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Also not a lawyer. To be covered by Germany's consumer protection law, you need show that you are end consumer of a commercial product or service. I don't see how that would apply to YC/HN.

If you could pull that part off, I think you could take YC to court in Germany, and even achieve a favorable judgement. However, I don't see any way how you could enforce the outcome, except if YC has assets in Germany.

The situation becomes clearer if you take a look at the traffic today with a human operator in each car. Also in this model, engineering and human failures happen. Engines break, tires get punctured, brakes fail, and humans make errors. We still accept the deaths and injuries caused by car traffic, and don't prohibit cars.

So it is more than sufficient if you can show that AVs - on average - cause less harm than human-operated vehicles.

To your specific question: when the AV loses connection, it would do the same as a human driver when a tire is punctured: turn on warning lights, slow down, and stop at the roadside. Like in other car failure situations, that might cause an accident in some cases. However, that is fine, as long as it is rare enough.

(disclaimer: I'm not working in AV tech, I don't know if current AV technology handles this case as imagined)

So which of those approaches is the one all rational humans would agree on, so that we can base the notion of truth on it from now on?

It seems that falsifying would provide an escape route. Unfortunately it doesn't, because you would first have to establish - without a doubt - the truth of the contradicting statement. That works ok-ish for collapsing bridges, but it breaks down for less direct observations, e.g., when reading experimental data from a computer screen, collected to refute a Physics theory.

After the postmodernist wave, analytic philosophers have attempted to rescue the notion of truth. All those attempts, including the ones you listed, change the meaning of 'truth' significantly, compared to how non-philosophers use that term.

None of the listed options is so convincing that everybody using their rationality would immediately agree with the proposed model of truth. That seems to indicate that also for these options, rationality alone is insufficient to establish truth, and a belief/irrational/social factor still would be at play.

I'm not implying that the mentioned approaches developed by analytic philosophers are useless. They do deepen our understanding how reasoning and fact establishing works. But in my opinion they are still very far away of solving the Münchhausen Trilemma.

There is no dilemma. We agree that people can be manipulated to some degree. We also agree that - if they don't suffer from an illness - that manipulation only goes so far. Finally, we agree that we shouldn't force a lifestyle on anybody.

So now you can manipulate (or nudge) people either towards behavior which is considered as beneficial (regular exercise, healthy food, etc.), or you can manipulate them towards unhealthy habits (e.g., smoking).

It is a good idea to limit the ability of actors to nudge people towards unhealthy habits. That will help everybody except a few people who will earn less money. It is also a good idea to foster nudging good behaviors, even if there is no commercial value behind it.

The dilemma only starts to occur if we try to put all things into either the good or the bad box. Probably most ads are in the large grey area in between these extremes. However, ads fostering smoking addiction or obesity should be called out as bad for all of us. There is no downside of this call-out.

Now, by moving the goalposts, you lost your initial argument. Sure it might be the case that Swedish companies, at some stage of their growth, tend to incorporate in another country.

Still the benefits Swedish employees experience don't seem to be in the way of getting a startup successfully up and running in Sweden.

Of course, everybody can interpret history as they like. The fine handed out by EU to Microsoft was of course also a deterrent against further similar attempts, and Microsoft afterwards changed their tactics not only in EU, but world-wide. Or did you not get the Windows browser choice menu in US?

Even without psychedelics, persons suffering from psychological issues can have breakdowns in therapeutic sessions. Professional therapists are very careful to not unlock 'dangerous' memories and insights prematurely, they wait until they consider the patient ready to deal with it. They also have emergency plans in place, reaching so far as taking care that an overwhelmed patient is afterwards treated in a hospital for a while to safely recover. Do you have such emergency plans in place?

While I trust that you can give psychologically healthy people a good experience, I have a hard time imagining how you could give the necessary support to people with larger issues. And because those issues are often deeply hidden, it is hard even for professionals to detect that in advance.

We have neural circuits that receive sense data, place attention, and record attentional memories.

