HN user
CV at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/flk60yotkeuh5uo/AABK6gsa5eFO6tEBE8924zHVa?dl=0
Seriously, stop with this crap. The people on this forums are some of the people who have the know-how to actually DO something about the internet. If they can't discuss these things, we get the situation that your company seems to like - SV decides what's allowed on the internet and what's not. Those of us outside of the US don't like it very much, and we'd prefer to - you know - talk about it.
But the answer is not to stop having laws.
Why?
Serious question. When are laws too many? (According to some history, 10 laws were too many and most people were ignoring them.)
Are a trillion laws too many? A billion? A million? A thousand? What if we had a thousand laws, but each law had a million pages?
(I'm pretty sure we're at over a billion pages of laws if we take into account all the laws in the world - as multinational companies are supposed to do.)
When, exactly, should we say "this is excessive"?
Almost right. On the basis of their political affiliation, mostly.
And yet, the number of otherwise informed, intelligent people I've talked to who believe that the frequently-used image of the Covid virus is an actual picture is astonishing.
Yes. The reason is the most people are idiots. Like a ruler says in one of our books, "stupid, but many".
All blackmail involves exposing something that someone doesn't want exposed - usually because the "something" is illegal. And yet, blackmail itself is illegal.
Most countries have a culture against whistleblowers, starting from childhood ("don't be a tattletale", "don't be a rat").
He went against the consensus. You cannot go against the consensus.
There are a lot of use cases. For example, I have 17 applications running on a system that need a connection string. When I need to change that connection string, I can 1) change 17 config files; 2) change 17 shortcuts containing command-line arguments; 3) change one env variable.
It's difficult :)
The US government sends people to prison for owning the wrong plant or the wrong type of lobster. It assassinates political opponents - definitely foreign, likely domestic. It snoops on, disrupts and if necessary curtails any serious efforts at political organizing (they actually called Zuckerberg in front of Congress because Facebook was not censoring enough people! Facebook! That was freaking mind-blowing.)
Yep, the difference is amazing.
Eh, unlimited data plans might still be valuable to someone.
Really? So I can send anyone I want to jail, as long as they have one of these? Wow, that's definitely not going to cause problems!
Huh. Almost as if a company would provide a guarantee and only get paid if they kept the servers running for at least 99.999% of the time.
Weird, huh?
... but the counter incentive is the free market.
Yes. Which is why the free market is ILLEGAL in the medical system, in the police system, in the educational system, in the judiciary system...
As a general rule, the entire medical profession has the incentives set up the wrong way - the more problems you have, the more they benefit.
I have read that there was a time, in the distant past, where you paid a doctor only as long as you were healthy. I can come up with some problems even in that case, but I can't help but think it might still be an improvement over the current situation...
Huh. Would it be possible for someone to hijack the SIM card in such a device and use it to get free calls all over the world, including long-distance? Would that be illegal? Would anyone care? :)
I have no idea why you believe TV makers won't handle this market.
Here's a list of non-smart TVs on the local equivalent of Amazon[1], which includes this 75" 4K Samsung TV[2].
[1] https://www.emag.ro/televizoare/filter/tip-tv-f9181,non-smar...
[2] https://www.emag.ro/televizor-samsung-75-189-cm-75ru7099-4k-...
Or if that doesn't work, then torches and pitchforks.
It's America. I think the Matrix quote "guns; lots of guns" is more appropriate :)
Off-topic: this is one of the few comments you have that aren't dead.
Or half of antartica disappearing? Or Australia, and Western United States constantly on fire?
I rest my case.
Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?
In fiction?
Back on the original topic, Erik Dietrich's "Developer Hegemony" has a less extreme view of the corporation; worth reading IMO.
I have.
The number of people killed by the US government in the last 50 years dwarfs that of people killed by Facebook by many orders of magnitude.
Similarly, the evidence for climate change is pretty much undeniable now and I can only assume that those pretending it doesn't exist are not honest actors.
That's exactly my position, except the opposite. Anyone who claims that "the world is ending, give us money" is anything but a scam, shamelessly copied from the Catholic Church, is not an honest actor.
Name three scientific papers (that you have studied) that contributed to mobile phones.
From your mouth to God's ears. /grin
This religion, despite Asimov, was not successful because it worked. It was successful because - like all other religions - it made it easier for people to stop thinking for themselves, and accept what they are told is the truth.
[When it works we call it engineering.]
I think this is another example of "worse is better" [1] -- it's something that's yucky, and has a lot of flaws, but worked (for some value of worked) well enough for a lot of people.
This is one of those instances where I find it difficult to accept honesty. The entire purpose of the public school system - in EVERY country - it to make you accept stuff without evidence, or AGAINST evidence.
E.g.: the Earth revolving around the Sun, the existence of Black Holes, the Earth being 5 billion years old and so on. I have daily evidence against the first, and no evidence for the others, all of which are accepted by everyone "because scientists / professors / everyone else says so" and any attempts to argue against it are ridiculed.
Let's not even go into Global Scamming, which has reached religious levels of hysteria. I mean, "the world is ending, give us money" is basically copied from the Catholic Church.
The number of downvotes / flagged comments on this page suggests that this site is heavily biased towards the left / atheist crowd.
Then again, reading the comments for a couple of days will do the same :)
I understand this, and even agree with it up to a point. However, sometimes the gap between worldviews is too large.
Here's a few hypotheticals:
- you're a Christian trying to politely explain to a Satanist that you dislike sacrificing children to Moloch
- you're a transgender trying to politely explain to a rabid transphobe that maybe you have a right to live your life as you see fit
- you're a doctor explaining to someone that vaccines are not a conspiracy to kill the population
- you're someone genuinely scared of the possibility of raised water levels in a few decades talking to the owner of a 3 mpg monster truck
Now, how long do you think you can last being polite? More to the point, WHY?
Yep. The purpose of taxes is building up the treasury, so that the people in power can keep being in power.