skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Free speech isn't important because it's in the Constitution, it's in the Constitution because it's important.

Actually it's in the Constitution because it's important for a different reason than most people think.

If you read the Bill of Rights carefully (and I mean thinking about the reasons behind them and their implications and interpretations over time, beyond what you see in school) you gradually come to realize that they were not meant to be declarations of your rights at all. (This is very much in contrast to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is such a thing.) Rather, they have been very much intended to be protections against the government, i.e. limitations on what the government can do.

This is not obvious, and it has nontrivial implications.

The 5th amendment is the clearest example of this, but this theme goes across all the amendments. The "right against self-incrimination" is not actually declaring a fundamental right. Ever think about why there would there be such a right? It's surely not the kind of thing I'd think of when writing a Constitution, and the same is probably true for you. Furthermore, if it's a right, then why does it go away once you are given immunity? And why doesn't it exist for other people (even those in your own family)? The reason that right exists is that they wanted to protect against torture, which was used to extract forced confessions, and they decided to grant this right to reach that goal. Otherwise, they did not by any means believe that it would be somehow wrong for a judge to compel you to produce testimony. That's why the right is so limited: it doesn't apply to testifying against other people, nor does it apply to yourself once you have immunity. Yet most people don't realize this and think it's there because it's somehow deemed to be a human right.

The same goes for the freedoms of speech, press, association, and the right to bear arms, etc... those are, again, meant to protect against common practices of oppressive governments. They are not declarations of intrinsic human rights. It's probably a somewhat radical departure from what you've learned, but I think it's worth realizing this. In particular, it implies even more strongly that the right to free speech was NOT imagined to be something that anyone but the government should worry about.
Does 'toniest' mean wealthy / snobbish? I've never heard it used in this context. Thanks.
In short; 'JR' has better success in business when he can under-pay his workers and ignore their health and safety needs and human rights. As an unrelated side note; All my businesses would be successful if i could just use slave-labor.
> Linux distributions have chosen MariaDB Server... It is the “default” MySQL in many Linux distributions (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE and Debian). However, Ubuntu...

I think this is a key point. The major Linux distros use mariadb. Ubuntu does not by default, but "apt-get install mariadb-server" will get it for you. Plus the creator of MySQL and much of the original MySQL team actively develops MariaDB.
Twitter hypocrisy
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I also liked the bit about being confident in what you are / what you have / what you offer. Instead of worrying about public opinion and blow back for being unhealthy or partnering with a television show about cooking meth the Cinnabon company embraced everything. It won't work so well for everyone, but I think companies and products that are a bit more on the unsavory side could take a big lesson, here.

It's much more endearing than lying or being fake. It's much more endearing to admit faults or to be honest with your customers and the public about your goals and how you perceive yourself. People might not love everything about you, your product, your services or what you stand for but they will find more reasons to hate you for being a liar than for simply acknowledging what everyone already knows about you.
It's not that "1000 reproductive adults" disproves the headline, it's that the paper that that quote links to says there's no evidence for a recent population bottleneck.
If they actually followed their own rules they actually delete his account.
> The reason such TVs don't exist is simply engineering laziness.

If your answer to the question "why can't a billion dollar industry provide me with instantaneous channel switching?" is "because they are lazy", you are severely misguided (at the very least!). There are hundreds of extremely talented engineers working full-time on these problems. If the solution were as easy as you propose, the issues would be solved.

> zero boot time

That's not going to happen, ever, but I'll assume you meant "faster" boot times.

Probably. Keep in mind that your average set-top box likely goes through a more complex secure boot process than most electronic devices you would ever interact with. Why? Because if people can run arbitrary firmware on a set-top box, your cable company would lose a shit ton of money.

> instantaneous channel switching

You are bound by the latency required to demodulate a signal being broadcast from some satellite ~30,000 km away from the receiver, decrypt the resulting stream, and finally decode it, all on the fly so you get a nice, continuous, stutter-free full HD broadcast.

I am no expert, so there is probably way more stuff happening behind the scene that someone else could probably shed light on. The point of my comment was to demonstrate that things can sometimes be more complicated than they seem at first glance.
Basically sounds like some class of shares in a corporation?
Can the company tell how many you have, and draw conclusions about how committed you are?

I think this is being paid in stock options. Many people choose to mix stock, options, and cash in compensation.
Isn't this equity and stock shares, without the extra conversion step?
"Anecdotally, I can tell you that a significant minority of modern humans who comment on news articles are just furious about actual or projected technological advances that allow people to prevent e.g. obesity or pregnancy without relying on strenuous mental and/or physical discipline."

Yep. And yet you never see these people volunteering to make their livings as agricultural stoop labor peasants or (if female) volunteering to have 15 or 20 pregnancies over the course of their lives.
What sheer drivel.

>But, I’m neither a historian nor an economist. I’m an entrepreneur, so I’m not going to wax on about the historical imperative of unions and why they do or don’t serve a role in our modern economy. I will, however, tell you what I know, and I know about starting and growing businesses.

I don't think we need much explanation on why an entrepreneur would prefer to dictate terms rather than negotiate with an organized workforce.

>I believe unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic that destroys the esprit de corps businesses need to succeed.

Might you be mistaking the thrill of total obesiance for esprit de corps? You wouldn't be the first to...

>That’s why the type of company that interests me is one where ownership and the employees are truly in it together, without interference from a third-party union that has its own agenda and priorities.

Um, that nefarious third party agenda is the organized voice of your employees. Heck, we all appreciate being able to dictate terms, but not all of us are intellectually dishonest enough to come up with spin like that.

>It is my observation that unions exert efforts that tend to destroy the Free Enterprise system.

You haven't mentioned a single observation, just breathless, self-serving opinion. Were the shoe on the other foot, I'd expect to see you writing for Pravda.

*edit: I'm beside myself with that Pravda comment. JR posted this literally today: "Attacks on President Trump Show the Political Class Has Learned Nothing" http://blog.joericketts.com/?p=581
> I believe unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic that destroys the esprit de corps businesses need to succeed.

The divergence of who gets the money in a business over the past few decades makes it pretty clear what business managers (in general) think of that esprit de corps. With CxOs taking more and more multiples over line employees, it's pretty clear there's an us-vs-them line anyway, regardless of whether unions are involved.

> It is the Free Enterprise system that has made this country an economically wealthy and powerful nation and I enjoy participating in it.

Well, that and killing or enslaving people and taking their stuff. The role of the US military in the US economy is so often ignored. Even today, the US economy sees benefits from the USN being able to project power anywhere on the globe.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tony+definition
What if it were the norm to be paid in company scrip with no meaningful value to anybody outside the company?

Why is it that engineering types don't pay the least attention to history...? Why is it that engineering types think that sprinkling crypto on it solves a single meaningful social ill? Hiding the scrip behind "crypto" does nothing. Who's going to take your FacebookForCatsCoin when they could have actual money instead? A random speculator? Meanwhile, who's gonna take dollars?

Jeez.
Indeed, the notion in 2017 of a significant set of "died-in-the-wool Marxist hardliners" seems like a fantasy.
I guess I'm thinking of a periodical rolling ICO with employees being able to buy in early, often, and at a discount.
When is the deadline? My kid sister would be interested in this.
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What if it were the norm to be paid in cryptocoins linked to the value of the company you worked for?

Well, it's usually the norm for employees to be paid enough to get food, clothing and shelter. In your norm, this normal might not hold. Perhaps employees would be so upset in this case they'd form a union - or maybe just quit in en mass.
That's just shares isn't it?

Imagine 100 employees having 100 coins each, and then the company tanks. No thanks..
If getting the software you need to actually run is painful enough that you just run linux in a vm with a wrapper how is that easier than running linux in a vm or just run linux natively?
We're all in it together to make the founders rich.
"Never mind that the founders or CEO will have 1000X more equity than you, employee (if you have equity at all). You're in it together!"

Okay, I'll bite: why shouldn't the founders and investors have a lot more equity than the employees? If the business goes belly-up, they lose everything they've put into it, while an employee just goes out and finds another job.

Risk and reward need to be related somehow, surely?
> In short; 'JR' has better success in business when he can under-pay his workers and ignore their health and safety needs and human rights.

Being anti-union doesn't mean favoring slave labor or breaking laws. Many rights of workers are protected by legislation (depending where in the world you live), and unionism doesn't mean higher wages.
US considering up to 35% tariff on imported solar panels
Way too much, and way too heavy? What kinds of foods do Japanese eat for breakfast?
I'm not advocating for this, but it is an interesting thought experiment. I do share your concerns, but I feel that this kind of thing is likely inevitable with the rise of ICOs and cryptocurrency futures trading. Capital flows will make a market of it somehow, even if it's only quants and AIs who are able to operate such a market in meaningful, value-adding ways.
> But, I’m neither a historian nor an economist.

Go to his bio:

> After graduating Creighton University with a B.A. in economics in 1968

He on at least some level an economist.
I don't even know of any tech unions in the US.

But I can guarantee you, if the typical middle manager told his group of teamsters or UAW members that not only were they going to be fired, but if they wanted their severance, they'd train their own replacements - a bunch of 20 somethings from <low wage S. Asian country> on a work visa - the manager would probably end up missing.

