beaned

More Android phones sell than Apple, but I think most HN-ers would be hard-pressed to claim that Google is definitively the bigger, better, or more successful company overall.

That seems even more monopolistic?

Does this mean there are separate rulings for Google and Apple? Does that mean the law is inconsistent?

> 93% of trips are less than 30 miles, but the vast majority of drivers take occasional trips

But they still take these occasional trips, and getting there in an expected way is important to people.

So I think the relevant statistic is not what % of trips are short, but what % of owners take a trip that may induce range anxiety once every few years or more? If I knew I had a big road trip planned for two years from now it'd still affect my choice for a new car today, if I felt that I might be limited by range.

Yeah but they use it mostly to represent Bitcoin Cash. The history is irrelevant; bcash doesn't stand on its own legs and the misnomer is used to trick people. It's dishonest.

Well what's BTC and what isn't? The bcash people still desperately cling to the r/btc handle for their subreddit.

Increasing block size decreases decentralization. (Or rather, increases centralization.) Satoshi's true vision was that decentralization was a prerequisite for everything else. Block size increases presuppose infinite scaling of bandwidth, processing speed, and storage, but we do not have that. Because those things are scarce, block size must be as well, if the goal is to maintain decentralization.

Also in the end it doesn't matter what is in the Bitcoin Core github. It's a network and you can run any variant you want. Bitcoin Cash tried and failed, because in the end it is not what the users, the node operators, chose to adopt.

Yeah, pretty much.

Contentment with one's lot in life is easier to fake than income. These stories are popular because they provide a fantasy outlet for people who work hard but are unhappy, to justify their choices by villainizing the path not taken. It is a form of therapy. This therapy would not be needed if the general sentiment of those who pursue careers that many in this thread call "prestige" were actually fulfilling. In reality they are (on average) less fulfilling than simply having any somewhat high-paying job that offers security for oneself and one's family.

There are of course exceptions for people who are true artists, who could not live if their soul was not developed through creative work. But again, they are the minority. The "prestige" we allot to very average jobs is superficial, a social formality we perform as polite society because we perceive it as needless to have people constantly reminded that they did not achieve as much as they could have.

I think it's a little disingenuous to make a comparison so extreme, but I guess I'd just ask why that theme seems so popular. Money doesn't make you happy, it's true. But there's a reason it's always presented as a dichotomy. It placates the masses.

Certainly exists, though I think it's the minority. It's generally not difficult to tell who is happy or not from their choices, too, and I suspect in such cases the scenario may be reversed. E.g. the graphic designer who is content in life, entertaining the stressed account manager with curiosity.

This is also the vision of ourselves we love to see in stories and movies, since it associates low income with passion and success with unhappiness, even though you can have both (or neither).

Everyone knows who's made a smart decision in adulthood by choosing and succeeding in a career that allows they and their family to prosper.

In my experience when you come home for Christmas and everyone's asking questions to the struggling-but-"creative" folks, it's not because truly in your heart either you or they believe they've done something more true, "right," or "better," but that you understand that inquiry is a small flattery that only minimally compensates for the hardship they've chosen, likely from lack of foresight earlier in life. These types love the attention as it makes what they do seem more important, but everyone involved seems to know that it's just a form of compensation.

When you've already beaten the struggle, or sidestepped it smartly, and succeeded, too much of a focus on your career is implicitly understood to not be polite conversation since people naturally compare. People who are smart are smart enough to get this, too, and so are typically happy enough to not talk about themselves.

All this is of course excepting genuine care, concern, and curiosity, but I think it does explain somewhat the balance of conversations overall.

The thing that annoys me most is that there's no reason MFA needs to be tied to your mobile device, and I have to pull it out every time I'm signing in somewhere on my computer.

Just let me have an MFA program like Authy on my laptop, or even make it a Chrome extension. It would be so much more convenient.

MFA is not generally trying to stop the use case where someone steals your laptop while it's open, it's trying to prevent the case of someone stealing your password remotely.

It's run by anyone who wants to support the consensus mechanism with more decentralization. I run it on my laptop.

Running a business requires continual effort, it's a different question than simply "owning resources."

