It may go against the grain here, but I think advertisements in Windows 10 is crucial. It's strange, because you would expect the HN audience to be in favor of getting products in front of eyeballs.
Operating systems in 2020 have evolved into thought systems that enable our lives in the emergent digital economy. Think of it like real-estate in the "real" world. People hate billboards because they're gaudy, yet they relish Times Square. Operating Systems are like the Times Square of the computing world, allowing us to navigate and consume and vote with our dollars. It makes total sense for them to contain advertisements. In fact, I encourage it.
Are you in favor of your landlord or the HOA replacing your wallpaper with advertisement too? My desktop environment's role in my life is much more like that than Time Square's.
Tourists visit Times Square and then go home. Similarly I might tour some virtual hell hole covered in ads for Candy Crush but then I’m going home to an ad free existence because I’m not a crazy person.
I am glad you mentioned China. Many people are too afraid to acknowledge the reality of that authoritarian country, for fear of reprisal from liberal do-gooders.
That's the beauty of the free market, put your dollars where you believe they hold worth. I may disagree with your analysis, but I respect your essential freedom to vote with your money.
But on a more serious note, it is great that we are seeing thought leaders counter-act the media propaganda frenzy regarding this situation. The "big evil businessman" know best that our economy is on shaky ground, and that continuing social distancing measures will immeasurably damage America's position as a global power (and thus its citizens security and freedom) more than a few tens of thousands of deaths will. I, for one, am proud to go back to work. Staying at home isolated is merely fomenting unnecessary chaos and social unrest.
I am fortunate to be employed too, but I work in a closed space with little contact with others. Unless you work in a meatpacking plant, hospital, factory, or front-facing office, you may be taking on less risk than Tesla workers.
In defense, Tesla did send an e-mail to the workers saying they could stay home if they are at risk, which is hats off to them. Is it legally defensible to use this if they get fired? I hope so.
Man, I really liked Elon, until he started downplaying and dismissing the risk of COVID. It just didn't come from solid scientific reasoning in my view. Taken out of context, this lawsuit would have had me in full support of Tesla. But I now really have to question his motives behind employing people at Tesla.
Thank you for being a diamond in the rough, Dan. Your tireless work keeping Hacker News a safe haven for free thinkers and polite politic is essential during times like these.
There is another meaning, akin to "needle in the haystack". This is the only meaning I was aware of until I used the phrase to describe my then-girlfriend. She was only aware of the meaning you reference. It was awkward, but we're now married.
Over the years I have asked many other people about this phrase when it came up in conversation. Most of my acquaintances only knew of the "needle in a haystack" meaning. These people went to Berkeley, Stanford, etc. and worked at FAANG or are doctors/lawyers.
I have wondered if it's a geographic thing — most of these people have spent most of their lives in California. Perhaps the east coast is different?
I think we need to do more in this space. As HackerNews had become more popular, it has begun the inevitable transformation from a place of analysis to a place of advocacy.
...which inevitably results in a drop in quality and substance and a rise in partisanship.
HackerNews thrived for a long time by keeping under the radar, but what we really need now is a new mechanic that rewards dispationate analytic content and substance over partisanship meetoo content.
Behavioral guidelines and moderation don't work long term and don't scale.
That's not to say there isn't a decline, just that it's hard to discuss objectively. The dominant factor in such perceptions is randomness; more precisely, the streaks that occur in randomness that feel like they can't possibly be random. That explains why people have been saying the same things in identical language for so long. You could even make one of those guessing-game sites out of such comments. For example: 2010 or 2020?
The community is full of ideologues to the point where the comments are most often just predictable talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum. Everyone talks about the intelligent conversation, and it does happen, but far more times it’s just the same clichés repeated over and over.
(2010, of course, or the question wouldn't have made sense, but you see the point.) A decade is a lifetime in internet dog years, so HN already has survived these concerns long-term. If there is a downward trend, it's a slow one. Some of the things we've done to stave it off (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) must have done something.
If I argue the point using that analogy, someone is bound to take it the wrong way.
If people keep seeing signs of apocalypse for 30 years, they always say the same things, the apocalypse never comes, and there's a simple alternative explanation, that weakens the case for apocalypse, no? At a minimum the burden is on 2020 to show how the same perception now is more objective than it was in 2010, or 2008 for that matter, when people were also saying this. The simple explanation is that internet users always perceive things this way.
Just like some people are more intelligent than others, or more athletic than others... some are more self-motivated and can work through their own initiative rather than relying on external input (such as managers).
That's not a bad thing, either! We should encourage those self-motivated people to work however makes them the most productive members of our economy. That is incredibly crucial for the times that we live in.
When I was a manager I'd always just say to the people under me that they where driven, until they actually started to be motivated. It's a great little trick that made everyone happier, works on teaching programming too.
I don't think it's that easy as self-motivation as a scale, it's all about the environment and task that makes people the most productive.
I always want there to be someone with insane amounts of grit and ask how they do it. Insane amounts of grit would be:
- Six pack and can run a marathon when old.
- Recognised in their field.
- Earned enough through work (not through the insane rise in housing prices)
to be able to stay in their home for a decade without working.
Checking all these boxes, would be the master of grit.
This is a great idea!! We need to give these poor and low-income urban and rural students as much opportunity to "get connected" as we can. There are many thousands of gifted students out there whose potential is untapped, and I think this is a great opportunity to accelerate education and foster growth.
This, too, would help with the learn-to-code movement (a skills gap that I consider essential to close). This could have far-reaching effects and do wonders to lift the next generation of poor out of poverty and into more lucrative white collar jobs.
It is a great idea, but it's also a testament to the sorry state of our nation's internet infrastructure caused by telecoms that are free both from competition and from being regulated as the essential utilities they are (the latter thanks to Ajit Pai's cronyist FCC).
Maybe you can find solace in the fact that Germany, which allegedly breathes engineering, suffers from much the same fate. The internet in the large cities is good (not great, but good), in the smaller cities it's a mixed bag, but largely okay, and in the rural parts it's usually a joke.
It appears that it is not an issue that's unique to the US, but common in the "old" Western democracies. Friends tell me it's not much different in rural Spain and France.
Rural Spain and France are a lot less dense than rural Germany though.
There's really no excuse for the state of broadband and cell coverage in your country. I lived two years in Mitte in Berlin, and I couldn't even make a phone call from my place! To add insult to the injury the BMVI was just around the corner; billboards about Gigabit broadband by 2025 reminded me everyday the country is 10 years behind where it could afford to be.
Part of the problem is the goalposts move. The cellular data connection you can get in many places (though, of course, not everywhere) is probably a lot faster than back when WiMAX was being promoted as the fix for the last mile problem. And typical cellular data caps today would mostly look like all the bandwidth in the world going back 15 years or whatever.
Now, a lot of people don't think they have "real" broadband if everyone in the household can't be streaming Netflix at 4K simultaneously without any meaningful caps or throttling.
The issue in Germany is that we're somewhat behind on mobile traffic caps as well. It's gotten a lot better recently, but it's still on the high end in Europe on traffic/cost.
That's surprising to me; I've always heard that it's better in Europe.
It's possible that our definitions of "great", "good", "okay", and "a joke" are different. "Good" in the US is 50mbps. "Okay" is 20mbps. "A joke" often means there's no actual hard line, and you have to use a satellite-based ISP instead.
Those definitions work here as well. There's the occasional outlier where you'll get fiber for a competitive price, but 50mbps is usually what you'll be able to get in a large city. Next up is 16/2.4, which most Germans can get. In rural areas, it's 6 or 3mbps, but if you're unlucky, you can also be stuck on that speed in a major city.
This has been getting somewhat better by cable providers getting in on the action, but they have their own sets of challenges, like CGNAT, shared bandwidth and generally problematic contracts & customer service.
My parents live in a rural area just outside of Silicon Valley and there is no fiber, cable, or DSL Internet service available at any price. The only options are satellite and Verizon cellular.
Yep. That’s most of the country by land area. Someone I follow on twitter just started construction on a licensed wireless backhaul to his house. Took months to even get the time of day from the ISP and it’s costing thousands of dollars to install.
Elon has done more for climate activism and the green movement in the last decade than basically anybody. Besides perhaps Miss Thunberg.
His "guzzling" jets as you call them are a minor convenience in order to facilitate quicker, more efficient transport to enable the evolution and development of Tesla and SpaceX.
Do you expect him to drive everywhere? Not only would that be worse for the environment, but it would mean more of Elon's precious time wasted and thus also our time wasted because a brilliant man is stuck in traffic.
I expect him to video conference, not fly 150,000 miles/take 250 flights a year—nor fly his jet from one LA airport to another LA airport to shorten his chauffeured ride home. I expect him to buy carbon offset credits. I expect him to not publicly trash public transportation. I expect him to not donate to climate change denying politicians, and I expect him to not sell emissions credits to polluting automakers, delaying their transition to ZEVs, and sneakily undoing all of the environments benefits from buying a Tesla car. I expect the Tesla paint shop from repeatedly violating California emissions regulations. I expect Musk to not spread coronavirus disinformation over Twitter. I expect him to not expose his workers to undue risk by violating Alemeda County’s restrictions on non-essential businesses.
I hope Elon will be fine. The future depends on benevolent billionaires like himself to get us out of the financial mess the governments of the world have put us in. If we have any hope of tackling climate change, Tesla will be front and center in that battle.
Besides, he just had a child! What a wonderful gift to the world. I hope his child grows up to be as wise and down-to-earth as his father. :)
This seems... unnecessary? The free market guarantees fair contracts. If an individual is presented with an unfair offer, they merely seek employment elsewhere. It is just common sense that these sorts of things get sorted out by the free market; people just have to communicate when companies try to screw them, so that word spreads and the company either changes its behavior or (hopefully) goes out of business. The logic is simple and self-evident.
A startup to facilitate this is tantamount to government intervention in the economy: it is bastardizing a perfect natural order. This company idea seems naive at best and basically grifting at worst.
Operating systems in 2020 have evolved into thought systems that enable our lives in the emergent digital economy. Think of it like real-estate in the "real" world. People hate billboards because they're gaudy, yet they relish Times Square. Operating Systems are like the Times Square of the computing world, allowing us to navigate and consume and vote with our dollars. It makes total sense for them to contain advertisements. In fact, I encourage it.