Stories need to be good, and that's a problem. Right now, the HN community is voting up more "pop science" to drive people to paywalls. I don't know if its a troll farm or a side revenue, but the number of nytimes.com, businessinsider.com, etc. stories keeps rising.
Here's another explanation: not all bad stories are upvoted, just those that work well to spin up a good discussion.
I know I upvote in this pattern. I read HN for comments first, stories second. The linked story is immaterial, as long as there's something interesting in it that can be discussed on a better level. Take "pop science" articles - the comment thread under those tends to contain links to original research, corrections to the article, opinions of actual scientists in the field, and much better explanations of the described phenomena (as well as the standard set of complaints about paywalls and "journalism these days"; I myself am sometimes guilty of the latter).
Would an arXiv paper be preferable to a "pop science" article? Perhaps. And we get our fair share of papers submitted here too. But I have a feeling that the "articles for the masses" are statistically more likely to create an insightful comment thread, and end up being upvoted more.
Also worth noting is that moderators often update the submission link, when better sources on the same topic are surfaced.
You are making assumptions about motivations. Dang’s post Tell HN: Paywalls with workarounds are OK; paywall complaints are off topic [1] explains the rationale that many here adhere to.
This isn't some backseat driver telling DO how to run their event better. This is literally someone who is supposed to be benefited by the event (an open source maintainer) who is saying the event has negative value for them. They have skin in the game, they're doing this for free compared to the DO employees who are being paid to administer the event.
Why? Open source has worked perfectly fine before this and maintainers are saying it's a net negative. So why not stop? Because DO doesn't get a PR campaign anymore?
This might be a good story, but the github ReadMe manages not to say what the package does, why its unique, or why its cool. I'm sure it says something much later in the manual.
Thank you, both good ideas. I'm not sure right now about how to support more dictionaries without making the UI too busy, but it's something I'd love to find a solution for.
At the risk of being too traditional: coin and courts.
For coin, you start with Estonia's electronic signature infrastructure. You have the government work to maintain the sanctity of signature chains, the flow of money, and the visibility of the flow of money, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature_in_Estonia or the use of RSS feeds in the TARP-2 bailout fund.
For court, you want to have speedy trials, heavy on the jury. I mean trials like the 1920s where people sue each other over almost everything and most trials are concluded the day after they are filed. You should probably consider mandatory jury duty (or significant fines) streamed to cell phones. Let locals shape and enforce the law.
The goal of coin laws is to create a single system. The goal of jury trials is to have everyone buy into the system.
I did not put justice as a goal.
Sometimes I need to echo things back to understand.
1. Start-up decides to scrap their current, unhappy business to pivot into a totally different area for which they have no long passion.
2. Start-up develops a product for a small, small niche: companies making design systems that also drive product development decisions based on actual, as opposed to requested, client usage. And said development company cannot use log analytics, roll their own, nor existing companies like Teleric.
3. They create a solution to said possible problem, without a planned first customer nor existing application.
Our republic, and the California state government, is based on rule of law. One group makes the laws, another enforces it, and a third interprets the conflicts. This works. What we have here is a 'no rules' set of actions.
How about rules that say "we will take any student for $200K/year". This is enough money to supply extra supervision and also give a full scholarship to another student.
The idea of privilege first entered the public sphere in the prelude to the French Revolution. "Privilege" in Old French literally means "private law".[1] It was the idea that a different set of rules for each of the Estates (Clergy, Nobles, and Commoners) was both fair and natural.
Are we are starting to see similarly different sets of rules for each class in the United States? Is such privilege in accordance with our ideals of liberty and justice for all?
Before the 18th century most people could not read. Literacy rates began rising dramatically starting in the 17th century with the invention of the printing press and the proliferation of reading materials that it spawned. By the third quarter of the 18th century, an extraordinary milestone was passed in France. For the first time in history more people could read than could not. The commoners of Paris were obsessed with the plays, novels and essays of Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot. The satire and wit of these thinkers inspired a new form of popular discourse we now call critical thinking. Commoners from rich merchants to petty artisans started examining and discovering the contradictions and injustices endemic to their lot in life. The idea of privilege came from this tempest of new ideas. While the hierarchy of power and its unequal treatment are as old as time, this newly educated population was for the first time able to see this hierarchy of power for what it is: an inherited system of control based on fraudulent claims to divinity that is inherently unfair and unjust.
1 for 1 isn't worth it, and the UC system already plays that game with international students where one international pays for 3 in-states. Make the buy-in price pay for 10 and I'm in support.
1 for 10 seems reasonable, assuming there is also a strict academic requirement for that privileged student. Even more points if it supports their housing and food plan.
If you fail out Timmy, he has to pay for tuition again thus paying for even more students. Or just charge the 10x upfront + normal tuition/year after that.