You could do that of course. But then you probably don't actually own the resource directly. You probably own the company in the form of shares, similar to money, another tradable token.

You're certainly not using the real estate for yourself like the comment we were replying to was saying. Indeed, if it's being leased then it's probably being used entirely by others!

Further, resources decay. Land is taxed, bananas rot, cars rust. If you purchase $1B of actual hard assets with $0 left, you will not be able to maintain the upkeep. They will be spoiled or sold by the next year.

They don't actually own the resources, that'd be untenable for any individual or even large family. They own a token that represents a claim to resources, and realistically they can only use so much for themselves.

The difference in actual material wealth between the rich and the poor isn't that excessive today. Beyond a certain threshold you're only buying novelty. And the gap is shrinking every year.

Eventually such a practice will bite you in the ass when you form an opinion on something you think doesn't matter, but actually turns out to matter.

So far he's abiding by the law and not going to jail. What is in "his own telling of his own story" that suggests he should be happy to go to jail? It seems like he's trying hard not to.

We only have one life, nobody wants to sacrifice 3 years of it. Just because you and I consider potential alien life disclosures to be important doesn't mean we have the right to demand someone with that knowledge sacrifice their own life for us to have it.

If I had hardcore proof of definite alien life on earth but by revealing it I'd spend time in prison, would I do it? Or would I be content to know that in the 4-billion year scope of life on Earth, people will probably eventually figure it out without me anyway, and that I could let go of my particular contribution to the arc of history for a simple, peaceful life with family? Maybe the latter...

A good point. A couple thoughts here might be:

1. They make exceptionally few mistakes overall anyway;

2. Perhaps it is the interaction between armed force technology and their vehicles which creates problems for them (whether intentional or not from our side);

3. The majority of our land surface area is not inhabited at any given moment. Maybe these drones, or whatever they are, do not even care about life here, and are not particularly attracted to cities or people, and are statistically more likely to fail out of reach of most populated areas just because that's what our geographic distribution is like.

Is there a place to read more about this claim that Snowden had access to "almost everything classified"?

Right, like what would be their motivation for exclusively interacting with governments rather than, say, landing in Times Square?

I guess a counter thought would be that they haven't actually tried to interact with anyone at all, maybe only observe, but the armed forces/governments are the only element of our species with the ability to detect and retrieve them when they make mistakes.

Anchor was everywhere when I lived in SF for a good while. It was the reliable staple when you knew everything else at the party would taste like bitter barf. It did sell where it was made; perhaps they could've made a stronger effort to make a name for it elsewhere.

Some of these just seem like things people say when they don't want to dig in to a conversation for convenience, or don't have an interesting reply. The article sort of lays them out as having a type of sideways intention, but often these ones are more benign. I think there are probably better examples.

None of your examples actually align with the general sentiment here. In your examples, you cite specific goals that should fail, which may be part of a broader approach which includes more noble goals.

For example, you say that Microsoft should fail in attempting to snuff out Linux, not that Microsoft should fail generally.

You say that the USSR should fail to kill their own people, not that the USSR should fail to thrive as a people or a nation.

In this case the equivalent would be to call for Twitter to fail at... what exactly? Free speech?

I think you've been gotten. You don't perceive these examples as equivocations when they are, and it is blinded by dislike for a figure you disagree with rather than a specific bad goal.

Do the people who actually work for his companies generally feel the same way?

Is it..? All the replies to this thread just mention how he has abhorrent politics but there's no specifics. I'm not sure anyone really knows why they dislike him, and thought critically about it. A lot of it seems assumption-based, fed mostly by the media who is Twitter's biggest competitor. And on Hacker News, of all places. I'd think it the most likely place to find people who understand the rift between tech and trad media, and that character assassination is the biggest tool used by one particular side in this war. Instead the middling tech armchair specialists who partake in and promote the culture that birthed Elon and his multitude of companies have bought the other side's narrative to hate on their own.

There's definitely a strong element of people here rooting for Twitter to fail because they dislike Elon's politics.

I don't have a horse in this race but I find it odd that your dissenting opinion is down voted when you provide a reasonable rebuttal with a source, when the post you're replying to is just an opinion from authority.

Would be great if those who disagree could dispassionately say why.