Hacker News Reader

wcerfgbaon Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

It's less important to cover every eventuality, and more inportant to outline the decision making process for handling the unexpected.

wcerfgbaon Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

Thomas Swann's Anarchist Cybernetics and Rhiannon Firth's Disaster Anarchy both touch on this at points.

https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745340463/disaster-anarchy/

https://academic.oup.com/policy-press-scholarship-online/boo...

wcerfgbaon Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

Yes, in UK we have a network of tech workers co-ops: https://www.coops.tech/about

wcerfgbaon Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

Wonderful story, thanks for sharing.

Do you know any worker-owned food businesses? Share in the comments!

In Preston, UK, we have The Larder. Not sure about the ownership model but it is a social enterprise working on food justice: https://larder.org.uk/

wcerfgbaon Where do fonts come from? Monotype, mostly

Every major brand is owned by a minority of multinational conglomerates. 90% of the money we spend in shops and online goes to a number of companies you could count on one hand. This issue is not restricted to fonts.

wcerfgbaon Consumers complaining on X targeted by scammers after verification changes

Initially thought X was a metasyntactic variable, then realised it is post-rebrand Twitter. Would be funny if everyone just keeps calling it Twitter :P

wcerfgbaon Thomas Sowell's greatest insight [video]

Why is this video tagged #transgender ... ?

wcerfgbaon Webvan: The dotcom bubble’s biggest bust

The current unicorns are definitely not overvalued.

wcerfgbaon The first messenger without user IDs

The Android app has an option for periodic notifications, where it only checks for messages every 10 minutes. It positions this as battery saving, but in our information saturated, always on world, I think this is a great feature for user experience. It reminds me of old school email, where you could set the polling time. I like the idea that I can set the rhythm of my devices again.

wcerfgbaon The inability to simultaneously verify sentience, location, and identity

Or perhaps its a small minority of people who have access to vast wealth and control through a combination of luck, ruthlessness, and glitches in our social, economic, and political systems, who then maintain their power by refusing to makes those systems more equitable. There are plenty of studies of Indigenous peoples whose societies are much more equitable than ours, which shows that the problems we face now are neither inevitable, nor solely a result of 'human nature', if such a universal concept even exists.

wcerfgbaon Java 21: What’s New?

Isn't Kotlin licensed as Apache 2?

wcerfgbaon Rising ill-health and economic inactivity from long-term sickness: 2019 to 2023

> An important contribution to long-term sickness volumes has come from the large number of "baby boomers" (those born between 1946 and 1964) approaching retirement.

The lack of age breakdown in these statistics is disappointing, its not clear how much of these trends can be attributed to an ageing population.

wcerfgbaon The Last 1%

Not on the list: reflection, in the vein of action research.

wcerfgbaon Jailer, a unique open-source database tool

Can you do SSH tunneling? That would be transparent to any other tooling.

wcerfgbaon Orb is a free and open source web desktop

There have been a few of these over the years. The one I remember best was eyeOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeOS

wcerfgbaon Replace peer review with “peer replication” (2021)

What do we recommend for qualitative research, where replicability is not a quality criterion?

wcerfgbaon Ravenchord – A Radical Redesign of the Piano

What needs a radical redesign is the keyboard: https://jpreston.xyz/1d-isomorphic-chromatic-piano-keyboard-...

wcerfgbaon Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

Exactly, the 99 stands for 1999, so potentially this material has existed for over 20 years and we could have started testing and replication on a much wider scale a decade ago. What benefit have we gained by disseminating this research so slowly?

wcerfgbaon Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

If this is real, what are the consequences/impacts/implications/applications? I don't know anything about superconductors!

wcerfgbaon So, you don't like a web platform proposal

It would reduce the number of fraudulent clicks and non-human views, but then if you can verify the eyeballs and cursor on the other side are human, presumably that would increase the cost per impression and per click, so it may increase revenue.

wcerfgbaon So, you don't like a web platform proposal

Exactly, the agenda is everything. It's very difficult to convince a megacorp to act against its profit motive. The proposal exists within a cultural and economic context, you can't just ignore that.

wcerfgbaon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://jpreston.xyz

My repository of recipes, art, notes, music, photography, and essays. Software, economics, politics, ethics, food, democracy, etc.

wcerfgbaon The first Oxide rack being prepared for customer shipment

I don't really understand how having a larger minimum purchase unit (entire rack vs rack unit) is a USP. Your comments explain the emphasis on tighter integration across the stack, but it doesn't clearly show why this is a benefit.

What are the problems people are having with existing systems (like Vxrail), and how does Oxide fix those? What stories are you hearing?

wcerfgbaon Show HN: Litnerd (YC S21) – Kids Book Club Meets Gaming

Do you have any concerns that gamifying reading and turning it into a competition is immersing children in neoliberal logics, and pushes them away from intrinsic motivation and cooperation instead?

wcerfgbaon Adversarial Collaboration Project

Except when he unquestioningly platforms conspiracy theorists, quacks, climate change deniers, transphobes, and eugenicists.

wcerfgbaon Show HN: Global Pomodoro every 30 minutes

I find 50 + 10 is a good approach for meetings and events over 2+ hours, like when you have multiple speakers or a workshop. That gives everyone a chance for a regular toilet or comfort break.

wcerfgbaon Startup Incorporation for Founders: A new handbook

And here's one network of tech co-ops in the UK: https://www.coops.tech/

wcerfgbaon Startup Incorporation for Founders: A new handbook

Have you thought about adding a section on different ownership and control models, such as co-operative models?

wcerfgbaon Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

Wow this is way cooler than the ski goggles announcement! :D

wcerfgbaon Moderation strike

I don't think criticising AI on grounds of it not 'understanding' is a strong argument, since we have neither a definition for, nor a way to measure, what understanding is.