From there, you can either go into the direction where we are just machines, and everything we do is predicted by how we are programmed. Then, free will, ethics, etc. are out of the window. There is then also just a machine named trevyn posting bit patterns on HN. In such a world, consciousness and free will don't actually exist, or only do exist as some kind of illusion/imagination. While this world view is somewhat consistent, it seems very hard to reconcile it with your own self-image. Why would you continue to strive for anything if you really believe in this 'clockwork' model? It sounds like a sad life, somewhat like taking the red pill and finding out you have no control whatsoever over your own life and can't leave your lifelong coffin.

The alternative would be a real explanation, i.e., assume that consciousness and free will exist as you experience them, and explain how neural circuits generate these effects. With this assumption, you so far only stated that neural circuits cause consciousness. But that is not an explanation yet. You need to explain how it happens. And that means, you need to connect the tangible, physical world with an intangible, non-physical phenomenon such as consciousness. I'm looking forward to see how you cross that bridge.

Windows was lock-in in late 90s and early 2000s. That was not only a fear. EU forced Microsoft to open Windows during that time. And that was a good thing. I don't want to wait decades until that stuff is sorted out by obsolescence.

Where is the advantage in waiting for the market?

However, no one forces you to live in the EU. Even countries can exit it. Let us do our thing, and you can do your thing. The market will sort it out :-)

I think we have to agree to disagree. I assume that you are not living in the EU. Our experiences here with governmental regulation are not so bad. Companies are complaining, but consumers are not.

Making things a little more convenient for everybody is super-compelling if there is no downside. Freedom for humans is an extremely high value. However, companies are not humans, there is no inherent benefit in giving them as much freedom as possible. And I know economics well enough to confidently state that freedom for companies does not naturally cause well-being and freedom for humans.

And definitely: Every country regulated power outlets. Every country regulated landline phone connections. Every country regulated mobile phone transmission. EU even regulated mobile phone roaming prices. Now they are regulating chargers. And I hope they won't stop, but do everything to keep modern technology open. Industry loves to lock consumers into separate, proprietary, walled gardens. There is no viable strategy for individual consumers to escape. The only viable strategy to escape is by regulation.

I have a hard time understanding the question. If something is overwhelmingly beneficial for everyone, I don't mind at all if market or government make it happen. I just want it to happen.

Again, to not be misunderstood, I'm not sure if charger standardization is indeed overwhelmingly beneficial for everyone. That is what I believe we should discuss here.

Again, you need to show specifically that a uniform charger is less beneficial to consumers than letting Apple keep their proprietary patent-protected charger.

I want my iPhone and my Android phone and my tablet and my notebook to share the same charging port. I would definitely buy an iPhone with USB-C if the market would offer one to me. However, the market won't give that to me. Even if 90% of iPhone buyers would prefer USB-C over Lightning, Apple would not give it to us, because it is beneficial for their business to build their own walled garden.

I don't know if forcing Apple to agree with other vendors is a net benefit for all consumers or not. However, as you seem to have a very strong opinion on why that would be detrimental to consumers, you need to show where consumers would be negatively affected, specifically for charging ports.

This has nothing to do with what one thinks about governments in general.

Everything where high interoperability is more beneficial for consumers than proprietary solutions by individual companies. As a rule of thumb, everything where standardization brings more benefits to consumers than innovation.

Note that as consumer, I can't vote with my money for standardization. I can only vote for one of the proprietary solutions. So if 70% of consumers stick to one option, and 30% stick to the other option (because of other product features), standardization will never happen through market forces, even if 100% of the consumers would want it.

It gets even worse when more than 2 options are on the market, and vendors gain an advantage by locking customers in to their proprietary option.

Please make yourself familiar with a bit more modern economic theories. The belief that the unregulated market moves things to an optimum for all participants has been proven to be wrong by modern game theory. Not all economic games have their equilibrium at the optimum for consumers.

I leave open if this particular intervention on chargers is beneficial for the public or not, but you will have to argue about chargers to make a point, not about governments and markets.

Which protection in particular is present in US and missing in Germany?

It was usually a typist's job, and you paid for the newspaper, instead of watching the interview for free on Youtube.

I guess, as an artist, he assumed more people had his impulses?

I think this is part of the sixties zeitgeist: if people would be freed from capitalistic consumerism, there would be some kind of awakening, leading to a better society.

One of Paik's famous quotes is: "Television has attacked us for a lifetime, now we fight back". The attitude to hope for everybody's creativity is also well aligned with Beuys posit: "Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler" (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-joseph-beuys-ever...).

Superdeterminism looks like metaphysics to me. It seems an attempt to postulate a fundamental truth about the world, but without empirical foundation. Which experiment would falsify the superdeterminism hypothesis?

Psychology talks about 'agreeable' in the same way as Physics talks about 'hot'. In our everyday context, 'hot' is quite vague, and people will have widely varying opinions about something being hot, depending on the context and on their personal experience.

To cope with that problem, science needs to detach the term from everyday use, and put an artificial definition in its place which allows to make repeatable statements. In its wake, the term loses a lot of its meaning. That is the price for preciseness.

Imagine there was a unit for agreeableness, so you could say 'John has an agreeableness of 4.4 Ag'. Then it would be clear that this statement refers to a formal definition (based on a standardized questionnaire), instead of our common vague understanding.

Now you could still argue that this new definition is so detached from what we usually mean with agreeableness that it becomes useless. However, you can't simply dismiss the method, you need to bring concrete arguments why the proposed definition does not capture what it is supposed to capture. For example, you could show that people with agreeableness below 2 Ag are married happily more often than people with agreeableness above 4 Ag. Do you have such concrete objections?

They hired you because they already believe you will be a valuable contributor. So don't try to impress your colleagues, but rather try to collaborate with them. For example, instead of asking this question here at HN, approach your peer reviewers and ask them about it.

Another advice would be to explain as part of your PR (e.g., in the ticket) which design options you considered and why you chose the one you ended up with.

As long as Google cares, it is a net win for humanity. Even the worst-case scenario that Google is later bought by an immoral company is a better outcome for humanity than Google immediately becoming immoral.

I also find your argument about Google becoming unprofitable unconvincing. They were very profitable while they held the standards high in the past. Maybe not maximally profitable, but very profitable.

[1] and [2] are not studies. [2] isn't even peer reviewed.

[3] is behind a paywall. It appeared in the "2006 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance", which is a pretty good indicator that this is not work done by social scientists, i.e., not scientifically backed. I have worked in science, the good papers appear in journals highly relevant for the topic.

[4] and [5] are not about software engineering.

[6] is also behind a paywall, and is based on a study with 24 students.

As I can't access the full-text papers, what is the reported strength of the effect, i.e., if person A is x% better than person B in spatial recognition, how much better is A in software engineering?

edit: here is a study presenting evidence that spatial skill differences in gender are not biological, see https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-38414-001. Without paywall: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mike_Stieff/publication...

I would hope that every single person - including shareholders, managers, and employees - holds our fundamental values like peace, freedom, or justice higher than their desire to maximise profits.

The top question is not: will it hurt the company. The top question is: will it hurt humanity.

We liked Google because their founders did the right thing for a long time, and fended off profit-maximizing shareholders.

Your examples are not related to software engineering. Please name software engineering related biological differences between men and women, backed by solid scientific studies.

No, because then US would stop doing business with Saudi-Arabia.

The impact on China's mass surveillance capabilities is negligible, because RISC-V work is open source already.

What the foundation avoids by moving to Switzerland is fragmentation of their ecosystem due to US foreign policy decisions.

Note that China is already among the technology leaders in the world. Even if cut off from the remaining world, they would have no issue in manufacturing and operating sophisticated surveillance infrastructure. So I can't see how the foundation would help suppressed minorities in China by staying in US.

I like a lot how G. B. Shaw phrased this insight: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

However, from the perspective of the reasonable man, things look differently: Only a small minority of 'unreasonable men' actually manage to change the world. So it is rational to be doubtful if someone's novel idea contradicts widely shared assumptions.

I agree with the assessment of interface{}. However, the proverb you cite does not exist. It is: "A little copying is better than a little dependency.", which does not apply here.