ATsch

Surely you must understand this?

Yes, I understand why blockchains are bad, have no benefits, terrible performance and are a privacy nightmare. Thanks for explaining it in more detail. And binance understands it too, that's why they're not using it (not even a private one!) despite all of their talk about how it's a revolutionary technology.

The comment you're replying to is clearly sarcastic. Infecting 2400 people with HIV is generally not considered good care.

It's always very amusing how all of the blockchain companies wax lyrical about all of the huge supposed benefits of blockchains and how every industry and company is missing out by not adopting them and should definitely run a hyperledger private blockchain buzzword whatever.

And then, even when faced with implementing a huge, audit critical, distributed append-only store, the thing they tell us blockchains are so useful for, they just use normal database tech like the rest if us. With one centralized infrastructure where most of the transactions in the network actually take place. Who's tech stack looks suspiciously like every other financial institution.

I'm so glad we're ignoring 100 years of securities law to let all of this incredible innovation happen.

Yes, this. linux sucks in a lot of ways. But it sucks for boring reasons I can deal with, like lack of resources, incompetence or even just ideas I disagree with. You know, just the every day inevitabilites that come with interacting with other human beings, even when they're doing their best.

But what is infinitely worse than that is, on top of all of those things still happening, also having a random chance of waking up every morning to discover that someone has very deliberately, specifically decided to make my life worse, not out of personal conviction, but because it makes a line go up somewhere in a board room on the other side of the world. That I can not deal with.

It doesn't matter if they're a minority if moderation just lets them use HN as a megaphone and post hundreds of comments before any sort of reaction.

Or in terms of a tired metaphor: If you refuse to weed out your bad apples, you can't really complain when people stop taking your fruit shipments because they keep spoiling their bunches :)

The thing that truly shocks me about this whole thing is how absolutely blatantly corrupt the Irish regulator appears to be.

The book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds was written in 1841

It feels worth noting that this book, as well as the wider idea of an abstract idea of crowd-induced mania in general it reinforces, is pseudoscientific with little credible evidence to support it.

It's origins lie much more in the political motivations and historical context of the authors: It is no coincidence that this book was written by a wealthy scotsman against the backdrop of the idea was first floated by an aristocrat during the upheavals and riots surrounding the introduction of capitalism, and that the idea was initially proposed by an aristocrat during the french revolution. They were both times where it was extraordinarily convenient to be able to dismiss engaging with the things the crowd was being driven by.

I'd urge against making the same mistake today. To me, it is impossible to separate the web3 mania from the historical context it happened in: Like 2008, it is a time of job insecurity, financial anxiety and distrust in systems with governments doing little to help. They are prime times for wishful thinking and people who want to take advantage of it.

I wonder if they checked this with the compliance department regarding their obligations to delete data under GDPR. I hope their Data Protection Officers have the time to respond to all of the thousands of relevant manual email requests and delete all of the data in a timely manner, if people are made aware they are legally required to honor those.

It is personal data regardless of how it is used. The only question is if that use of personal data is permissive.

Using it for user analytics, which is neither required to run the service, nor in the users interest, nor reasonably expected by the user, is almost definitly illegitimate use.

The definition of personal data under the GDPR is anything that can be used to uniquely identify a natural person (with sufficiently high probability). Both cookies and date-modified meet that definition identically, as do IP addresses.

That doesn't mean you can't use it at all. It just places strong restrictions on what purpodes you can use it for. The important point is just that those restrictions are the same under GDPR for all of these technologies. It doesn't matter how you uniquely identify users, what matters is what you do with that information.

I don't think it makes sense to apply you-and-I logic where actions have consequences to a billionaire. He obviously never had a business case that would make twitter worth the premium and extra billion dollars a year interest it's paying now.

So my point is not that he doesn't want it to succeed, it would obviously be a great personal embarrassment. It's that the risk of destroying a community of millions of people was clearly lower on his mind than the power trip of how cool it would be to own Twitter. He can afford to not care, and that's a deeply depressing situation.

I don't disagree. I think he bought it on a whim because to show that he could, in the same way that a football fan might say they could run the team better than a manager.

Then he realized it was not in fact a good idea and backed out of it.

I don't have any inside information, but as I understand it's basically just a spending commitment. The online auctions still take place, however the purchaser will gain some sort of bonus for agreeing to a certain amount of spending over the next year.

The deals seem to be rather secretive, but from what I can tell bonuses can be anything from a straightforward discount, to a guaranteed amount of impressions for some campaign, to things like guaranteeing that the client will win a certain percentage of auctions above some price.

I don't know who said it, but the real point of buying Twitter was to prove he could buy Twitter. He doesn't really have to care if it burns down, he's not going to be out on the streets from it like the rest of us. It's futile explain what he's doing using any other logic.

I'm not sure how helpful this is? The service Pantone provides is not really a list of colors. It's the calibration of almost every printer and item that can create color, in every medium and on every surface, against their color library. Not just printable colors either, also things that can't be printed like metal and florescent colors.

