You need to atone for your actions regarding Aaron Swartz sir. When I first arrived at Hacker News I happened upon a thread where Aaron was asking for help from his compatriots, his fellow hackers. What he got was a sharp stick in the eye. The top voted comment was by a fellow who had been an active and helpful participant in this forum wherein he called Aaron out for not covering his own expenses for his defense. We now know that Aaron had already spent his fortune defending himself from a prosecutor out of control, Stephen Heymann, and was literally broke. This is apparently standard procedure for the Justice Department: threaten defendants with financial ruin and many years in jail to get a plea. As a result they boast a rate of 90% pleading guilty in federal cases. Thus effectively removing one of the most cherished protections of our civil liberties: trial by a jury of your peers. You sir, shut down every thread in that post in which someone even suggested that Aaron might be in trouble. The fellow who posted the top comment on that thread decided to abstain from taking part this discussion forum following Aaron's suicide. You, however, did not. You carried on commenting and defending the very behavior of the Justice Department which, along with your actions, lead to Aaron's death.
I second this. It's no secret that I often find Thomas's writing and tone to be reprehensible. But his comments, then and now, with regard to Aaron are beyond the pale.
The only thing "preposterous"--to use Thomas's word--is that the debate here is a mostly semantic one about how much jail time Aaron "faced," rather than a substantive one about why he was facing any jail time at all. That's the debate that should be taking place, and it's one worth having.
It is absolutely true that Aaron was treated incredibly poorly by this community when he was most in need. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5056279. Though much has since been deleted, I saw it happen, and I've been on the receiving end of similar treatment myself.
I'm planning to revisit this topic later. But for now, shame on those whose cynicism knows no bounds. And shame on Y Combinator for allowing a useful tool for discussion to devolve so clearly into a toxic mess.
The deleted comments on that thread are about 'edw519, not Aaron Swartz. The thread you've linked to to show Aaron's mistreatment happened after his suicide and thus can't illustrate any treatment of Aaron whatsoever. So I have to ask what you believe you "saw happen" there.
I was about to donate $50 to Swartz's donation link until I read Tptacek comment about Swartz having had sold a startup before was hardly in a bad place to defend himself. I guess instead of thinking of donating I could have called him instead, maybe that might have helped.
I don't think you should feel any more comfortable attributing malice to Ed than to me. In fact, you should feel less comfortable; Ed's more sincere and thoughtful than I am.
There is no malice attributed to Ed. It was a thoughtful comment that made a lot of sense at the time, enough to convince me to pursue a course of action that I otherwise wouldn't have taken. No fault doesn't mean no effect. If I was Ed and had his perspective I'm sure I'd have said the same comment. That comment did have a part in affecting other individuals (well, me at least) deciding actions they'd take, especially because Ed is a respected member of the community, who is sincere and thoughtful.
No fault != No effect.
The point is each and every action we take in this world changes it in some way. And it's simplistic to say no one in this community had any part in Swartz's death.
The tone of your comment is fawning and is easily confused with trolling, and "brave" is a word commonly used contrarily to indicate disdain for someone's actions. That, or you're actually just trolling.
Your scolding, scapegoating tone is pretty awful, too, but you'd have to delete the whole comment to correct it. No actions of any commenters here "lead to Aaron's death".
You call me a scold and accuse me of scapegoating. You claim that "no actions of any commenters here lead to Aaron's death" and imply that Aaron should have been able to survive the onslaught of financial ruin and the prospect of years in prison along with having his compatriots on Hacker News tell him to fuck off. Clearly, you have no compassion for Aaron's plight. But I do. You live in the same world with me and we are all in this together whether you like it or not.
Don't play like "who, me? I'm just a naive seeker-of-common-ground!"
You entered the conversation waving a bloody shirt to slur real people, present here, as being responsible for the death of another real person, who was once present here. You couldn't even spell your adoptive martyr's name right, yet you're passing judgement, and want to assign blame to commenters – commenters! – for a death.
Swartz was a principled free-speech absolutist – see http://bits.are.notabug.com/ – so you do him no honor when you suggest commenters owe penance, or silence, for expressing certain opinions.
Chargebacks, while inconvenient for vendors, provide utility to consumers, especially online when there can be a long delay between paying and getting to receive/examine the product.
Chargebacks do provide utility to consumers, but they also provide utility to scammers and fraudsters, who use chargebacks to steal more than $10 billion a year in the US alone. The cost of this, and fraud prevention and dispute resolution, is ultimately passed back to the consumer as higher prices.
From the most negative point of view, the chargeback mechanism could be seen as a sleight of hand marketing trick that was necessary to get consumers to accept new payment methods, by hiding the real costs.
When people mention "no charge-backs" as an incentive to merchants to use bitcoin, they seem to not realize or gloss over the fact that for that benefit to be realized would require the merchant only transacting in bitcoin. It's not like they can say, charge-back scammers have to use bitcoin, everyone else, credit/debit is fine.
I can't imagine that there are many business where the cost/benefit of only accepting bitcoin to eliminate chargeback losses makes sense.
It doesn't have to be so black and white as that. You can take into account other factors such as country of origin of the consumer and identifying information provided as whether to accept a credit card payment or not.
I have never ever had to request a chargeback from my credit card company. I have, however, returned many items which were voluntarily refunded by the merchant, even those items paid with cash or cash equivalent. But then again, I also don't buy from sketchy vendors that have no incentive to want to gain/maintain your trust.
I made a purchase from a site operated by an artist I had been a fan of for 8 years. The order was never fulfilled despite my PayPal account being charged. No one from the site ever returned my messages. I reversed it without issue. If it had been bitcoin, I'd simply have lost the money.
Consumers like knowing they have an element of protection when buying something from a store they can not visit from people they'll never meet. As someone that has worked with ecommerce websites for the past 15 years and currently has $110 worth of bitcoin in my wallet, I don't think that is likely to change anytime soon. Especially not with the current pitch of bitcoin.
Collectively we (as a generation, let alone a culture) haven't reached a point where more shopping is done online then in person. Until we start to approach that point we don't start to a bigger push for online digital currencies form the general population.
And even then "online digital currencies" aren't really particularly needed where there are satisfactory online digital payment mechanisms denominated in traditional currencies.
I've looked through your comments on this post and did not find anything that looked like an explanation or refutation of Lewis' claims that HFT were front running. Maybe I missed it or you were talking about another post. Why don't you create a blog post? That way you can point people to it and you won't have keep repeating yourself.
I think if your house/company burned down and you loose yor main PC and the external backup, you'd be glad to pay 0.10 cents for every Gigabyte you can retrieve.
Or potentially higher than 20x that much, if you are downloading it quickly (are you actually aware of the Glacier pricing model? where did you obtain $.10/GB?).
But it's not like S3 and no backup at all are the only two options. There's loads of backup providers (Carbonite, Mozy, Backblaze etc) out there. The comparison needs to be against those.
A strike involves work stoppage, it's a very different tactic than mass resignation.
In 1999, Major League Umpires Association (MLUA) were not able to legally go strike so they opted to use mass resignation as their negotiation strategy. It backfired, cost 22 umpires their careers and led to decertification of the union.
Sickouts are commonly illegal. Though it is usually impossible to punish the individuals for calling in sick, an organization that promotes it - such as union - may suffer consequences, and organizing such thing may be a firing offense.
We don't actually know that. And part of the reason is "dinosaurs" is such a broad term, encompassing so many species of many millions of years. I would think it's mostly likely that some dinosaurs were cold-blooded and some warm-blooded.
I have also attended a talk that suggested that some dinosaurs almost certainly didn't fit the warm-blooded or cold-blooded model, and that despite mechanically being cold-blooded, their large size alone kept them warm. So in many ways those ones were practically warm-blooded.
