Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | beltex's commentslogin

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

— George Orwell, Animal Farm

I understand the moves by Stripe, Twitter, and co. However, I would argue that the long term implications set by this precedent are much worse. When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide, and I trust our President. Three short years later, who took the office? Would you have every imagined that? The same goes for this. Think five minutes into the future if you will.

If the leader of the free world can be banned from all social media and co, who are based in the very same nation, and who are monopolies, then what hope is there for the rest of us?


> If the leader of the free world can be banned from all social media and co, who are based in the very same nation, and who are monopolies, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

1. "leader of the free world" is an incredibly arrogant statement.

2. He can be banned for the same reason that the rest of us can: inciting violence. I'd argue that having equal rules for everyone (or even _stricter_ ones for politicians) is good and healthy. The banning of people inciting violence gives me hope.


It's your opinion that Trump incited violence.

If you ask Trump opposition, they will all say he should go to jail for 1000 years for hundreds of crime that Trump committed.

I'm not close to he situation, but I'd feel much better if a judgement like this actually comes from a trained judge with a proper due process.


Trump called for a March on the Capitol building. This is a very common thing for politicians to do. This does not constitute inciting violence.


You may read his statements so, but his followers treated them as marching orders.

https://twitter.com/LiteraryMouse/status/1347873498925064194


> When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide

Wow, that's some impressive revisionist history, unfortunately for you its possible for us to actually look back in time and see exactly what was said.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5849932


Can you prove that the same people who said "so what" to Snowden said "this is fine to these tech actions? My personal experience is that the people who opposed to mass surveillance are fully in support of these actions. At least I do.

It's fairly clear where these companies are drawing a line, and for most people like me, it's a perfectly acceptable line. Being the cause of actual violence and death means you get to be banned. Fairly clear?

The more murky question is people who think all cake shops should serve gay weddings but twitter should also be allowed to ban trump. Tough call and nuance involved there, but I doubt there's much ambiguity separating where one stands on Snowden's revalations and these recent bans


I'm one of those "murky question" people, and here's my take on it.

Discrimination is discrimination, and can and should be prohibited. Free speech was not invented when Twitter and Stripe were created, and thus it cannot be deprived by being banned from these platforms. Fomenting violent revolution is most certainly worth preventing, as is discrimination against people for their immutable traits. Fomenting violence is not an immutable trait.

I see the point people try to make when they equate the two, but I don’t think it’s a good one, because then it equates lgbt discrimination with private company platform bans for fomenting violence, implying that if you have one, you must tolerate the other, but that’s not true. One can ban discrimination while at the same time allowing Twitter or whoever to ban people promoting violence on/with their platforms. The principals are internally logically consistent, even if one disagrees with them.


> When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide, and I trust our President.

Most of the public was pro-Snowden, especially the tech community. Telegram rose like a rocketship as a result of concerns over NSA backdoors.


>When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide, and I trust our President.

Wtf? Nobody said anything of the sort, and if they did they would have been downvoted to the maximum. This is just totally absurd revisionist, we were only five years removed from the W Bush administration, which committed legitimate war crimes and left office with a 22% approval rating.


> When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide, and I trust our President

This is … not even remotely how I remember that period, more of a sense of outrage and companies rushing to encrypt internal connections and deploy PFS.

> If the leader of the free world can be banned from all social media and co, who are based in the very same nation, and who are monopolies, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

This isn’t a great fit: Trump isn’t being banned for being a conservative or talking policies, but for inciting violence which lead to a deadly mob. If all that happens are companies enforcing their terms of service against violence or hate speech evenly, that bothers me a lot less — especially since in this case it’s treating everyone consistently rather than singling him out for special treatment.


Strength through adversity? Maybe this will be the fire needed to improve decentralization and alternative currencies that are more censorship resistant?


> “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Actually, the problem is that those with power can get away with this but others can’t.

Think five minutes into the future if you will where there are no consequences if you have enough political power. Some day that might be a socialist or a communist or a white nationalist or a fascist encouraging an armed group to intimidate the legislature. Will we encourage companies to continue to do business with them as well? Or do we specifically grant Republicans and Democrats the privilege to abuse the power of their office?

Imagine Jamal from down the road hammering his neighbors with lies about an election and then organizing a march into the capital that beats a police officer to death with the goal of killing the VP of the US. Jamal had no status, no privilege, no financial resources and no one to pardon him. No one is worried about Jamal or his supporters ever attaining political power and seeking revenge because they have no connections, no wealth and no access to the halls of power. No communities are “healed” by not prosecuting Jamal, so he ends up going to jail for a long time. On the flip side, Stripe has never heard of Jamal so he gets to keep his preferred payment processor after he’s released from prison. Meanwhile Trump who’s been pardoned and is living under Secret Service detail at Mar a Lago is still somehow “not as equal” as Jamal because Trump is only able to make money online through other payment processors but not his preferred Stripe gateway.


Americans didn’t Weimar-Republic into a fascist regime this time, thankfully.

The prevailing idea on HN is however “let’s have no regulation than bad regulation”... Guys, there’s such thing as good regulation.


To be fair, it's far from over. If this is analogous to the beer hall putsch it can be evaluated in a decade or two perhaps.

The very most dangerous thing that could be done right now is to say "glad that's over and nothing happened".


[flagged]


Learn from Germany:

Das Grundgesetz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Artikel 18

Wer die Freiheit der Meinungsäußerung, insbesondere die Pressefreiheit (Artikel 5 Abs. 1), die Lehrfreiheit (Artikel 5 Abs. 3), die Versammlungsfreiheit (Artikel 8), die Vereinigungsfreiheit (Artikel 9), das Brief-, Post- und Fernmeldegeheimnis (Artikel 10), das Eigentum (Artikel 14) oder das Asylrecht (Artikel 16a) zum Kampfe gegen die freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung mißbraucht, verwirkt diese Grundrechte.


You're pointing out Snowden in 13 and Trump in 16 and implying there's a causal relationship between the two. This is ludicrous, Trump was elected due to numerous factors, it'd be hard to place Snowden in even the top 10. immigration, trade, feckless GOP, crowded primary field, biased dem primary, weak dem candidate, I could make massive list more important than Snowden. All trump's supporters would say about Snowden is that he's a traitor, they'd understand or care little about what he leaked.

Maybe this is a HN bubble, the vast majority of Americans wouldn't be able to tell you what Snowden even specifically leaked...or rather, the journalists leaked on his and our behalf.

Trump is not the leader of the free world any longer. He's clearly on the way out, and he invited violence while the door was closing. Even the weakened GOP must admit he is a wannabe dictator, and his rhetoric led to 5 deaths, nevermind untold thousands to pandemic.

So no, I think there is not much slippery slope implication to deplatforming insane people like Trump, Alex Jones, KKK members, Nazis, terrorists, etc. Why should these people retain the privilege of posting harmful and murderous content on a company's website? Where in the constitution is tweeting an enshrined right?


> You're pointing out Snowden in 13 and Trump in 16 and implying there's a causal relationship between the two.

Your are misinterpreting his comment. He says that you can't 100% trust in long term government/administration. There will always be a bad guy somewhere at some moment.


The elephant in the room to me is that companies talked a ton about creating spaces that are conducive to great work. The design and architecture of an office matters. Not all have it right, but for those who do, it goes a long way. See Pixar as an example. But all of a sudden everyones acting as if none of that matters, all because we get to skip a commute and sit in our pyjamas?

You truly don't know what you've got till its gone...


What's special about Pixar, that you have your own office? This is very rare in the industry, and it's unsurprising people don't miss the open office.



About the 2016 tag that was added to the title. While the header does say 2016, I think it's that the file wasn't made open source by Apple till this weekend.

Aside - explicit reference to Raspberry Pi here:

https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-4903.221.2/osfmk...


Project page - http://rapids.ai


May he rest in peace.

Glioblastoma is particularly awful, even in the realm of cancer. Two books I found quite interesting on neurosurgery and cancer as a whole.

