wbronitsky

You could have so easily made the point that Eton aims to train the elite without being viciously dismissive and condescending. Coming in here and attacking using a throwaway account undermines the ability for the community to have a discussion.

There are many ways to try and measure the aptitude of a 13 year old without putting the idea of supporting state sponsored murder into their heads and forcing them to defend it. I would argue that the possible damage done to a person at a very impressionable age by asking them to justify murder outweighs the vetting process for a scholarship.

I think it is pertinent to highlight that this question was posed to 13 and 14 year olds. I don’t think anyone at that age can properly address this question.

The argument that 330+ million people should feel responsible for the outcomes of tens of thousands of elections they cannot vote in is absurd.

You might as well say that someone in Germany should take more responsibility for the actions of the Catalonian separatists. It is on its face ridiculous. There is literally nothing I can do about, say, the governor of a state not stepping down when he loses an election.

Pretty rare that someone would come on Hacker News and advocate for torture. Do you have any data that shows that what you are advocating for is effective or are you arguing that public policy should focus on using sadistic practices for no reason?

It would seem that they were told to shut off the power due to previous criminal negligence. I'm not sure we should let them off the hook; this is their past wild misdeeds, such as falsifying line inspections, catching up with them. There is no need for PG&E apologists, they deserve the scorn they are getting.

It would continue to seem like the argument here is that we should want corporations to rebut NYT articles in a public forum, which I continue to disagree with, regardless of what the argument is.

While we should hold the "truth" to account, open debate cannot be the way to deal with this at every impasse. FedEx is more than welcome to write an article, post a video, or do anything else to rebut the article published by the NYT, but instead has chosen a narrow path in which they can surprise the other party in person with attacks. I fail to understand why open debate is the best way to solve this; at the very least, I don't know where the time to watch these debates about... FedEx and tax avoidance... among the other issues I try to keep current on

This is an easily searchable answer: https://www.tripsavvy.com/washington-marijuana-smoking-regul...

https://www.thestranger.com/green-guide-spring-2018/2018/04/...

https://lcb.wa.gov/mj-education/know-the-law

it might or might not be a good idea to do some research before asking others to do research for you

In this argument, that point does not matter. OP said that Chase stole money from them. That is not true; banks lawfully complying with government orders is not theft. Banks, or really any private business, do not protect you from the government.

What point is being advanced here? That it is ok, or at least inconsequential that Google can lock you out of services that you rely on? Or that we should be happy because Google is "reasonable" here?

I have purchased a domain and used it to underpin a fastmail account; personally, I don't share in your line of reasoning and don't want to continue to trust Google.

Is this an ad-hominem attack based on posting history? How far we have sunk here in HN

"The entire point of joining a start-up is to 'play the lotto'."

I don't think that's "the entire point" for all of us. I enjoy the challenges of scaling products that already have product market fit; startups are a great place to do such work. I also enjoy small, but not too small, teams; somewhere between 50 and 150 is a nice sweet spot for me. This setup is also found at many startups. Sometimes, markets lack institutional players as well. If I want to work on certain kinds of healthcare, financial technology or cryptocurrencies, startups are also a great place.

I'm not sure it matters why I'm in the minority in my commute. And if I am in the minority in some populations, I might not be in others. It would seem that quite a few people that live in my neighborhood use the same transportation options that I am, although this is obviously anec-data.

I disagree with your last statement. BART is 4 miles from oyster point, so you would have to take a shuttle. I'm going to assume that is at least 20 minutes more, if I'm being generous. So, for me, that would equate to about a 90 minute commute each way, at a minimum, where as a commute to Market street via BART would be about a 50 minute minimum. 80 minutes per day is not a trivial amount of time for me.

Overall, I'm not sure what the argument here is. That a lot of people take BART? That we should be ok with more commute time?

In this argument, it would seem that to be "adequately interested" in a company, I need to be willing to do unpaid labor for them as a first step. I would argue that most, if not all companies, should disabuse themselves of the thought that this is anything but exploitation.

This isn't a very helpful argument. I live in Oakland and commute to San Francisco and rarely take Bart because there are many other options that don't involve me breathing directly from someone else's exhalation like we all are forced to on Bart.

Personally, I take casual carpool, https://sfcasualcarpool.com/, to work and a transbay bus home. Total cost is $6.50/day, which is cheaper than commuting by Bart, and because I live 30 mins walking from Bart, it is also much faster.

Why comment if you are obviously ignorant of the situation? To you, 10 miles might mean 10 minutes or less. In this situation, it could lengthen an already lengthy commute for many employees by 30 minutes or more in each direction. I know this because I worked at Stripe and commuted from Oakland to their office South of Market by car.

When I commuted into the Stripe office by car from Oakland, it would take me about 45 minutes to get there, and well over 60 minutes to get home. With this move, you can add about 30 minutes, at least, on to each end. And that's on a good day and assuming you are already commuting by car.

From Oakland/the East Bay, there is no good way to get to South San Francisco by public transportation. You are looking at a 2+ hour commute in each direction to go < 15 miles

I’m not sure there is a ton of utility in complaining about societal stupidity, right? How does complaining that people don’t follow rules help us be safer? What would you propose as an alternative to “cater[ing] to the lowest common denominator” for public health and safety issues?

Hey it happens, no value judgements really; I do it myself all the time. The problem lies in my misunderstanding more than anything else.

“Human rental business” absolutely makes whatever economy that is sound much more like the reality these workers live in. We should use it more instead of the euphemisms we all use now.

I assume you mean that these companies are in the business of renting hardware, not that they themselves rent the hardware they are using.

I believe the virtualization they are offering allows the service to scale a bit more like software, but I do agree that these cloud providers don’t have 0 marginal cost.

Either way, thank you for de-buzzwording the original argument. It makes much more sense in English

I don’t understand this argument at all; it seems to be only buzzwords.

What is the relation of the gig economy to a cloud hosting service, other than most gig economy apps are built on cloud servers? Also, how does looking at the problem this way enlighten us?

Arguments like this completely ignore that the police and government have their own secure channels they use in these situations, and are prone to frequently inciting violence. Why should an engineer feel bad for leveling the playing field between people who feel oppressed and their oppressors?

This argument is preposterous.

There are so many reasons poor people find it difficult to appear in court. A huge, and very easy to imagine, issue is that poor people tend not to have time flexibility; with everyone screaming at them to pick up another job, how could they possibly appear in court as well?

Another very easy to imagine issue is getting healthcare outside of this “town” everyone seems to live in in the above argument, could make appearing in court difficult as well.

The argument that “all poor people are fat and ill” is not just lazy, but outright ridiculous.

This reply is an example of exactly why people don't want to discuss things like this at work. People rarely want to have such a combative discussion with our coworkers, especially when framed as an all-or-nothing, very high stakes conversation.

If these issues, such as where you use the toilet, what you wear to work, what documentation you are provided, are relevant to your work-place, I would suggest that they are not "political" topics, but instead workplace topics and could, and should, be broached. However, I don't know GitLab's stance on this.

That being said, I do agree with you that all of these things are political, as well as who is causing the issues. However, your coworkers might not, and there might be very good reasons to continue to work with such people.

I do believe you have misread this. "Ourselves" is used because "me" would not be correct, but really the meaning is "me the author" in that sentence. I would suggest a more generous re-reading.

There seem to be quite a few people on this forum that both find this article interesting, and don't fall into the enumerated thought buckets.

I, a Jew, don't think either of those things and do think this article is interesting and has merit.

There are many places and times that people do not want to discuss the politics of the outside world. Examples could include while giving birth, while shopping alone at the grocery store, while sitting alone on a city bus, while performing surgery, while discussing your raise with your boss.

Just because someone does not want to discuss something here and now, doesn't invalidate that they have original opinions. Not everything is a dichotomy all the time. Plenty of people who are not fine with the status quo don't want to discuss it at work.

I want to point out that there is no citation for this straw-man thought experiment.

Even the Heritage Foundation, which is incentivized to dig up as much voter fraud as it possibly can, has only found fewer than 1250 individual cases in what seems to be the last decade. This is overwhelmingly lower than the preposterous 1% presented in the above straw-man. https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud

Indeed my point was not just about voter fraud, but the racist history of Voter ID laws in the US. My overall point was that there is overwhelming and easily accessible evidence that voter ID laws are racist and that voter fraud is not an issue.

US history is why its a big deal to show your ID to vote.

Wikipedia has a great summary of the racist policies voter ID laws were made to enforce, and that voter fraud is "vanishingly rare" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St...

I think instead of framing this issue as "how easy would it be to re-register" we could instead ask "why should anyone have to register to vote at all?" In the US, voting is a right, which is something that cannot and should not be taken away. Invalidating voting registration, especially in a targeted way, is deplorable.