Further points if rich kids do household chores, cleaning, cooking etc for less privileged folks. Just strict academic requirement is not sufficient. Rich kids also have to remain in 95 percentile in academics. A further investigation committee need to be setup to investigate every year if rich kids are not using their influence to be among top students in their classes.
You obviously have to balance the legitimate cost against the illegitimate costs people will incur to get kids admitted. I don't know if 3x or 10x is the right value, but it's definitely not "more is better." If you make it cost a billion dollars to legitimately buy your kid into the school, there will still be millionaires utilizing these sorts of bribes.
This isn't tenable at this price. Double or triple it, and maybe.
The limiting factor for elite universities usually isn't dollars, but the quantity of qualified tenure-track faculty and physical space. Not at the university, but overall. The number of postdocs and graduating PhD students each year with the credentials that Cal wants to accept isn't huge. Similarly, the number of rooms that the university has is limited, and both of those numbers take time to change.
A certain ticket for 4x the price of Harvard is still a really, really good deal for lots of wealthy people.
This is already the way education works. You’ve heard of “needs-blind” admissions? Anywhere they don’t say that, it means the ability of students to pay full price is part of the admission process.
The economy travellers make it possible to travel first class. First class travel is for the moderately wealthy. The very wealthy have their own transport.
The idea that we have to "tear it all down" and institute Marxism is backward and self-contradictory.
As you said, we need to identify where and how rule of law is lacking and fix it, making sure that representative government and separation of powers remains intact (or is put in place again).
a) It's not uncommon these days for the term "Marxism" to be used as a brush to paint anyone "too left wing" (despite not being close to actual Marxists)
Plus, yes there are still some people in the world who believe in Marxism, although often just in a broad sense rather than thinking everything about it is right. But I doubt many on HN.
And while complaining about downvoted may be against the rules, personally I think it's completely fine in the context of wanting to understand something like your question, rather than "this shouldn't be downvoted".
There was a study suggesting the strongest social mobility influence granted by an university education is really just the proximity and opportunity to network with the wealthy on even grounds more than the education itself.
So by having a guaranteed ratio of very wealthy mixed into your student pool, it's hugely beneficial to everyone else. It's practically the reason people chase after prestigious MBA educations.
The practice might be distasteful philosophically, but the results are apparently great.
Well no, that's not really what rule of law means. It would be perfectly within the rule of law to allow people to pay for admissions. If this wasn't a public institution, it would be perfectly legal, and I'm not even sure it's illegal here.
Rule of law is not sufficient, power also needs to be distributed correctly for rule of law to lead to good outcomes.
> It would be perfectly within the rule of law to allow people to pay for admissions
Not if a law exists to the contrary. And that was the point I was agreeing with -- the solution should be to write a law if one doesn't already exist; or to enforce it if it does.
> power also needs to be distributed correctly for rule of law to lead to good outcomes
Agreed, though distribution isn't the word I'd use, as it implies the existence of another human authority to determine how it should be distributed (thus granting that person or group of people improper power).
But if the placement of power is determined by duly enacted law, that's acceptable.
It's a fine view that nobody should be denied great education, but if an entire country's annual cohort of high school diploma recipients all applies to the public college considered to be the best one they obviously couldn't all attend that one.
This has been done with hardware. The OLPC was a clean sheet implementation of a computer. It created ideas such as only having a few sizes of screws, shipping extra screws in the case, separating the light bar from the LED screen, innovative use of polarization, new mesh networking, and a low price tag.
About half of the innovations were picked up by other manufacturers within a couple years.
This was done with a programming language. Ada was designed through an iterative sequence of trials for a clean sheet implementation of a development language. It created, or popularized, ideas such as explicit module exports, tying directory and file names to classes, separate "to end of line" comments, and more.
About half of the innovations were picked up by other language vendors within a couple years.
Oberon gets mentioned on HackerNews every couple years. It is hard to say its really a clean sheet.
Many of its ideas, and Xerox PARC workstations which is here Niklaus Wirth got his inspiration from, could be replicated via COM/XPC/D-BUS/gRPC/AIDL based desktop, however they never go to the full extent as Xerox/Oberon went, because most developers lack the understanding how it could be like and never bother to learn from history.
Capitalism, according to Wealth of Nations, has some problems with corporations becoming monopolies. When Teddy Roosevelt was sidelined into the Vice President position, it was partly to sideline the movement towards regulation and trust-busting. That period, due an assassination, broke up large companies.
We now have Apple, and a host of other players, using monopoly powers to extract value from any who would play. Epic may have done that math and found the tax was too high to be profitable, or that upsetting the monopoly was worthwhile. History may turn again, and monopolies may face more scrutiny.
The uncertainty of changes are one of the joys of a government system that is organized mob rule.
