Contributions to Wikipedia are not time-sensitive, and the ability to load a Wikipedia article is not dependent on the availability of volunteering Wikipedia gnomes. Here, the availability of seeing volunteers at any given time is the limiting reagent, and the free market is one proposed solution. The Uber/Lyft/taxi analogy is that the availability of friends with cars and free time at any given time or place is the limiting reagent for getting free rides. The existence of paid services allows us to increase that availability by orders of magnitude, and hopefully the same would apply here.
I think the parent is asking/claiming that public options are almost universally less desirable than the product of self-interest in the presence of competition, so their main effect is just to ensure that the private would-be monopolies need to actually provide a good service.
In domains like Internet infrastructure and health insurance which are empirically pretty terrible when there's no public option, I think there's a lot to be said for that argument.
Is it "fair" for a monopoly to have to compete against an organization that has nearly infinite resources but terribly inefficient operating ability? I don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Is it fair to huge ISPs to impose net neutrality on them? Maybe yes, maybe no. But it's no less fair for them than not having net neutrality would be for companies who want to use that infrastructure. It's certainly no less fair than life would be for a child who can't afford access to health care in a black market-like total laissez-faire economic system. I'd prefer to live in an imperfect implementation of capitalism that tries to regulate out negative externalities when possible (despite often failing) and provide as much fairness for as many people as possible, to one that provides so much "fairness" to certain corporations that they can make the game unfair for everyone else, people and companies alike.
> I think the parent is asking/claiming that public options are almost universally less desirable than the product of self-interest in the presence of competition, so their main effect is just to ensure that the private would-be monopolies need to actually provide a good service.
Well, actually, I'm claiming that a Free Market alternative should be able to win even if the Free Market includes the government.
Nobody is guaranteed to win, and I don't think a public option would necessarily be odious, but if someone's so gung-ho about competition, they shouldn't be scared of competing with a government.
Edit: OK, yes, I was mocking the Free Market Fundamentalists in my post. Fair's fair, they mock the government and the moderates, often using japes invented by Ronald Reagan (peace be upon him).
Right. Free market alternative should be able to beat government, so in cases where the free market isn't producing acceptable results, rather than forcing them to change through legislation, government can just compete with them until they beat the government.
In addition to incorrect instinct, heuristics, and prejudice, there are also cases where a hiring manager's instinct correctly identifies problems with a candidate but where they then lie about the rationale because being direct would seem too insulting (e.g. "You strike me as a dishonest/unfriendly/lazy/[insert insult] person").
I think you're confusing the parent's use of "primary" + "source" with the lexical item "primary source". The parent presumably meant "one of the most main sources [to use as one's only or first point of research]".
Sort of separately, but as threeseed points out, Wikipedia is frequently used as a corpus for primary research, so technically it's that kind of "primary source" too.
Agreed in concept, but you can get similar if not greater productivity gains from stacking/floating WMs that let you move and resize windows into a tiling-like configuration. Examples are goomwwm and subtle.
This "manual tiling" approach is also probably the only viable option for tiling-like window management on OS X. While not nearly as powerful or productivity-promoting as the above-mentioned WMs or conventional tiling ones, the OS X program Spectacle (http://spectacleapp.com) makes life a lot easier on OS X for those of us who are used to the screen real estate and keyboard control afforded by tiling WMs.
Edit: Another commenter mentioned the non-free Optimal Layout (http://most-advantageous.com/optimal-layout) for OS X. I haven't downloaded the trial yet, but the website makes it look very promising.
I've used an xmonad clone for osx [0] for about a year now. It's a lot buggier than xmonad - mostly due to osx's terrible apis - but it gets the job done.
Recent versions of Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst have made a pretty much xmonad-like experience on osx. There are a few quirks but I don't see me going back at this point.
Completely different. The Microsoft employee beating his wife would be analogous to an Uber driver beating his wife, neither of which has anything to do with their company's products or services and neither of which would be interesting to HN users. The point here is that this is a case of a driver raping a passenger, which immediately challenges the safety of Uber's model. This is now a component of Uber's perception, much like Elon Musk's blog posts are of Tesla's, and those make it to the front page of HN all the time.
Well, given that "move fast and break nothing" does have that catchy je ne sais quois (at least to me) that makes a motto resonate, I'm assuming it is controversial in some way. Maybe not in whether it's a good idea but in whether it's even possible. I think it is a pretty controversial/shocking claim to say that you can move with startup efficiency without sacrificing the reliability that slow-moving large corporations with pointy-haired bosses seek. If the industry readily accepted that claim, the industry would look a lot different from how it does now.
The new motto just sounds like "Pay My Rent and Keep My Money"; sure, I'd like both of those things and it's certainly going to cause a stir that I'm claiming I'm going to do both, but it's not like it's actually a thing that can be done, and the attention people pay to the claim is largely confusion about what I even mean when I say that.
By contrast, "Pay My Rent and Empty the Account" actually tells you something about the direction I'm going in, and what I prioritize when picking my actions.
If person A walked up to your window and fired shots through it, killing a family member of yours, and then person B walked up to your window out of curiosity (trespassing), saw a dead person, and called 911 (or whatever your country's emergency number is), should person B be prosecuted for murder?
Edit: I thought this was an accurate analogy, but I'm assuming the downvoter either disagreed or felt I phrased this as a sarcastic attack rather than an analogy. If it incorrectly came across as the former, that would be my fault, but I don't know if that's what caused the downvote, so an explanatory comment would be appreciated.
Since you asked for a downvote explanation: I couldn't make any sense of the comment, even after thinking about it. It's not that I disagree, I can't even figure out the analogy. Are you saying B shouldn't be charged with anything because they didn't murder, or B should be charged with trespassing but not murder, or B should be charged with felony murder because of the trespass, or something else?
The parent asked whether the OP should be treated differently from people actually doing the malicious act. My analogy was meant to illustrate that we should.
I didn't express a stance either way on whether he should be prosecuted for a more minor offense or not, in the analogy's case trespassing. (There are obviously both pros and cons in the precedent set by prosecuting people for revealing their own minor crime on account of reporting a terrible one.)
That is NOT an accurate analogy.. to make it analogous, you need at least two fixes: a) the person needs not simply see from window, but to get into your basement from breaking a double-panned window, and go up into your bedroom. b) Also the charge needs to be for 'intrusion'
Plus, using 'murder' and 'family' and 'dead' etc. are too dramatic and personal and unnecessary to convey your point about internet security.
