dhh2106

Yes that seems at least worth a try, though I'm sure there's some rule against it?

Also, why do you need an android version at first? Author says the app is useless without it but I don't understand why

Completely agree, unless it's under the pretext of launching in China?

I don't see how that happens though unless reddit abandons some of its principles

For the last two decades, full-time workers with permanent jobs have had the right to take a six-month leave of absence to launch a company (or alternatively, to study or to look after a relative).

These are unpaid leaves, right?

I think it's a great idea, particularly for a business of a certain size. I know many of my peers leave their jobs because they are looking for an extended break. If they didn't have to leave, it could be a win for both employees and employers.

Yes, and the stories of people getting completely screwed over to make way for Foxconn

Perfect and beautiful are two different things.

100% agree that HN's UI is great, but I'm not sure anyone would look at it and say, "oh that's gorgeous." Or at least I wouldn't

After all, the purpose of UI is not to be beautiful, but too many people still think it is

I feel similarly about Medium: waning enthusiasm.

I only recently got engaged in HackerNews. The UI isn't beautiful. There are minimal features. It's my favorite content aggregator right now. Obviously, HN isn't a blogging platform, but it accomplishes many of the things medium is trying to.

I wonder if many more partners will give up on medium? Hackernoon is moving away because of a change to medium's advertising policy.

One interviewee, in response to a question about what advice he would give a potential whistle-blower, wrote, “[Can they] afford 5 years of their life in turmoil?” Another said, “Part of your ability to do anything about this is keeping yourself together,” and suggested that whistle-blowers find someone “like a minister or a shrink who’s confidentiality-protected,” because “this could go on for a while.” A high proportion of whistle-blowers reported divorces or other marital strain, family conflicts, and stress-related health issues including shingles, autoimmune disorders, panic attacks, insomnia, and migraines. Several of them said that the financial consequences were devastating.

More than anything, I didn't realize how long these cases seem to take. But I wonder: if there was a way to reduce the duration of the cases, would that reduce the impact on whistleblowers? Is that possible somehow? Retaliation is also a big concern, of course, as the article makes clear.

Also, I found this interesting: >the first documented whistle-blowing case in the United States took place in 1777, not long after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when a group of naval officers, including Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven, witnessed their commanding officer torturing British prisoners of war. When they reported the misconduct to Congress, the commanding officer charged Shaw and Marven with libel, and both men were jailed. The following year, Congress passed a law protecting whistle-blowers, and Shaw and Marven were acquitted by a jury.

Agreed. This feels like a classic causation v correlation problem.

Of course when a substitute improves, some people will switch. However, the root cause is the declining quality and lack of improvements to the system that even gives a substitute the chance to compete.

I honestly don't understand how 100 years ago nyc was able to build an expansive subway system and today it takes decades to add a new station. I know it's a combination of land costs, labor costs, corruption, regulation, underground congestion (and that the original lines were built by private companies) but I still don't really understand the situation.

Agreed. I feel like a barely flinch at these headlines anymore. My guess is most people also are getting desensitized, which means the PR costs of a hack are decreasing.

We need some mechanism to increase costs (or fundamentally change the way data ownership works)

Great and infuriating article. There's also issues with eyewitnesses testimony and lineups that have been well documented, meaning the rate of wrongful conviction may be quite high.

"The National Registry of Exonerations has documented 553 cases since 1989 in which someone was convicted on false or misleading forensic evidence and later cleared. The growing list of exonerations includes a Texas man whose 1987 murder conviction, based on bite-mark evidence, was thrown out in December, and an Illinois man declared innocent in January in the retrial of a murder case that hinged on dubious ballistics evidence.

But the exonerations likely represent only a fraction of the cases in which faulty forensics sent innocent people to prison, researchers say."

Is there any research estimating how many wrongly convicted people may be incarcerated? How could that even be estimated?

How were they conspiring to limit labor competition?

Completely agree constant vigilance is important. It also shouldn't matter that many employees can switch jobs. All employees cannot (personal circumstances, visas, etc). It also doesn't waive the company of its responsibility for fair pay.

+1

It's hard to build up to complex solutions when we (society, broadly defined) seem unable to agree on the basic facts.

I don't know for sure if the past was better or worse when it came to reporting the truth. Given the limited number of news outlets, radio stations and tv stations historically, there were at least a limited set of reporting to agree on (independent of the accuracy of that reporting). This was probably very helpful in enabling more complex solutions.

I don't understand what the offer suggests companies do instead?

Service based models (with training, support or integration) also can have perverse incentives on the open source software. To make those services valuable, you need the product to be worse than it otherwise could be.

Additionally, the characterization that open core companies stop improving the open source software and only improve the proprietary software might be true at some firms but is the extreme.

I thought all diseases spread exponentially, with the rate being determined by how contagious on one side and how deadly on the other?

With topsoil disappearing at a rate of 1 percent a year and “only 30 to 70 good harvest years left depending on your location,”

Well, that's definitely a scary framing. Does anyone have sources for this specific prediction?

Aside from launching his (for-profit) climate fund, (for-profit) vc investments, and funding research, I'd be very interested in more details on how the money will be used.

Nice article op. I work in a remote-first org and completey agree that org structure is crucial.

A couple additional thoughts: people assume remote work expands your talent pool to everyone. I don't believe it does. You're limited by time zones and by autonomy. Not everyone performs at a high level in a remote context. You need people who are very organized, disciplined and self-starters. Additionally, it can be very hard to unplug in a remote first context so you need a culture that prioeitizes time offline (I.e out of the office)

I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch.

CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it.

Do people here have examples of companies that are taking innovative approaches to the licensing/OSS question?

I think it depends how it goes. Some people might gain trust if the community could move swiftly to fix the problem

"By making the episode unavailable in Saudi Arabia, Netflix became complicit with the pervasive censorship that artists, entertainers, journalists and regular citizens have long had to deal with in the Middle East."

Netflix had seemed to be one of the few tech companies that could do no wrong of late. It's built a reputation as a place people want to work and can be proud they work. I wonder how a story like this affects employee retention and recruitment.

Were there reactions from Netflix employees?

And here is an overview of the results: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/01/bi...

Has anyone read any good responses to this?

The Chinese have made massive infrastructure investments around Africa, in ports and railways, etc. These have massively increased china's influence in the region

They've also sparked fears of a debt trap (https://www.npr.org/2018/10/08/641625157/a-new-chinese-funde...) and scenarios where countries default on debt so China will control major components of the infrastructure.

Couldn't the whole family enter the same VR environment? Why limit it to just yourself?

Then you'd be free to chat over the top of the boring bits...

I agree that replicating the full social context of TV will be difficult

Interesting article.

Any literature/thoughts on when to commoditize complements rather than trying to vertically integrate? Private repos might be a complement to github's other business, but it doesn't naturally follow that they should commoditize it in all situations

And Houston.

In Triumph of the City, Edward Glaser talks a lot about the effect of regulation in housing markets on pricing and new construction. He uses Houston as the prime example.

Of course, deregulation in the housing market is far from a panacea and comes with a number of trade-offs

Here's the main study cited in the article: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3301009

"We find that the same minority applicants who faced lower approval rates on auto loans do not face lower approval rates on credit cards, even during the same year. This finding suggests that the human element of auto lending, rather than differences in hard information, leads to the lower approval rates for minorities."

What are the main differences between beam and grin?

Any thoughts on which to start with?

Agree it took decades for TCP. We might still be a long time away for blockchain and associated technologies (ipfs, zkp, etc.) going mainstream

The privacy use case in blockchain has trade-offs and is not a panacea. There are some situations where the centralized efficiency outweighs the risks

I posted this as a response below but still

I find it interesting that OP says public crypto failed because of both fundamental misunderstandings and immature tech (internet trying to compete with newspapers in the 80s). Eventually, the internet was able to compete with newspapers and I think eventually public blockchain will compete with centralized companies.

Networks can benefit from economies of scale without the rent seeking bottlenecks of centralized agents. I agree with op that in some cases centralization naturally happens but it doesn't follow that this is true in all cases.

On a diff note, has anyone read the Master Switch that OP recommended? Worth reading?

There isn't currently a huge demand for public crypto currencies but I see a lot of demand from enterprises (particularly in financial services and supply chains) for blockchain. The tech is iterating to solve for these needs.

I don't think that means public crypto has failed or will go away. It just needs time to mature as a technology.

Fwiw, I find it interesting that OP says public crypto failed because of both fundamental misunderstandings and immature tech (internet trying to compete with newspapers in the 80s). Eventually, the internet was able to compete with newspapers and I think eventually public blockchain will compete with centralized companies.

Networks can benefit from economies of scale without the rent seeking bottlenecks.