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

When I read the title, I thought "morg" was one of those goofy tech words that I had missed but whose meaning was still pretty clear in context (like a portmanteau of "Microsoft" and "borged," the latter of which I've never heard as a verb but still works). I guess it's a goofy tech word now.


At least it wasn't mogged, or morbed...


Yeah, isn't this why we're told everything "moves so much slower at a bigco" than at a startup?


Was going to say that I hope Joe doesn't end up going to prison for an unspeakable crime, but then I saw it was an acronym.


Is that a Reiser reference or am I missing something?


>they broke all the time

While I was reading the OP I kept thinking about how an accounting firm's entire ability to do business rested on the continued functioning of a parallel-port dongle. I just have to imagine that they had a box full of these.


I imagine this is a temporary gig until the burbclaves build out their own armed security services and he moves on to high-speed pizza delivery.


Some rule of law would be nice, so that we don't have to resort to private security forces.


But property laws disproportionally benefit the rich.


> disproportionally

So even you concede they benefit almost everyone, only they benefit some more. So should we really be dismantling them and descend into anarchy, just to harm a group you dislike? Doesn't seem like a good move.


All I'm saying is that if a society wants true equality, it cannot have property laws because some individuals will inevitably own more than others.

We must decide which is more important.


I think the historical evidence is pretty clear that the only way we can achieve true equality in wealth is in equal squalor.


And?


In the current age, can something be both unequal and good?


yes?


And...that is not nice


Only because you hate the rich. I get that it encourages them to share to keep the pitchforks off their lawn, and that noblesse oblige has broken down recently, but property laws are the foundation of our prosperity. If you can't have something that's actually yours (property laws) for you to invest in, then there will be little investment.


Wanting property laws not to give additional advantages beyond those that wealth itself already gives is not hateful. It's also pretty reasonable that the vast majority of people who are not rich might not care about preserving "our" prosperity in the current form. I'm pretty certain there have been plenty of societies with worse quality of life for most people in them throughout history with property laws at least as strict as ours, so it doesn't follow that people would overall be worse off with more egalitarian property rights. This doesn't even address the obvious issues with assumptions that maximizing prosperity is inherently the most important thing; it was arguably more "propserous" to avoid regulating child labor, 40 hour work weeks, minimum wages, etc., but I fundamentally disagree that those would be bad policies even if there were provably shown to reduce "prosperity", whatever that means


But there's a loophole. Burbclaves will need to let deliverators in, which is a gap in the armor. How are they supposed to defend themselves? Some sort of rat thing?


> The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade.

Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?


Allegedly, it was given a lower grade due to it not being a feasible business plan, in the professor's estimation. Of course, this forms part of the legend behind Fred Smith and FedEx, so that should be taken with a grain of salt.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fred-smith-told-yale-professo...


“Initially, Ravel was to create a variation on the music of Isaac Albéniz, but copyright laws prevented him from doing so.” [your article]

“[Koji Kondo] had planned to use Maurice Ravel's Boléro as the title theme as it perfectly matched its speed, seeing as under Japanese copyright law, music is released into the public domain 50 years after the composer's death. However, Kondo was forced to change it in November 1985, late in the game's development, after learning that it had only been 47 years and 11 months after Ravel's death.”[1]

Funny how things rhyme.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_(video_gam...


A few years after this, a documentary was made about some of the men still living at the Sunshine (mentioned in the first paragraph): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0m2FaC8GUs


Great assessment of Dave Barry


> The most timeless thing here is Linux retaining its "highest hacker to user ratio".

More so than BSD? Or still more than just the OSs Carmack listed?


In 1997 Linux was still so niche that the hacker-to-user-ratio was definitely on par with BSD.


BSD was much less desktop oriented then, and there wasn't newbie friendly documentation around.

Whereas it was a niche but still relatively common for teenage hobbyists to install Linux, get X11 running, read the HOWTOs and surf the web with Netscape for Linux[1] on the home (or school) PC and geeking out on all the Unix things that you heard the older kids got to use at the university lab workstations.

You could argue those users had the hacker spirit of course and many of them did learn programming as well after a while since you still ended up building stuff from source half the time when you wanted to install something.

It helped that you could easily get your hands on cheap Linux install CDs in bookstores and computer shops.

[1] Netscape seems to have been at version 4.0 by 1997. WP thinks version 2 was already available for Linux.


Honestly, I didn't even think of BSD. I actually don't know anyone who uses it on a personal level, I assumed it was more of an OS that you had to use for your job. But I guess, given how niche it is for individual use, you'd be right. But to be pedantic, if you took something really obscure (like hobbyist OSes that have little practical use), you'd probably get to a 100% "hacker" user base.


Playstation, Juniper, NetApp, Netflix to name a few small users. If you touch any of these, you use it too.


I know many OSes are based on FreeBSD, I assumed that OP implied people who used the actual standard distribution of it, not highly-customized embedded or similar versions. Also, using Netflix wouldn't make one a BSD user just because it's what they run on their servers.


Don't forget macOS and iOS, Darwin is also derived from BSD.


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

Search: