maconic

7 ms·

1.
by maconic 7y ago
I think the pragmatic answer is that unless the country cares about the stick (sanctions, tariffs, military conflict) or the carrot (financial aid, access to markets, military alliances), you can't do anything. How long have we been ta
2.
by maconic 7y ago
They all do engage in some form of it... show me a modern Western country that doesn't have long sentences including death for sedition, subversion, or treason against "the State?" I think the only question is who gets to dec
3.
by maconic 7y ago
I think the second idea is the correct one, there are many counterpoints to the first one: you can see the same thing in any culture with the right ingredients, such as Germany in Nazi era (the movie "Downfall" captures the psycho
4.
by maconic 7y ago
Being banished from social circles is certainly one reason, but in this case I think it's fear of life or liberty by an authoritarian regime that has complete discretion to do so if you come across as speaking out against them. If you
5.
by maconic 8y ago
I'm a little late to the conversation, but this seems to be hijacked into an anti-Israel/anti-Semitic discussion rather than about spying, so I'd like to suggest one (hopefully obvious) point: nationality and ethnicity seems
6.
by maconic 8y ago
I don't know if there is a good fix for it, but labels are a very potent weapon. In the U.S. a few decades ago, calling someone a communist sympathizer was a dangerous label. In China in the 1950s being called a rightist was a dangerou
7.
by maconic 8y ago
We were all a burden on our family since day one weren't we? It takes a few takes decades to repay that burden, if ever. > "Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke crack, and loiter all day on some street corner,
8.
by maconic 8y ago
Didn't he make enough money to follow his honest convictions? I take it at face value he wants to achieve the mission because he believes in it.
9.
by maconic 8y ago
I believe it was Sam Altman who had proposed a good solution to this, which is that you start off with a high number like that for employee #1 with decreasing numbers as the employee count goes up. If you are Instagram and become worth $1B
10.
by maconic 8y ago
I don't agree with that... I would want all the early employees to be rewarded for taking a chance on that. I would want to go the other direction and give restricted stock (which can be early exercised) when the valuation is low and w
11.
by maconic 8y ago
Well, but then don't look for generic cookie cutter startups that everyone wants to work at :) Go after the startup where you as employee #1 are uniquely positioned to negotiate for. If you're employee #1 and you just graduated fr
12.
by maconic 8y ago
I would recommend making a distinction between a startup that manages to get acquired as a small team for building a good product (Instagram is an extreme example... but I know of a few startups that few here have ever heard of where the ou
13.
by maconic 8y ago
That doesn't have to be true, there are many decent and honorable people that decide to start companies. But I do certainly think you need to walk away as soon as you feel a founder doesn't recognize or value you or your contribut
14.
by maconic 8y ago
I am not religious so I won't make any comment on that part, but I do hope we can culturally somehow figure out how to avoid someone like Mr. Rogers being considered a pedophile (and maybe he was a pedophile or a serial killer I don&#x
15.
by maconic 8y ago
Time for a decentralized blockchain of code commits...
16.
by maconic 8y ago
Exactly :)
17.
by maconic 8y ago
Fair enough, but there is still a hosted solution, it's just hosted email instead :) I know Linux used that approach, which is seemingly ironic since Linus made git, and previously used BitKeeper. There seemed to be some problem that e
18.
by maconic 8y ago
Independent of Gitea (which I have nothing to do with nor have any relationship with anyone involved). Your comment "It is worth stressing that you need no software to 'host' git. Every git repository is 'self hosting&#x
19.
by maconic 16y ago
There are a lot of bootstrappers on the Lean Startup Circle discussion group ( http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle/topics ).
20.
by maconic 16y ago
Disclaimer: I'm just speculating Mike Arrington presumably wanted to reduce Jason Calacanis' stake because most of the revenue was coming from TC50 and AOL didn't want to buy them with Calacanis getting half the revenue. So Arrington, act
21.
by maconic 16y ago
Thanks to everyone for the feedback and comments, Scribd just announced they are making changes: http://blog.scribd.com/2010/09/21/the-scribd-archive-an-apol...
22.
Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist(blog.ericgoldman.org)
294 points by maconic 16y ago|104 comments
23.
by maconic 17y ago
From an ethical perspective, I think it just depends on how you will use the leads. If you make sure you're giving the leads to a scrupulous company who will offer the customer a valuable service that (s)he was looking for, then I don't see
24.
by maconic 17y ago
Supplier fraud (sourcing using sites like alibaba.com) is also a big problem on the Intenret. It's hard to establish trust on the Internet, especially when dealing with people from other countries where you don't know which institutions you
25.
Ask HN: How do you send mails from Amazon EC2?
8 points by maconic 17y ago|8 comments
26.
by maconic 17y ago
I've spent some time in China and found Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot, BBC (just to name a few) to be entirely blocked while I was there. While it's debatable as to whether or not these Western websites are important to average Chinese, it se
27.
Using temporary IPs in the cloud considered harmful
32 points by maconic 17y ago|22 comments
28.
by maconic 17y ago
If Apple would have made these improvements long before Google's Nexus One, it would have seemed more sincere. Doing it now just makes it seem like bowing to competitive pressures and not because they actually care about developers.
29.
by maconic 17y ago
One thing is for sure: unpaid internships are probably illegal nine times out of ten. Employers are legally required to pay interns at least minimum wage if they fit the definition of an employee. Given the way most startups use interns, th
30.
by maconic 17y ago
UCSC Professor Helmbold used machine learning to discover optimal portfolio allocation: http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~dph/mypubs/OnLinePortfolio.pdf

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