yes, the license allows it. So, technically they can. But you have to admit that it's a bit of a dick move.

The reality is, ElasticSearch with all of it's capabilities would not exist if the company would not exist.

How many other new interesting products will no longer be built as open source, because they know that AWS can just co-opt them and then their business will be effectively over.

The laws and licences cannot possibly cover all the details of the real world, there needs to be some humanity involved, some "let's try to not be assholes" attitude.

I prefer to live in a world where I'm not required to be a robot. Following all the clauses and laws to all the details will end up with that. It's not a great path.

We all need more empathy.

Please don't - too many times have I loaded a number of tabs containing medium posts before stepping on a flight with no wifi and only then discovering that images a page down are not visible.

It's fine to not load everything immediately, but load the page and then start loading all the resources, but don't wait until I scroll to the right place!

This is an excellent idea! Someone should create a company that buys all the data that is available about people, structures and correlates it and then sells it back to the people

The ironic beauty in that would be awesome. Also, I'd kind of like to get it about myself for similar reasons :)

The article starts off well, but then goes wildly wrong in the end.

"Giving a shit" is orthogonal to working long hours. As a part of my job, I hire people and one thing I tell all candidates is: "I expect you to care about your work. This does not mean that you have to work evenings or weekends. But while you are working, you should care about doing a good job."

It's certainly partially about believing that you are working on the right thing, but mainly about believing the craft matters.

The way I've been thinking about thing is that - yes, life is (relatively) short and meaningless and there is no point or purpose to the universe, from an outside viewpoint (this is important).

However, a deep understanding of that gives you freedom. Because if everything is objectively meaningless, then just by virtue of finding something interesting, you have just given that something MORE meaning than everything else. Thus, whatever you find interesting is almost infinitely more meaningful than anything else.

That's pretty cool - your choice changes the entire universe, for you. If you manage to be persistent enough, then for others as well. Kind of makes you all-powerful ;)

Of course, unmitigated climate change will be catastrophic. No argument there.

I do however think that we would be better off funding and building massive amounts of solar that gives us enough energy surplus to do large-scale carbon capture, instead of forcing everyone to move to electric vehicles.

If you think about it, we right now have an open loop transportation system - dig stuff up from the ground, burn it and forget about it in the atmosphere. Basically, extracting easy to use energy that was captured over a long period.

But we now have the tech to extend that to a closed loop system - capture enough energy from solar to recycle the burned fuel back into burnable fuel.

This will also mitigate all the co2 created when producing electric cars btw.

As someone that works on software that includes functions to try to figure out where you can place electric car chargers - it absolutely is very hard. The grid just isn't ready for it.

It can be done, but will require massive investment in infrastructure.

There are also problems such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve and other things that can be mitigated with ADR to an extent, but it's absolutely not easy

The only thing that has a chance of working is thinking about it a bit differently - governments should heavily subsidize building solar energy plants. On the scale of "much more than we need". Then they should also heavily subsidize carbon capture and possibly also tech to turn it into liquid fuels again.

Getting petrol cars off the road is just not going to happen on the time scale it's needed. If the 10 years until the ban would be spent building enough solar, carbon capture and fuel generation, we'd be in a much better state. We'd literally have a knob that controls the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The open source stuff is mostly really fidgety and works correctly with a rather narrow set of inputs. To make most libraries be actually easily usable for a wide range of inputs is a tremendous amount of work.

The core of them mostly do the thing they claim to do, but if you feed them data that's just slightly off, then it'll break in interesting ways.

Speaking based on a lot of experience[1]. Nothing in the geospatial or environmental data world is easy and there will always be an unexpected problem lurking right behind the corner, regardless of how many of them you've already fixed or worked around.

Still, the complexity of the problem space also makes it fascinating. As an example, the definition and measurement of something that's seemingly very simple: mean seal level is actually tremendously complicated if you think about it. The Wikipedia article talks about averaging over decades of measurements to get it right for example.

