badRNG

Free markets have a well established, well understood "tendency towards monopoly." A truly free market is one dominated by cartels [0] (not to be thought of as something unique to the drug industry.) The market forces that spur innovation like competition, absent a government that intervenes, best resolves competition through either ceaseless merging or subsumption of the competition. The domination of markets by cartels is seen in countries whose governments have either been effectively captured by industry or are otherwise incapable of intervening in the affairs of the market. Prior to antitrust legislation, cartels dominated industries at the dawn of the capitalist economy.

Merging with competition allows both players to charge more without providing greater value, which is always the best option for both players.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel

I also pronounce Linux as "Linux."

I was really worried one of my bots had run awry and got my IP banned. Tried different browsers to see what the issue is, and it seems to be a FireFox issue. Googling "Reddit Blocked" doesn't return anything helpful.

Searching HN was the right way to go.

It isn't much news (disclaimer: IANAL.)

Facebook had submitted a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. A motion to dismiss means they assume that every fact alleged by the FTC is true. You perform a motion to dismiss to say "even if everything they said is true, it still isn't even possible for them to win the lawsuit." The judge said, essentially, that if every fact the FTC alleges is true, then it is at least feasible that the FTC could have a successful lawsuit. There are two key things that this go ahead does NOT do:

1. It does not look at whether even a single alleged fact by the FTC is true

2. It does not mean that the FTC suit would be successful even if every fact is successfully proven

Even "small" farms have a number of practices that the average person would find appalling if they became aware of them. There's a place for graphic descriptions of these activities intended to upset and dismay "non-vegans" but I don't think that place is a tech board. If you are curious as to what these practices are, looking up videos/practices related to modern dairy production that are popular even on small dairy farms or male chick culling might be a decent start, PETA also has plenty of resources available. (I'm sure there are some really tiny family-owned farms that don't employ these practices.)

Aside from this, farms, like all industries, follow the "tendency towards monopoly" where ever larger players will consolidate, merge, and buyout their competition to maximize their collective control of the market share. I think as long as there is a market for animal products, that market will be overwhelmingly captured by large industrialized farms. It's precisely the most upsetting practices on factory farms that keep costs low enough to make products accessible to working class Americans.

Industrialized farming is worlds different from these idealistic "small family subsistence farms." The hypothetical world in which one might be able to raise animals ethically as a food source isn't the same one that can have massive businesses turning a profit from supplying animal meat to millions of people. I don't think a business could survive in a market economy while treating their animals humanely. The cost would simply be unimaginable.

Most people who oppose the torture of animals and are sufficiently educated with how industrialized farming works face either discomfort and cognitive dissonance to some degree, or feel inclined to make a change (whatever that may look like.)

As far as the difference between living in the wild and living in industrialized farms, I think allowing animals to live in the wild is vastly more ethical than the misery that awaits them on factory farms. Of course, the current generation of livestock should never be returned to the wild. The "end game" would be the cessation of breeding of these animals.

It seems that, regardless of one's political position, folks always want to try to map the motivations and views of the so-called "founding fathers" of the US to their own. This is likely because they play an important role in the American mythos, and are generally held in high regard by people across the political spectrum.

In reality, the politics of that day don't map onto the modern world. The backdrop of that era was colonialism, and competing for who would profit from the spoils of the new world. It was one where Lockean liberalism was compatible with the genocide of natives and enslavement of black people. The world is unimaginably different from that of the founding of the US; politically, economically, socially, and ethically.

A (somewhat?) vegan perspective.

I've teetered on staying committed to veganism for ethical reasons, and have spent time on and off with vegan diets. I don't at all think (nor do I think most vegans think [see disclaimer]) that pigs are worthy of equal moral consideration as humans. I, along with most humans, think that pigs as well as other animals are worthy of some level of moral consideration. Most would be rightfully outraged at the torture of animals for fun, for instance.

Vegans take it a small step further, the moral consideration of a pig outweighs the pleasure provided to our taste buds by consuming their flesh. The prior two examples of consumption and torture, while vastly different, are also on a whole different level than raising pigs to save human lives. If you agree that pigs and humans are NOT morally equivalent (which is most people, including most vegans [see disclaimer],) then I think you are committed to the idea that it is imperative to raise and kill pigs to save human lives.

[Disclaimer: neither vegans or non-vegans are monoliths. There are countless ethical, religious, and practical frameworks one will employ to arrive at any particular ethical position.]

I don't think it is all that uncommon for regular human-to-human transplant recipients to be on immunosuppressants for life. If I'm not mistaken, that's the case for all organ recipients, but there may be exceptions. I think the concept of "immunocompatibility" can refer to a spectrum of outcomes that we haven't gotten down even for transplants within our own species.

>The only "value" in any of them is finding a bigger sucker to give you real money for your fake "money".

What's interesting to me about crypto currency is the ancillary philosophical discussion of what the necessary and sufficient features of "real money" actually are. Crypto shares a lot of the features we'd normally associate with "real money," people use crypto currencies as "real money," and generally people trust, to some degree, that crypto will have ongoing value (regardless of how misguided we may think that is.)

Does there ever reach a point where those claiming that crypto currency is "not real money" becomes analogous with the man yelling that US currency is somehow "fake" because it isn't backed by gold? The ongoing utility of both "currencies" seem to make both of these positions appear misguided (this coming from a fellow long time crypto-skeptic.)

I think that's just because those games are written poorly and don't account for the differences in moving diagonally. If you are moving on a grid, moving forward one tile moves you the length of a tile. Moving diagonally one tile moves you sqrt(2) ~1.4 tile lengths.

The tool in question is just what you probably thought: Ghidra, also thought of as a FOSS alternative to the popular decompiler/disassembler IDA Pro. Interesting story either way.

It's genuinely absurd to try to map the Libyan civil war onto crypto currency. There was nearly a "51% attack" on Bitcoin, though it's not accurate to call it an attack (and it was far more than 51% of the hash power.) The SegWit2x upgrade almost went through despite upsetting many Bitcoin enthusiasts, but was ultimately squashed by the loose coalition of miners that proposed it when faced with fierce opposition. They could've forced the unpopular change, and only chose not to.

This article is from 2018. The EU has already banned the chemicals in question, and now the UK is looking to do the same. Here's an article from yesterday [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/jan/05/uk-investiga...

Damn that's depressing...

I guess I've never read these emails before. I was a child when these emails were released, so I really wasn't following these events in real time.

I'm blown away at how openly they discuss being anti-competitive. When I think about a company being monopolistic, I usually envision market and environmental pressures that culminate in actions that can be broadly identified as anti-competitive. I don't typically envision leaders sending emails to each other on how to best be cartoonish villainous monopolists. And I guess it's strange that there was a time that it was considered even feasible that Windows could corner the whole web. Then seeing "embrace and extend" literally quoted in the email feels like some bad hit piece on Microsoft.

Developers my age grew up with multiple OSes with web capability. When I graduated, Chrome OS just came out, Android, iOS, and OS X were all widely used. Most of my career Microsoft has... "embraced" FOSS. Just some thoughts from a different perspective.

This glosses over the historical context of the Iranian revolution. Iran's leftist, democratically-elected prime minister (who nationalized the oil fields in 1951 that were originally taken by British Petroleum) was overthrown for a West-backed dictatorship in Iran in 1953 that lead to the mass killings of leftists and pro-democracy advocates. The 1979 revolution led to the restoration of elections.

Good writeup here: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthr...

It's unfortunate that Popcorn Time hasn't seen more popularity. Though, I know other apps for streaming torrents that are actually in the App Store and Google Play store have beat out PT for the "piracy market." Netflix was more convenient than piracy and imo killed a lot of piracy by being a better value than pirating.

But know, to watch the popular shows you need to have

- Netflix

- Hulu

- Paramount Plus

- Peacock

- Discovery Plus

- HBO Max

- Disney+

- Apple TV Plus

It's a mad scramble for rights holders to pull their content off of existing platforms to start their own, and I'm not sure that the value of these services is greater than that of piracy for folks at this point.