It means you can get a book cover and a business card printed, some plastic injection molded, have your car painted and be assured they are all going to be exactly the same color when they arrive. It's the mapping between pantone names and the real world that's valuable, and this doesn't seem to help with that.

I personally found that part very comforting. Very few people generally talk about getting fired or quitting early, which created this sort of impression to me that everyone just had a model career and never ran into any roadblocks and that I would be under pressure to do the same.

Seeing that someone who is quite succesful and to me admirable got terminated multiple times was very reassuring there.

I see the opposite: Someone who can be confident enough in their skills that they don't have to worry about finding another job if they are unhappy with the current one.

Of course, many companies would prefer desperate employees who are afraid to hit the bricks instead. But is that really who you want to be working for, given a choice?

This is the same strategy as used by vague supposed "anti traficking" laws and such. These do absolutely nothing against actual trafficking of course, but they create lots of fear and doubt around having any business relationship with someone who might be a sex worker. This leads to regular occurrences of things like people who are e.g. just running an onlyfans account on the side getting cut off from companies or evicted by their landlord. Because sex work might be "trafficking" and if it's trafficking, you might be held responsible for renting to them or providing them services, so it's safer to just blanket cut them off. Which is, of course, the goal.

The US is HUGE.

China is huge too. Russia is gigantic. The US was huge before the 1950s too.

The terrible city sprawl of the US is not a law of nature, but specific post WW2 city design policies that could easily be reversed at any time.

I don't know why cities don't have better public transportation.

It's the same policies. Take the minimum parking requirements: you can't have multiple shops accessible from one station because every shop needs to be surrounded by a walking distance worth of parking. You need to duplicate your entire network because things like corner stores don't exist, meaning there are basically no trips within residential areas. Allocating almost all budget to cars for the last half century has lead to severe loss of experience with designing transit. The Buy America clause says that foreign companies must set up temporary factories in the US whenever someone orders a trainset from them.

There's lots and lots of things, but they all originate with car-centric post-ww2 policies.

Those seem to be the people who push the car-less idea the most, because it meets their world view, but doesn't work once you step outside the downtown bubble.

I have a friend who lives in a small village of roughly 3k people. If you step out of her backyard, you step into a winefield. You have to close the windows when they're fertilizing the fields nextdoor with dung.

I can reach her in half an hour plus three minute walk with trains that go every 15 minutes (half-hourly after 8pm, hourly after midnight).

Somehow this is possible all over the world, except in the US where it just an inevitable impossibility, just the way things are. I dare say, the people who are actually in a bubble here are the North Americans who have never seen or lived in a city that is anything except a square mile of skyscrapers surrounded by an endless sea of car-dependent single family houses and desolate concrete parking lots.

It is pretty frequently done when arguing in bad faith, or (sometimes deliberately) misunderstanding that "minority" refers to power and not numbers.

Take a train? Doesn't go there.

It should, that's the point. The only reason it doesn't is because the US has been regressing on rail infrastructure for a century.

Bus? Again.

It should. And it should be so often you don't need to check a schedule.

I'm not sure about IP rights, but saying natural rights derive from property rights, which this sounds like, is pretty popular in right wing libertarian circles. The idea being that if you own yourself, all human rights become property rights. This is the basis of things like Ayn Rand's "objectivism", a philisophy effectively claiming to have solved morality once and for all.

It is, of course, clearly nonsense if you try to use it for anything more than justify unfettered capitalism or drug legalization. Most famously being unable to effectively condemn things like pedophilia, slave contracts or human trafficking. But this exact ability to come to counterintuitive conclusions about many things means it remains very popular among certain groups of people.

If running a dozen competing redundant versions of every utility to all homes is your idea of a productive use of resources I'm not really sure what to tell you.

You already need an existing C++ compiler to bootstrap GCC though I don't see how this is much different. Plus there is already mrustc as a C++ Rust implementatation specifically designed for bootstrapping.

Adding a GCC backend for Rust (rust-codegen-gcc) does this already. I do not personally see the point of writing another frontend in C++.

Feels like there's a 10-year cycle of this:

1. Companies lock down access until everyone starts pirating, broadcast rights become increasingly worthless.

2. A company realizes that this is a great opportunity to provide easy access to all of the media and becomes wildly succesful. Broadcast rights suddenly become very valuable.

3. Goto 1

There's still plenty of money to be made until the law comes into effect, the regulatory bodies become active, the cases are prepared, rulings are made, all of the layers of appeals have gone through, the regulators have decided whether the new measures are in compliance, it becomes a repeat offense, etc.

Right now, we'd be getting remakes from every piece of pop-culture that was semi-popular in the 80s-2002 time frame

That's exactly what we are getting right now though. Looking at the top ten of the box office right now, only three are not part of an existing franchise. Three of them are reboots of 80s movies, four if you count comic books. Large IP holders recognize under the current system, it is much more profitable to exploit their existing IP than to come up with new concepts. If the copyright terms were significantly shorter, the pressure to be original would be far higher.

It works better for entities that were able to gobble up all of the ipv4 space before the rest had a chance in general