It's interesting just how well the elites have trained us US tech workers to be good global, corporate soldiers.
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I'm gonna be straight with you: it's an interesting thought experiment if you ignore the entirety of the history of the industrialized world. If you don't ignore it, it's not even novel.

ICOs are valueless trash in ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of all cases. This will only change, maybe-if-you're-lucky, if they are securitized and regulated, at which point it's the new "oh but stock!", and it's still not going to be a sane deal for a worker because the worker has no real way to deal with either counterparty risk of exchanges (meanwhile, dollars involve no such risk) short of paying a vig--you know, like how companies pay poor employees on debit cards with fees, how's that reality sound for everybody?--or safety of exchange rate, because LOL your company has a bad quarter and now you can't pay your rent because FacebookForCatsCoin no longer makes the speculators, the only people who are paying attention to it, sufficiently money-horny.

Sprinkling crypto on company scrip doesn't make it anything other than company scrip. And it's a bad idea for companies, too, because a mere, what, ninety-nine percent of companies have no public stock and would very much like to keep it that way?
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Do you reimplement caching and data storage on every new project? Redis is just one example. Surely in any major project you've made use of a third party server? Maybe not, but tons of projects do and I'm simply describing an easy way to manage those services in a development environment. What's so hard to understand about this?
So true! He should be treated like a "normal" person.
>Social media was weaponized by a foreign power to sow dissent, destabilize democracy...

We need to stop this nonsense. The Russians spent a few hundred thousand on social media ads in this election cycle, and frankly a lot of them explicitly supported Progressive causes. Meanwhile, Trump and Clinton spent $81 million. Scroll Facebook for 90 seconds and you'll probably see a dozen ads "impressed" on you. Can you remember a single one? Three?

>...and ultimately weaken American influence abroad.

Seems like we've been happily doing that ourselves for quite a while now.
Twitter employee 'deactivated' Trump account on last day
I think user engagement is much more important to these companies than any ethical qualm about truth and fairness. It was pretty obvious when Facebook killed its human news editor program because they kept spiking viral but fake news stories from sites like Infowars and Breitbart and conservative media outlets complained about bias against them.
So far I have yet to see a climate change denier who has looked at any of the IPCC reports [0] -- they operate on the same scale of evidence as religious fanatics. It was actually fascinating to see the improvement comparing AR5 with the AR4, and they are only 6 years apart!

>For example, the greenhouse effect is a piece of well-established science. Climate change is even less scientific.

Even looking at this sentence, which is the foundation of your arguments, the way you express yourself is that the greenhouse effect itself is not scientific! The actual science part of climate change is actually pretty great science, and very much scientific. You can check out the physical science IPCC report [1] for the starters. It contains many references to actual scientific articles, but by itself is a great piece of work.

The political part -- policies, denial of facts, media coverage, bribery by the fossil fuel industry representatives and continuous slander of climatic researchers is a problem, I agree.

[0] -- Here's the IPCC Synthesis report, a short summary, for starters: http://ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/

[1] -- IPCC Physical science report: http://ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
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Employment is not a happy-go-lucky partnership.

At the end of the day people have jobs because they need to eat, the point was not that founders shouldn't have more equity it was that their incentives are not aligned. Lower wages is good for the employer and bad for the employee, it is adversarial and sugar coating it as if it's not is bullshit.

(Not that I think companies can't have good relations with their employees, just at the very least wages are adversarial)
> Many rights of workers are protected by legislation

That legislation exists because of unions
> Many rights of workers are protected by legislation

How do you think those rights found their way in to the legislation, and remain there?
I was actually surprised by this. At least in hotels (specially in the traditional "ryokans"), the Japanese breakfast consists of some sort of fish (normally grilled), rice, some small bites (mostly for flavor) of seaweeds and some soup or another. I have no idea what people eat at home, but all in all it's not a terrible way to start your day (once you get over not having a bunch of sweet stuff.)
I meant the plural you. I should have made that clearer in the first place.
There's also wkhtmltopdf that more or less does the same thing using webkit.
> Never mind that the founders or CEO will have 1000X more equity than you, employee (if you have equity at all). You're in it together!

It's a falsehood to think that every company is a profit machine, many employers are small business so 1000x more equity is not really much.
Well, yeah, I certainly didn't mean to say that SIP is a great protocol, it is indeed quite terrible--but still in practice if things don't work, that's usually a result of at least one party not following the spec (which is not really surprising , given all the pointless complexity ... but then that's still not really an excuse to not implement SIP when you are claiming that you do).
What is stopping the founders from “just finding another job”?

Losing “everything they’ve put into it” suggests that the founders will actually lose money if the business fails, where in most cases the business goes bankrupt and the founders only lose whatever seed capital they put into the venture before incorporating as a limited liability venture (specifically to limit their personal liability).

The employees also lose eveything they put into it, which is however many months or years of their life they contributed to the venture.
Click on his username to read his profile which includes a link to his website http://techspot.zzzeek.org
I care more about security and privacy than anonymity.

IPFS or Keybase seem like better approaches towards those goals. And, yes, Tor makes sense if you need to hide your IP address. But beyond that I don't see much further use.
Scss is so annoying and if you ask me, slows builds down a ton in development. Also, that uglify stuff is annoying! Thankfully they are adding es6 support but most guides are outdated.... I feel you...
>He probably got temp banned for violating their Code of Conduct in regards to Hateful Conduct.

This is such a garbage standard. It simply amounts to any speech whoever is running the support team that day doesn't like.
I can’t help but think the better option would be a bill saying that POTUS needs to stay off social media, no?
There's only two effective ways to prevent your employees from unionizing: 1) get government and law enforcement on your side and use force, or 2) treat them like human beings with their own desires and goals and make sure your business supports them in those desires and goals.

I guess a third way might be to find a bunch of employees who don't know any better, or enjoy being taken advantage of...
Why not just operate a company in such a way where unions don't feel like they need to exist? Unions are a self defense mechanism and a symptom of a failure in trust between employee and employer. Unions aren't about logic, I don't see the point in reasoning why unions should or should not exist or trying to sway opinions before/after the fact.

> "I believe unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic"

Unions are a blunt instrument people feel forced to use to correct a "corrosive us-against-them" culture. Unfortunately unions create as many problems as they solve, but at least they won't have to worry about putting food on the table, everything else is tolerable.
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Exercise done with proper form doesn't cause joint wear and tear. That's really a myth. Frequent exercise actually keeps your joints healthy.
Unlike economic models, however, the climate systems have boundary conditions and underlying assumptions based on real science -- physics.
What are some podcasts from Germany (in German or English) that you would recommend?
how else are we to interpret a "corrosive us-against-them dynamic" Unions don't get involved unless there is violation of workers rights. And believe me anti-union does mean anti-workers-rights.

"Many rights of workers are protected by legislation" - sure but employees are rarely able take the case to court without union backing.
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actually, it's theoretically a hard problem --
https://aclanthology.info/pdf/J/J86/J86-4003.pdf

I would have thought that they needed to 'ground' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem) at least one shared reference word/concept so they could proceed to define everything relative to that and thereby communicate effectively and know how to map different languages to the same latent space. But I guess perhaps one can infer/approximate it statistically -- https://cis.upenn.edu/~ccb/publications/discriminative-bilin...
I don't think many people care about anonymity as a primary value. Anonymity is simply one tool to achieve privacy and security against certain types of risks/attacks.
They are not any more or less valueless trash than most fiat currencies, which are stand-ins for the value of assets held and traded in said fiat currency. If the tokens you were paid in have excess utility generated with their production like filecoin for example, I would be more likely to consider it as a means of payment, but not necessarily as a store of value. I don't think you're wrong to frame it as company scrip, but if your company scrip was traded on Coinbase, you might not be so dismissive of the mere concept. Not saying I'd choose to be paid in it, either.
There's an entire holiday in the US, Labor Day, that specifically marks the struggle (including deaths!) of members of labor unions literally putting their lives on the line to secure those rights.
I'm genuinely amazed that this drivel made the front page of HN. It's not well articulated, not substantiated by any evidence, and succumbs to common fallacies like appeal to authority.
Nothing? References are something.
I don't like this stereotyped answer but isn't this what "move fast and break things" was supposed to be about?

Why did we become afraid to diverge from the norm and trends on the internet? From a consumer standpoint, uniformisation makes content parsing easier in the sense that you know what to expect and how to compare content more readily but why do people not go on a limb and take more "risk" in differentiating content? Why don't we have a glorious mess of different formats and the opportunity to choose medium?

At some point I believe A/B testing and optimising for reachability put a negative pressure on variation from the norm and platform standards, and that's a tragedy of the commons.
No email solution will be better for privacy outside of hosting it yourself. I have it set up for my personal email because I thought it was a fun project, but there's no point in pretending that it's realistic for casual email users.

Email without outside encryption like PGP is fundamentally privacy by policy which lives and dies by the reputation and policy of the provider: it seems like Fastmail's is pretty good.
This is a remarkably good idea. You can store an onion hash in a blockchain transaction and then use the signature of the key which sent that transaction to verify it.