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

by Henry Marsh

and

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

by Siddhartha Mukherjee


While were on the topic:

USENIX talk from VP of software at SpaceX (2016)

https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/conference-program/...

(Speaker was concurrently interim VP of Autopilot at Tesla for a bit as well)

Few interesting bits:

- Speaker’s background is SRE at Google

- Engineering culture: Authority, autonomy, accountability. Blameless postmortems

- High Integrity C++ & MISRA coding standards

- The spacecraft has multiple onboard computers, all running Linux

- Tripe String Architecture, 3 redundant computers, whose results are cross checked with majority voting before being applied in real time, given radiation tolerant over radiation hardened hardware


"Tesla Goes Bankrupt

Palo Alto, California, April 1, 2018 --

Despite intense efforts to raise money, including a last-ditch mass sale of Easter Eggs, we are sad to report that Tesla has gone completely and totally bankrupt. So bankrupt, you can't believe it."

- Elon Musk

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/980566101124722688


For those who didn't already get it, it's an April Fool's joke.


Indeed. Given the number of down votes, either folks didn't catch that, or it's all the short sellers :)


Or maybe it was a lame joke by the CEO of a publicly traded company and as such totally out of order.

That joke might have been funny if Tesla was making 7500 model 3 cars / week.


Agreed. Can't wait to live in a world where CEOs can control themselves and refrain from cracking a quick joke on April Fools Day.


With being listed on the stock exchange comes a certain amount of responsibility. If you can't control yourself from making jokes about your company going bankrupt then maybe you should stay private?

Keep in mind there are people's savings on the line here.


"Can’t believe you’re even writing about this. My job as CEO is to focus on what’s most critical, which is currently Model 3 production. Doug, who I regard as one of the world’s most talented engineering execs, is focused on vehicle engineering."

"About a year ago, I asked Doug to manage both engineering & production. He agreed that Tesla needed eng & prod better aligned, so we don’t design cars that are crazy hard to build. Right now, tho, better to divide & conquer, so I’m back to sleeping at factory. Car biz is hell …"

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/980910671763193856

[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/980913157739765761


I don't really get this. "What's the story here? Everything is running exactly as planned. Now I'm sleeping at the factory because it's hell."

One of those things doesn't sound much like the other.


Most people who understand how difficult it is to produce a new line of cars, or have been listening closely to what Elon has been saying pretty much expected that ramping up production would be hard and Tesla would miss their goals many times. Tesla has never delivered a car on time. But there is enormous demand for this car and they will eventually make it work. At the current run rate they are already able to produce around 100,000 Model 3 per year, and are ramping up quickly


This will become a problem if they run out of cash. Not delivering as many cars as planned is fine if you make a profit (or at least positive cash flow). But burning more cash than expected can be problematic. Especially if you constantly miss deadlines which means investors don't know if they should believe any of your plans.

The second issue is that of competition. Model S didn't have any meaningful EV competition. Model 3 competition is still comparably low but this will look different in 2-3 years. If they produce enough cars until then, prospective buyers will eventually switch to another brand.


Someone will give them cash. Elon will if nothing else.


Does he still have that much cash? Would expect that SpaceX would have to cut if Tesla really needs money. I don't think Musk has much cash lying around that's not already in one of his companies.


Enough people believe in Tesla that they can certainly find a way to generate cash. As a WORST case scenario i’m sure another auto maker would love to recapitalize them in order to acquire their technology. Tesla actually going out of existence seems unlikely to me at this point.


This is why I don't think it's a very big problem for Tesla. There is a big difference between not delivering (so far Magic Leap for example) and slow delivery.

Most people who ordered a Tesla realy want one so they are just going to wait.

Maybe some shareholderd might see it as a problem because they could have sold more Teslas in the same amount of time. But it's not that they are cheap and everyone can afford one.


Why would he even engage this, he just turned it into an actual story.


I can only imagine how much experience and knowledge Elon is gaining by micromanaging (a good thing) this much, compared to say how much the top executive at other vehicle manufacturers have evolved to become.