[1] I'm a part of the team behind https://data.planetos.com/datasets

You would not have been able to make these points without knowing what the article states and the point of it is that a lot of people do not.

It is true that we could do better and should do better - the pendulum of progress has swung too far away from working with nature to forcing it to conform to our standards during the industrial revolution.

But still your comment has a very pessimistic view of the world.

The easiest rebuttal is that I like my engineering management job. It really is more fun than doing housework - and I can tell this from experience. I've built a house with my own hands and lived in one where you had to carry in the water and build a fire in the stove when you wanted food or warmth. It mostly sucked.

Thanks to my car, or a rental car, I've seen things that I could never have seen otherwise and it has enriched my life in so many ways I can't even count. Also, I got my driving license at age 28. So I know how living without the ability to drive was like. It was possible, but not great.

The ability to use plastic tools in hospitals probably saved the life of one of my kids. Although on this one I do admit, the need to pack every single thing in it is excessive and we should cut down on the usage of plastic in many areas.

Finally, about fertilizers and monocultures - please read up on Norman Borlaug and the Green Revoluton before saying that things would be fine without them. Maybe in the US or other countries that have lots of space and great soil they would be. But in India, Pakistan and other countries, the ability to have crops that produce vastly more product per area has given a better life for millions of people.

Finally, the percentage of the population that gets to enjoy a better lifestyle has never been higher. Health has never been better. Of course, that shouldn't be an argument to stop progress, but saying that things are terrible isn't true either.

Exactly - but if you take it from a simulated world to the real world without re-training (and it's real hard to train in the real world) it's going to behave according to the rules learned in the simulated world. Which will be different and thus produce results that are weird to us.

Exactly. Intelligence does not exist "by itself", it only exists in the context of the world. It cannot be emulated in an environment that's secluded from the world or even in an environment that is exposed to a carefully selected slice of the world. Because the world is a tangled web of interconnections and cannot be partitioned cleanly. It's always going to be a leaky abstraction and thus any model trained within that slice is going to deviate very quickly in weird ways.

Indeed, but this is completely baffling to anyone in Europe. Simple example: In the US, if I have $5 in my pocket, I can't go to a store and buy a thing that's listed as costing $5.00, because at the cash register some more money has magically appeared on the bill. In Europe on the other hand, you pay at the register the exact amount that is on the price sticker.

And yes, I know the difference is due to taxes not being included in the sticker price, but why oh god why is it up to me to do weird math to figure out if I actually have enough $$$ to pay for what I'd like to have.

The more bad news like this is coming out, makes me wonder what did they show to the initial investors - it MUST have been something incredible, that was probably too bulky to wear and that they didn't manage to miniaturise.

I really hope someone talks about that after they either go broke or get acquired.

"For example, it was O.K. to think that Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos a fraud and express this opinion well before the court decided that."

That's the part I don't agree with. I don't think it's fair.

It's also unlikely that I'll be able to change your mind on this matter or that you'll be able to change mine during the course of a few comments on HN, so we can agree to disagree :)

My point is - is it possible that he is directly responsible for the airplane guy going to prison? Possibly, but we don't know.

Presumption of innocence is important.

Example: there's a locally well known actor where I live that was accused of having child porn on his computer a few months ago. The press obviously jumped all over that and he was plastered over all the front pages. Fast forward two months and it's actually looking like he isn't actually guilty and won't be dragged into court. The result for him however is that he's broke, got no more acting gigs and his kids are bullied in school.

Bad result. Because people didn't assume he's innocent until PROVEN guilty. I'd be 100% happy to trade off some exec that steals money from a company getting to skip jail for nobody who's innocent ever ending up in jail.

Him leaving Japan is undoubtedly illegal and not excusable. However if I understand the allegations correctly, he stole a bunch of money from a company he was running. Putting him to jail for 10 years for stealing $5m from a company that he just made $4bn for seems a bit harsh. Then again, Japan has the right to decide that so my opinion is irrelevant.

Depends on what the order was. If he said "threaten and kill anyone that gets in the way" then yes Ghosn is guilty. If the order was "get me out of the country without harming anyone" then the security guy was guilty. At this point we don't know which it was.

"He broke the law a bunch of times"

Kowing if he did that is dependent on there being a court decision.

Look, I don't like that some probably innocent plane guy is in jail more than anyone else but judging people just because they are rich is also wrong.

Also I'm pretty sure it wasn't Gosn that threatened him but rather the security guy that put together the plan.

This is probably the most balanced comment about meat-eating I've ever read.

I think the tax thing is key - I eat meat and I fly a lot. I know both of those things contribute to the climate crisis - therefore I'd be completely ok with paying some more money as tax that goes towards offsetting the environmental damage from those activities.

Lots of people think we needs to go back in development of technology and stop enjoying the things humanity has worked for a long time to achieve. Instead we should think about how we can make technology work better together with the environment and enable even more comfort and prosperity. Not force us to go back, rather find ways of moving even further forward.

The essay is just a long winded way of saying the quote from Eisenhower: "Plans are worthless, but planning is essential"

Which is of course a short winded way of saying that the article makes a lot of sense. We for example have sprint goals - these are things that the team commits to actually getting done during the sprint. Then there are tasks in the sprint which may or may not overlap with the sprint goals and may or may not get done during the sprint.

It's always about trade-offs.

Yeah, that is surprising. One could concoct a conspiracy theory but I guess submissions get overlooked sometimes...

I don't have many unused houses, however my family does have a tiny summer cottage that we don't use in the winter since it's not insulated and so on.

Coming to it in the spring and finding that some kids decided to have a party in there and almost burned it down wasn't exactly a nice feeling. I certainly hope that it doesn't happen to anyone else, including mr Bezos, however much you may disagree with his business practices.

Quote from the article: "Needless to say, this kind of trespassing is usually bad, unless you’re breaking into one of Jeff Bezos’ homes."

So it's ok to break into your house as long as you are very rich?

I go fairly frequently these days and am not surprised by much any more ;)

What you described is the exact impression I got when I first travelled to New York :)

"Is it supposed to be this dirty?"

One thing that's easy to overlook is risk. For example insurance - the hotel is basically liable for things that go wrong there. They also have insurance to make sure they can pay up when needed.

Does your airbnb host have proper insurance? For example you flood the apartment you rented from airbnb and the downstairs apartment owner sues you. IANAL but I'm fairly sure that usually in home insurance cases short term rentals aren't covered.

You make a good point - the "rent out my couch" type of thing and "rent out a whole separate house" admittedly break my argument a little bit.

However there are still the questions of things like insurance coverage and other safety related topics. Basically if anything goes wrong in a hotel, there is staff who is required to be trained to be able to deal with it. Again, the cost associated with dealing with the 0.05% corner cases is distributed to everyone in the case of a hotel room, but to the specific person to whom it happens in the airbnb case.

To be fair, if you really want to rent a whole house, the hotel industry doesn't often provide good options ....

This is one of the reasons I don't stay in airbnbs - the system breaks the social contract.

The reason hotels are more expensive is because they have to follow a bunch of rules that makes everyone's life a bit better by having insurance for risks and zoning and so on. However you have to pay a bit more.

So, if you ever find yourself complaining "I wish people did something in a not the absolute cheapest and effortless way" so that society in general would benefit - don't stay in airbnb.

I am old enough to have lived in soviet times for a short while. One thing I remember from back then - in order to get things done, you had to know someone. Perhaps your aunt's friend worked in the politbureau or your mom's classmate was a friend of the director. Through connections like that you could get what you needed.

It was such a relief when times changed and regardless of who you were, you could start exchanging money for things and services.

This story and many others like it remind me of those times - it's back to who you know to get your account unlocked. I've never gotten a story on the front page of HN and probably have 5 twitter followers. What's my avenue of getting my data back?

This isn't just about DO either. Similar stories about google and other services are many to be found.