passivate

It is a bit sad to see the smartest engineers in the world all working towards implementing and maintaining the largest spying apparatus in history.

We should be focusing on learning from and highlighting people who are working to make the world a better place - and not focusing on employees from these companies. Any online news aggregator could institute a policy to not promote products or services of these companies. Unfortunately, many startups are operating with the hope that these companies acquire them, and so they're all to happy to continue extending this spying apparatus even further into other domains.

Heh, I got a chuckle out of that :) Thanks for sharing.

Lobbying itself doesn't involve an exchange of money (its illegal to directly compensate a politician in exchange for services). If you write a letter to a politician its lobbying. Donations, many of which are legitimate, are regulated in many ways (e.g. https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate... ) The author is disingenuous by implying that all donations are bribes towards a single issue. If the goal is to fight the corruption, its best to be honest.

You're 100% correct. Its mostly about finding a system that works for you. As a format fat person I have internalized the fact that my body's hunger signal is broken and that 'eat when you are hungry' leads to weight gain for me. Focusing on the CO part of CICO, especially non exercise expenditure of energy has helped me keep my weight in check.

A lot of human progress in core sciences and engineering is on the backs of people toiling the midnight hours on sheer passion for little monetary reward. We owe a great debt of gratitude towards them.

In any commercial organization, there are tremendous pressures in high-investment, super high-risk projects and anyone can trivially find things that are wrong with the current system. The much more difficult challenge is showing an alternate path that is superior - based on the results it achieves. The times when you see the ugly behavior of people are times of desperation. Online commenters expend a lot of effort point out how to improve things by "proving" it by linking to random studies - but the more persuasive argument is by implementing those changes in the real world. "Talk is cheap, show me the code." ;)

Except CEOs, apparently they're always overpaid. ;)

States provide the infrastructure and educate the workforce which enables the job creations.

Yes, there is a nice division of responsibilities. But ultimately, governments are doing the jobs they get paid for. And they're not only wasteful with our money (spending on wars, defense, etc), ironically (in a sad way) they pay government workers poorly - See teachers' salaries.

Jobs would be created without the rich.

Jobs were created at all stages in history in all kinds of social and economic conditions. Also, plenty of rich people got rich after starting companies and creating jobs. We're incentivizing people who like money to create jobs, among other things.

See responses sibling post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31743755) about the issue with 401(k) (or pension funds in non-USA countries).

Those are not responses to my comment, so specifically what part of my comment was inaccurate? I can correct any misunderstandings, or improve my comment to fix any errors on my part.

There were a lot many years from the time of Amazon's inception till they became a monopoly. It seems like your "what could be" experiment has already been done. There was plenty of opportunity, but nobody managed to build a better competitor to them.

It is a separate argument, but 'more competition' isn't a magical fix to everything. This sort of gating mechanism relies on the end user/consumer having good knowledge, sound judgement, etc. Also what is best for the consumer isn't best for the society. A wild example - For me, as the consumer I'm happy to get an iPhone for $200, but that might mean that Apple pays their employees below US minimum wage.

For me, I am convinced that they create jobs, spend money in the economy, help provide valuable goods and services to society, etc. Amazon is famous for not hoarding money but re-investing their profits. Most 401ks invest in index funds that are buoyed by the tech stocks. I don't have ready citations but I believe these to be relatively uncontroversial statements. This whole talk about "net positive" and what is "net" is a pointless discussion that is going nowhere. There is no way to prove anything unless we have an alternative universe without Amazon to study.

What sort of citation will make you happy?

By that same logic, why should USA salaries be higher than the rest of the developed world? Will you work less hard if you can only get $70,000 versus $200,000? The CEO is an employee. The owners of the company hire him/her to do a job.

That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

The quantum substrate being non-deterministic doesn't mean that free-will exists/doesn't exist. It has to be shown as such.

What is happening at the quantum level, to the extent that we can understand it, isn't directly translatable into a non-deterministic world at the higher macro level. And so, we do expect and observe a certain level of determinism in our macro scale world. For e.g. A topic relevant to this community - Computing. For the vast vast majority of cases when thousands of people execute the same program on the same or similar hardware at different times in different regions we do expect, and observe the same deterministic result. The outliers to this are primarily due to damage to the processor/equipment, software bugs, or other known factors (including alpha particles/radiation, etc).

Well current scientific thought says yes

Link to evidence?

Wind the clock back to a time when you made a decision. Is it possible for you to make a different decision if you had the exact same mood/context/environment/knowledge and all the sub-atomic particles were exactly identical with the same spin, etc? Current dominant philosophical thought points towards a big NO.

Since its near you, have you tried going there and explaining it to the manager?

In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of semantic metadata. Restaurants won't have a 50MB PDF explaining the chef's vision for organic cuisine

That is a good idea, especially for visually impaired users - but why can't we have both? I sometimes like seeing the fancy fonts, and images if I have never eaten that dish before, etc.

Okay, but I'm not sure what the pentagon papers have to do with coinbase or anything we're discussing here. It goes without saying that I am not proposing a principle that applies in every single situation, for every single person. I don't know anyone who writes comments with that assumption.

I was not thinking this to be a payroll position. Just a consulting / one-off transaction. In those situations, I haven't heard of any verification of immigration documents... maybe its common, I don't know.

I don't think we should reward employees for bringing the stock up, but blame the CEO for when the stock drops. Its a team effort either way.

That doesn't make the title click bait.

It does. Sensationalism and misleading headlines designed to drive an emotional response are considered click bait too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait

I don't know everything about Coinbase's history, but I agree with most of the tweet. Airing dirty laundry in public, and arm twisting management is not really a great strategy. There will always be a power asymmetry, and it was understood as such when the employee joined such an organization. Using stock options which are a form of compensation benefit to then position oneself to be above the management is silly. "Smart people" is not some kind of a character trait that engages in such behavior.

Hmm, are you on the hook if they don't disclose this?

Even here on HN, plenty of folks will comment on all kinds of research they know little about.

I don't see anything wrong with that, because all opinions are not equal.

I think there is some level of pressure to get one's word in quickly, otherwise the nebulous cloud of commenters moves on to the next story, and your well-thought-out comment that took hours to write is seen by no-one. If you're responding to someone hoping to get into a nice conversation, you're out of luck since they have no idea you just responded to them.

I don't think low level system APIs when called from an App should be messing with UI components. Can you explain what is better about it?

I don't think its realistic to expect a Windows developer to solve a problem in Excel!

I think news is a public good, and much like paying for educating our kids, there has to be a sustainable funding model to educate the adults as well. But thats my view, and we may have a disagreement. I don't wish to convince you otherwise.

Sure, but it takes time to build brands like NYT, WSJ, WaPo etc. Until then, personal credibility will have to suffice.

You will come to rely on publisher branding, following the work of specific authors who you know do good work, etc.

Its no different than knowing if the food tastes good at the new restaurant.

It should be possible in any western system of law to defend content containing provably true statements (IANAL!).

The thesis that it's ok that we simply not give humanity places to speak & share is ghastly.

That goes against today's mainstream ideal of de-platforming people who say provably false (allegedly) things against minorities, women, LGBTQ communities, etc. The logic there is Platform X is a private business and they can kick out anyone they want.

with the added benefit of actual inheritance

Has this inheritance actually been experimentally demonstrated? Yes, random assembly of inherently unstable RNA molecules in a nucleotide soup is possible. And agreed, some of these randomly assembled RNA molecules might have limited catalytic properties (nothing like peptides). But - we need a mechanism of genetic continuity - before we get to inheritance.

Nobody is using a phone that is larger than a human's vertical field of view at arms length. Even otherwise, human vision is based on eye movements and a complex form of visual integration. Your desire to mock others is entirely your free choice, but nothing you said is "sensible".