It's amusing seeing this brought up in the thread when:

a) Drew is the person who wrote the major "takedown" screed accusing RMS of being a pedo(-defender). b) Drew was subsequently outed for having a long history on the internet of consuming & sharing lolicon and saying that 14-year olds should be required by law to have IUDs installed.

Firing them all broke the pipeline

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495739

Careful. Preemption takes many forms, some of them many would find unpalatable.

Those schoolgirls were obviously going to be a problem for the US in the next 20 years.

But it's also the basic l basis of deterrence and the destabilizing nature of ICBM defense: relying on interceptors presumes the war happens.

Unpalatable preemption is generally better than reentry vehicles coming down your chimney.

The problem there is you can't prove anything would have come down the chimney if the preemption is successful, so people will still be unhappy.

I agree, but some of them are more obvious.

Like not giving 100 billion dollars to someone who actively wants to kill you.

Because no one has ever deliberately used the wrong tool for business reasons. Or thought they had a perfectly reasonable argument.

It's better to have escape hatches for in case you need them, but anyone who feels that way probably isn't using Rust to start with.

Maybe that's a bit harsh. I'm sure there are some problem domains where the other trait is desirable, but IMO it's not generic systems programming.

"Advantages" are often to the individual's benefit, but the species' detriment.

I dunno...Wolves are pretty much endangered anywhere, but the cute and friendly ones became dogs and are everywhere.

Cats spread all over the world from the desert because of advantages.

Advantages mean you survive and procreate.

So ever-more vulture capitalists and lawyers, and ever-fewer actual honest workers?

Nature really doesn't give a crap whether or not others of yours species dominate you, nor how you feel about it.

Have a genetic legacy -- That's the only way you win. Or don't and be crying about it.

Maybe we’ll be happier overall if we select for other things.

Because we know better.

There's a word for that. Hubris.

You know people used to play games of chess sending their moves via postcard, right?

Like it was popular.

They do. But they used to too.

This style of play is really underrated.

I used to play a half-dozen or so games of Diplomacy at time with daily turns for years.

There are still modern games that take advantage of this idea (my friends have been playing Old World like this recently) but I'd like to see it more.

There were a bunch of 90s BBS games that worked like this. All the players had so many "turns" (maybe better described as "action points") which they could use for different activities in a given game. They reset each day.

It was more of a mechanism to keep connections shorter because most BBSes only had a few phone lines, or even just one, so the number of simultaneous users was extremely limited.

There are games online that work like that today

Used to play a multi-player Lords of Midnight (the Spectrum/C64 game) where each player (up to 8) made their moves in turn. The original used a day/night turn-based system, so using that for 2-8 humans made sense.

It actually improved on the original by introducing new maps, which probably helped players unfamiliar with the original game who could probably draw the map from memory.

Games could often stall where a real-life didn't allow a player time to make their moves.

Yeah! I cannot for the life of me remember the game but I used to play this space nation builder type game around 2004-2007...i was so invested. Then i found out the game resets every ~year. Wow that was a sad morning when i woke up to find out I came 50,000th or something haha.

EVE Online? I never played it myself, just know of it.

I don't think it was EVE, but i did play a little bit of that for a while. It's funny that we played these more as kids and less as adults, i feel like as an adult this kind of game is more my tempo.

There's so much culturally different here that blaming just the differences in the system of health care is effectively meaningless.

Yearly physical exams are much more thorough in Japan. Unless you are optimally fit, you will be prescribed lifestyle changes to make and there is a strong expectation that you will work hard on these. Your employer will be involved. There is _tremendous_ social pressure if you are overweight.

Healthy food options are ubiquitous there with healthy and cheap meals available 24/7. Combini food certainly has bad options but nothing compared to American fast food or the American diet generally.

There are other health problems that are significantly overrepresented in Japan compared to the western world. Alcohol, smoking and stress-related illnesses. Liver & Kidney diseases. Peptic ulcers, GI problems in general.

The problem isn't the executives, it's the boards.

But board members are largely just a proxy for the large shareholders anyway. E.g., short-term investment strategies are not going away.

Working C-levels would almost always much rather take the longer view against the wishes of their boards.

Yeah, it always surprises me when people on HN of all places who should have some modicum of critical thinking assume that, say, Bobby Kotick, Stephen Elop or a string of recent Intel's CEOs are some kind of rogue actors who just scammed their shareholders when in reality they were doing what they were hired to do by the board which represents (big) shareholders.

A pretty large percentage of the population believes in some pretty strange falsehoods about how business works, capital, economics, etc.

The last time I was in Berlin (2018), I was actually somewhat shocked by the amount of antisemitic graffiti that I saw just about everywhere (especially on lamp posts). Especially given the strictness of the laws against such speech.