I think there's a misunderstanding because the original thread leaves one thinking that Norton is surreptitiously installing cryptominer malware on their customer's machines (not a big fan of how that was communicated.) In reality, this is an optional cryptomining application that you can choose to run (if you are willing to let Norton keep a 15% cut.)

https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-service-announ...

Important note, because it isn't immediately obvious: Norton is bundling an optional cryptocurrency miner that they are offering as a product. Nothing here indicates that Norton is surreptitiously adding cryptominer malware on their customers' machines (like one might assume reading the original thread.) Though they are taking a 15% cut for using their miner...[1]

[1] https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-service-announ...

I think maybe my comment wasn't really clear. I know the pro-diversity comments had a lot of upvotes, what I was pointing out was that they were nerfed by a moderation tool or algorithm, not by downvotes, as evidenced from going from the top comment to the very last comment in the thread within a few seconds.

To be fair, every comment that didn't agree with the conclusion of the article was nerfed. The top comment on this post for most of its existence immediately left the top and within seconds jumped to being the very last comment at the bottom with all the other even vaguely pro-diversity comments.

I guess this is why these discussions are unproductive, because folks on both sides of debates on diversity efforts have contradictory anecdotal experiences. I know many women software engineers who've felt deeply, uniquely uncomfortable in tech spaces. I have yet to have a woman software engineer friend who hasn't had one of these experiences, and the idea that the tech industry is uniquely hostile to diversity efforts doesn't seem to be all that uncommon or controversial.

There's a chicken or egg problem with the "coven of witches" conjecture. I also don't think Gab is all that marginal. It seems to exist largely to facilitate conversations around perceived excesses with diversity efforts.

My greater point is that communities that facilitate these types of conversations typically have less inviting, more hostile cultures. There's a spectrum of course, but you can see glimmers of the type of discourse found on sites like Gab in the comment sections of anti-diversity blogs on HN. I think that an HN which plays host to more discussions about perceived issues with diversity will alienate a lot of folks who aren't entrenched in those sorts of debates and self-select for the type of discourse associated with these so-called "covens of witches." It seems to me that there's no value in sliding down that side of the spectrum for a site that's largely meant not to play host to ideological battles.

Maybe I didn't word it well enough, but I intend to comment on a broad category of discussion that I don't think is necessarily inappropriate according to the guidelines, but tends to produce unproductive, hostile conversations. I understand that anti-diversity blogs often gain a lot of traction with a particular subset of HN readers, but it consistently winds up producing flame wars and can make HN a less friendly place.

>One small counterpoint: Employers enjoy a bully pulpit on these issues. Employees with legitimate concerns about their employers' stances / policies sometimes can't even discuss them without the risk of losing their livelihood.

There are endless platforms that are better suited for these discussions: Gab, 4chan, and Ruqqus to name a few. "HN's anonymous-yet-respectful forum" is best preserved by not hosting these types of deeply hostile, alienating discussions.

The strong opposition to diversity efforts has been a pretty common trait associated with the tech community/silicon valley. It seems reasonable that a subset of the culture that produced the work environment at Blizzard [1] or has historically rallied behind alt-right thought leaders would also be here on HN. Talk to any woman software engineer, I 100% guarantee they have multiple stories about dealing with a...specific type of guy.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/8/22823991/activision-blizz...

I'm not sure these sorts of articles provide much value on HN.

By "these sorts of articles", I mean the ones that have claimed that "diversity efforts have gone too far this time." Regardless of your support or opposition to diversity, I think one would agree that these rapidly turn into unproductive, highly divisive comment sections that are out of place with the rest of HN.

You're probably correct here.

Flu cases are tracked due to its severity. Cold cases are likely not often even paid attention to by many of those experiencing them.

Anecdotally, I and my friends and relatives hunkered down for COVID in 2020, and we had more cases turn out to be actually COVID-19 than common colds.

>I think the same conclusion would have to be made here: if you send something and stick a 200 on it, the recipients are entitled to what you sent them.

Disclaimer: I don't work with web tech, but wouldn't that also permit a lot of activities we would absolutely consider unethical, like SQL injection? It seems like you could certainly craft a request to circumvent security controls to receive a 200 response back that we'd absolutely consider to be unethical.