Edit: Downvotes on this comment? Really? What, do you think you're able to imagine the amount of experience he's getting? Do you think the top execs at other manufacturers have the same experience and hands-on approach?


From personal experience I can say that I am certain that both Dieter Zetsche and Harald Krüger know more about basically every aspect of producing cars than Elon Musk ever will. Both are very much hands-on people and have 3-4 decades of experience.


Even if they have lots of experience, they failed to see how that the market was going to have to seriously build evs. It took an 'idiot outsider' like Musk to push it as far as it can go. and now we know that separately from the business success of tesla that it's possible to make successful and interesting electric cars like teslas, but also other companies have interesting cars.


Yet they never thought to move away from making cars with internal combustion engines and 2k parts vs 200.

Say what you want about how long it is taking them to get going, Tesla make excellent cars and the longer they make them the better they will be.


You know all 3 of these people well? Wow.


"Zetsche joined Daimler-Benz in 1976, working in the research department. In 1981, he became Assistant Development Manager at the Vehicles business unit. He became a member of DaimlerChrysler's Board of Management in 1998 and served as the President/CEO of Chrysler Group from mid-2000 to 31 December 2005, where he was credited with a turnaround of DCX's American operations. Since 1 January 2006 he succeeded Jürgen Schrempp as Chairman of DaimlerChrysler (now Daimler AG), being succeeded in the position of Chrysler Group CEO by Thomas W. LaSorda."

and

"Mr. Krüger joined BMW in April 1992 and served as Director of its Production Strategy, Control and Planning Division. He managed BMW Group's engine plant at Hams Hall in the UK and served a number of positions within the Human Resources division. He served as the Chairman and Director of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Ltd. from May 1, 2012 to March 31, 2013. Mr. Krüger serves as a Director of BMW Manufacturing Co. LLC."

Yep, quite a fair bet that any of those two know far more about auto-making than Musk ever will.


Ever is a long timeframe especially if Tesla continues selling double yoy.


I'm not sure how Musk's experience grows with sales on a linear basis.

Or how sustainable "double yoy" sales are.



I totally believe that reading resumes can support the conclusion, but stannol claimed they knew this info from personal experience.


How is that your personal experience?


The person who posted that wasn't the same person.


I don't mean to overly shill for "In Search of Excellence". (And yeah, I remember when it came out.)

But I just happened to catch the bulk of an hour long interview with its author, Tom Peters, today.

https://the1a.org/shows/2018-04-02/excellence-explained

And the parent comment reminds me of what he had to say about MBWA -- Management By Wandering Around.

It doesn't exactly fit what it appears Musk is currently doing. But as for the experience gained and benefit of being down on the floor, on the front line. Well, Peters' enthusiasm and description of same, seemed on point, to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_wandering_around

If there are problems, at least Musk is not sitting in his office, learning of them and trying to deal with them through layers of reports (both people and paper/electrons/photons).

P.S. As a possible counter-balance to this, I'll mention the complaints that have been reported about worker welfare on those same production lines. To the extent those are true, they would be in opposition to the practices Peters espouses.


See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genchi_Genbutsu

Also liked from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba#Gemba_walk

If I had to pick two tools from Lean production methods that everyone at every level of any company should use, it would be Go and See (Genchi Genbutsu) and Ask Why 5 Times.


I think the reason why you are getting downvotes is "micromanaging (a good thing)"


You can download Xcode (and many versions past) here, directly: https://developer.apple.com/download/more/

Thus, you can have multiple versions installed simply by having Xcode.app in a different directory or renamed. Just remember to set the active Xcode for command line usage via `xcode-select` (can verify via `xcodebuild -version`).

This is precisely for jumping between various GM and beta versions in case of issues and such. Downloading from the Mac App Store does not give you this control.

Finally, Xcode 9.0.1 has worked smoothly for us so far FWIW.


> Hopper (mac only).

Hopper supports Linux since V3 :)

* https://www.hopperapp.com

* https://twitter.com/bSr43/status/851832213066973185


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: