whatyoucantsay

The bigger question is, Can China build any alliance? Thus far, the one and only country in the world China has seen fit to form an actual alliance with is North Korea, but those relations are strained. At the moment, the PRC has territorial disputes with over a dozen neighbours.

Does China have good relations with any nearby country?

I'd much rather work with a developer proficient with C, Java, JS, React, DDD and a deep knowledge of Unix than someone who has spent the majority of their time on JS, Backbone/Knockout/Angular/Ember/React/Vue/Mithril, Redux/MobX/Vuex and Grunt/Gulp/Brunch/Webpack.

Knowing how a technology works is important. Knowing technologies needed to accomplish tasks to be done is important. Knowing seven different technologies that accomplish the same thing is at best a marginal benefit.

Google Voice Assistant will be a true success when can talk its way to Google's own support for a user who has lost access to an account!

Google has willfully abdicated its responsibility to the hundreds of millions of people whose digital lives they manage. Whether the product is paid in cash or the erosion of privacy, this kind of failure can ruin lives.

People choose to rely upon Google, but Google has spent tens of billions of dollars influencing us to do so.

A fractal abomination.

> Nobody actually cares about any of this... It’s just shifting power centers and really all comes down to corporate profits.

Europe has made this mistake before. Appeasing a totalitarian, expansionist dictator works well, abruptly to the point at which it doesn't.

To be clear, this is an attack on the sovereignty of a fully democratic nation with a population the size of Australia's.

Some things are more precious than "corporate profits".

And it has failed spectacularly in the case of China... for decades.

> By staying at Facebook your friends are explicitly supporting these and other scummy actions. They have decided to hold their noses and prioritise themselves over humanity.

> Think less of them.

Given their explicit support of scummy actions and not humanity, do you feel Facebook employees should be punched, in the defence of humanity?

A billion+/year would be reasonable, considering what they've done with Android.

I think confounded makes some good points.

> Print journalism is interesting in the same way college teaching jobs are interesting: a great deal of the work is done by an underclass of marginally employed people (freelancers with no contract in journalism, adjuncts with no tenure in academia). The "fully employed" level (staff reporter, tenured professor) is extraordinarily difficult to obtain.

This is no different to becoming an actor, a novelist, a rapper or "making it" in any profession that is a tournament game. Perhaps there was a time when journalism was not a tournament game, but with the decreasing importance of local distributions and the aggregating effects of the internet, it is one now.

Because the GDPR requirements are vague, overreaching, at odds with best practise and not yet even implemented by the misguided legislature that wrote it.

California isn't the state for you, then.

Their behaviour is more defensive in nature, really.

Talk to your representatives and let them know the pain the vague and overreaching GDPR causes you. Perhaps, in time, law makers will undo some of the harm they've caused.

Until then, invest in a VPN that lets you appear to be from elsewhere.

I don't begrudge losing the karma to share facts that violate our shared expectations.

The view I have on it is that in China, there is a large and growing interest in large, long-term investment in new technologies and new ideas. Obviously there's a continuum and China is also still implementing and scaling technologies built in the west, but there's a definite commitment towards breaking new ground as well.

Ah the joys of HN. Here is a source for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxWpvgTH9oI&t=25m27s

It is telling that the defining book of the decade on tech startups—Zero to One was a runaway best-seller in China but didn't even sell 50,000 copies in India.

India has, perhaps, relied too heavily on the 1 to N promise of globalisation and, in the process, won in a race to the bottom.

As a wise person once said, "You might love nature, but nature doesn't give a fuck about you."

They'd gladly "snack on your dog" or your child, given the opportunity.

> That's because German vendors are hopeless at processing cards.

>Australia/HK/Singapore/China/most of Europe: the reader prompts you with the sale amount. You tap your card. It adds zero time to the transaction.

Outside of department stores and similar, using a card is very inconvenient in China. Depending on the place, you need cash or Alipay/WeChat.

I agree. Many who don the mantle of being "liberal" are anything but.

A small percentage of people have genuine ideological commitments, but most are driven by self-interest.

I think there are two issues they have, one of which I agree with:

1) We should support and rely upon state assistance, not charity.

2) Religious organizations present an inherent level of risk, have a special tax status and must be constrained.

GDPR is a train-wreck. I'm fully behind the motives, but like many high-level initiatives it has the effect of further tilting the playing field in favour of incumbents who have the financial and legal resources to accommodate it. Europe needs to rein in Facebook, but not at the cost of any hope of the next Facebook being European.

This is, in effect, an exploit against vulnerabilities in US anti-trust law. Using dominance in online commerce and computing infrastructure to undercut food sellers is exactly the kind of problem anti-trust laws are meant to stop.

Amazon isn't actually monopoly in any industry, yet, but it's difficult to see how this is different to the approach a monopolist takes in entering a new market.

This comment further validates the concern. If regularly countering demonstrably false propaganda encountered within threads is "national battle" that gets an account limited, but the demonstrably false propaganda itself is accepted, then something is broken.

The Eternal September comment rings true. There was a staggering change from 2006-2008, and a gradually decelerating decline ever since. Site policy changes are not necessarily the primary factor. As an audience gets orders of magnitudes larger, it grows diluted and less cohesive. That said, I fully agree with DanielBMarkham's comments from the election thread (despite having been in political agreement with the majority myself).

PG has made truly non-PC comments here and in essays. His writing isn't that of a populist or a cultural conservative by any means, but is also clearly out of tune with the bay area echo chamber. There is a wide space between supporting Trump and not fitting in in SV! Broadly, the political topics pg seems to write about have been an opposition to political correctness, favoring equality of opportunity, and a belief that individuals creating wealth help the world rather than harm it. Some of these positions were either left leaning or had broad popular support 20 years ago, but most would now be considered right or centrist. This, coupled with his previous willingness to voice deeply sensitive but true observations, may have lead to his retirement (e.g. "founders with strong foreign accents have less startup success"). Things may have changed after Valleywag took aim at him, however.

The only "battle" being waged from this side is

    1) for the pursuit of truth
    2) for the freedom, happiness and well-being of every human to the greatest degree possible

This does involve criticising certain bad ideas (e.g. "It's acceptable to invade a peaceful neighbour to regain territory our ancestors held hundreds of years ago", "Human traits are shaped only by environment, without influence from heredity" or "Gay men should be thrown off rooftops"). Politics is far from the most important thing, but it, or tribalism generally, is often involved when a strong majority believe something at odds with history or empiricism. Investment bubbles and other herd behaviour are also deeply fascinating and worth debating.

Trying to accumulate karma leads to ever stronger filter bubbles. Consequently, karma is a resource best spent on ideas that are both possibly true and deeply unpopular. Given the willingness to dissent and the apparent alignment of goals with HN's stated guidelines, these and future comments may possibly serve as a useful canary in a coal mine.

pmarca had two separate $1B+ exits and the invention of the first mainstream web browser under his belt

1. Which years?

2. I've seen it happen countless times. With the exception of pg himself, who displayed an allergy to politics or anything that got in his way of attempting to discover truth, I believe every HN moderator his sit firmly on the same side of the political spectrum and culture wars.

Being humans, most have a propensity to ignore inflammatory or factually incorrect comments they agree with while flagging those they don't as "generic" or flamewar inducing. I noted dozens of examples of this behavior but the ROI on going through them is almost certainly poor or negative. The moderation response related to major controversies of the past 2 years has been clear. Which pages were artificially weighted was very poorly correlated with the intellectual honesty of their contents.

3. I was indeed prevented immediately upon making the comment in my profile, and met with a message that I was commenting too quickly. Even after waiting a full hour, I was still blocked from commenting.

Interestingly another story recently asked about YC's GDPR compliance and was weighted so heavily that it sank below much older stories with fewer upvotes. Comments didn't outnumber votes, ether.

#3 is actually related to #2 as YCs deepening economic and political investment in an authoritarian state increases the likelihood of a future HN where comments challenging certain militaristic, ethno-nationalist propaganda will be flagged as "generic political arguments" while repeating the propaganda itself is allowed.

My view of YC's ethics is not so poor that I think this is an immediate risk, but money does tend to bend politics over time. In the early days, few expected Yahoo would one day assist in uncovering rights activists so they could be executed, and yet they did.

I believe pg, pmarca and many of the others went from Reddit to HN to Twitter to more private lives.

If the question is "what site in early 2018 most resembles HN of 2006", I believe the answer is Indie Hackers. Its community is open, friendly, genuinely helpful and focused on business.

It's not quite the same since it takes more of a pro-bootstrapper stance, but then again the HN ethos used to be more tilted towards frugality and truly early-stage companies than it now is.

Things will undoubtedly change as they grow, but IH is arguably the finest place on the internet for entrepreneurs.

To me, it serves as a powerful cautionary tale. Ten years ago, it was a vibrant community where pg, pmarca, DHH, and many other quite accomplished individuals commented regularly.

It's not like that now. The elves have left middle earth.

HN's greatest contributors of the past, have been gone for years. Worse still, the site's audience has broadened greatly and its content has shifted towards the very mainstream news topics that it once avoided. Moderators have clear political axes to grind. While the site initially shunned submissions related to politics (and even codified this in its guidelines), it's no longer uncommon for flags to be turned off explicitly political stories that lead to viscous flame wars.

HN is invaluable, as a reminder in the fragility of communities and of the impermanence of anything we create. If a project that some of the smartest people on the planet put their heart and soul into can fall apart so ruinously, who are we to have any ego about our creations?

Greatest domain name ever submitted.