Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | bazinga888's commentslogin

There's nothing ethical about letting a minority claim the majority of a societies wealth.

You want to fund things? Get Trump to send a bill to Gates, Buffet, Koch's, etc.

Why blame the public system for the mess private capitalism is truly responsible for creating?


What? How did capitalism cause any of this? Politicians promised pensions assuming unrealistic consistent growth in their investments.

These funds stuck trillions of dollars in the stock market, which is exactly how Gates, Buffet, and Koch made their money. The pension funds are still getting massive returns. But that does not stop politicians from promising _even more_ than was possible.


Capitalism underlies the push for "unrealistic consistent growth in their investments." where "their" in this context primarily means "people who are ready filthy rich."

Capitalists want their investments to grow. Largely at the expense of others.

We'll put the pedal to the metal so the richest can earn more than is necessary. And poo-poo the notion that public workers should get even a smidgen of the same consideration.

Because it won't drive unreasonable growth if we're padding out health plans for the people that do the work.


The answer that covers many cases is: they otherwise have no retirement.

When I worked for a state university, in IT as a senior DBA, I earned half what private sector friends and professional acquaintances earned.

The story was something like "well, we can't afford to pay you enough to save for yourself, but we'll make sure there's a decent retirement to draw from for you."

The problem is, after the housing bubble, and with low-interest rates, the investment methods they had relied on haven't kept up.

Not saying this covers the more extravagant pay outs. But public workers on the whole have largely been shorted up front in exchange for a decent retirement.


Yeah, that's basically the deal: crap job/salary now, cushy retirement later.


Not to be rude, but why do you care?

If it's illegal, it's up to Apple to deal with it. Why go out of the way doing free work for them?


Because it has affected me in the past. I've had to debug stuff in the past in macOS, thinking it would be similar to BSD, and was thwarted by technical means to disable debuggers. I've found the experience quite distasteful and was trying to remember what the problems were that I faced.


Politics. He's trying to lead us to to the Freedom of the GPL in this Socratic fashion.


My thoughts exactly :-)


So that he looks smart.


No one is wanting to stop progress.

Personally, I just want a better voice in what that progress looks like. Rather than listening to venture capitalists whose sole claim to fame is making a lot of money off a social media platform. "Oh, well he got lucky in the financial lotto, so I guess I better listen to him."

SV capitalists are like yesterdays capitalists. "More capitalism" is the only solution that makes sense to them. Not necessarily because it makes sense in the big picture, but because their power and wealth rely on it.


"... venture capitalists whose sole claim to fame is making a lot of money off a social media platform. ..."

There was the whole Netscape thing, too. I mean, way his arguments on their merits, but he's not just a random VC.


Andreessen is quoted in the article as saying ..."Most of the good ideas are obvious," Andreessen says. "They just might not work right away."

If the good ideas are obvious, why bother listening to him?

He seems to ignore that an obvious good idea still requires exorbitant amounts of capital to enable it. No one can hack together a Netscape and win big anymore, been there done that.

Honestly, this "advice" comes off as a) obvious b) tone deaf.


I was only disagreeing with the 'sole claim to fame' part. Excessive and obviously inaccurate hyperbole does not make a good argument.


How did 'he' get lucky in the financial lotto? For providing a service that practically everyone in the world wants but no one did right at the time?

How do you have progress without private industry actually making things?


I believe it's just due to the niche application space.

2012 era Nook eink reader playing a game with hacked refresh:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fbD753xE-U

The tech can do better, but as I've heard it told, the market for it has been eink readers. Who needs to refresh their book at 120hz? is the thinking. Folks that want to game or have a "retina" resolution buy a tablet proper.

Upping refresh has steep power costs too. Ereader marketers like their "recharge once every 6-8 weeks!" message.


> The tech can do better, but as I've heard it told, the market for it has been eink readers. Who needs to refresh their book at 120hz? is the thinking. Folks that want to game or have a "retina" resolution buy a tablet proper.

Personally, I'd love to read most web-pages on an e-ink display, due to the high contrast, minimal power usage, and great readability even in direct light. I don't care hugely about usability for dynamic content, but I'd want fast scrolling with no update artifacts.

Related question: what's the state of color e-ink displays? Seems like it should be possible to produce a bi-stable display with a little bit of color depth, even if just through filters and dithering.


> Related question: what's the state of color e-ink displays?

They demonstrated true color in 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2V9iuTW3sA I would guess another 3 to 4 years to consumer availability.


That's really impressive. I look forward to seeing that in production.

(Also, some searching suggests that it's "tens of thousands of colors" rather than true color, but that's still a major improvement, and more than enough for the majority of the web sans photographs.)


> "tens of thousands of colors" rather than true color

My meaning by true color was color achieved through actual pigment pixels versus older E-Ink products like triton that achieved color through LCD-like RGB color filters on top of reflective/non-reflective pixels. The difference between the two is quite stark.


They stopped bothering. They had some demo screens a few years back, mira-something I think, and a few products that used it, but nobody bought it because the colors were terrible due to the entire "e-inks generally don't require backlights and so massive contrast issues" I think the tech got bought up and pretty much shoved in a corner somewhere


Mirasol display is I think what you're trying to recall. I still have one; a Kyobo Android 'tablet'. In typical tablet usage conditions (i.e. indoors, probably at night on a bed) then yes, mirasol displays and color e-ink screens never matched LCDs and SAMOLEDS. Mirasol was decent/serviceable imo while color e-ink has been truly terrible.

However in outdoor conditions (e.g. at the beach or a park) I still haven't seen any iPad or Samsung display as pleasing as my old mirasol display without backlight. If someone released a new mirasol display ereader today, I would buy it in a heartbeat


If you're refreshing rapidly, you might lose a lot of that battery life, based on my experience with extended fast reading sessions on my Kindle.


I've hit this before, but honestly do not think it's a big deal. Sure the installer could default to a larger boot, but it's manually configurable during install. And cleaning it up once in a while is just good sys admin practice.

sudo bash -c "apt auto-remove --purge; apt update; apt upgrade" is what I usually run.

Prefer they focus engineering cycles on actual engineering problems.


Cause it's a stretch for them to freely publish online using the same model?

Cause they're already doing that.


> That could mean a phone that is docked, but when you have 10x the screen real estate, a keyboard and a mouse the interface should be different when docked vs when not docked.

At least in the demos I saw, the mobile UI would turn into a traditional Ubuntu Unity look, with floating windows and keyboard+mouse interaction.

So it sounds like they were working in the direction you describe.

The dumbest move, IMO, was not using Wayland and working with that dev community to improve it's functionality on mobile (one of the reasons given for Mir). Shuttleworth seems to point this out in the post.

Turns out rolling yet another display server rankles noses and takes a lot of dev cycles.


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

Search: