There is little reason to when you can walk into a supermarket or department store, often with three or five of them within 1000 feet, and buy what you need at the normal marked price. If you cannot go there yourself, most of them offer home delivery anyway. You also know who you are buying from, you do not have to worry about questionable third-party sellers, and if there is a problem you can telephone a human being or simply walk back into the shop. What is not to like?

But yeah, not every city or country is lucky enough to have such a strong retail network. Amazon makes sense in many parts of the world. But I also think its success in those places is a sad indicator of weak local infra and underinvestment in local retail.

The world would probably be an economically healthier place if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores, and indie shops. It keeps more money circulating locally, supports more local jobs and improves local economy instead of funnelling all the money through one gigantic company.

I know that does not help someone who has become homeless or lost their job and cannot afford the 25 pounds a month (300 pounds a year). That is why I say it is important for people who are employed to get a Bupa insurance plan. Most people do that anyway. This reduces the burden on the NHS Dental and help provide free dental treatment for people who genuinely need it.

For non-dental medical issues, I think the NHS is pretty good. When I lived in UK, I always got same-day appointments for routine check-ups and same-week appointments for more complex investigations.

Can you share a reference for that statistics?

FWIW, I live in Europe and I always got dentist appointments within a week. For a severe issue (pain involved), I got appointment on the same day.

Re non profit, I do donate to a few nonprofits I like, like those working on fediverse and my favorite langs. But I don't know of anything that does this for extensions. I'd have definitely voted with money if something was there. So, yeah, no, I am not doing anything to start a nonprofit for extensions. You have a good point.

What do you mean by "should be"? Surgery is free and available to everyone. So why would one accuse surgeons of being extortionists? So I am not sure how the surgeon comparison works. That example supports the parent commenter's point that these extensions should be free.

Of course, there is still the practical question of who will do the work and how they will make a living. We can do what we do for surgeons. Maybe have a nonprofit consortium that people fund, so that it can support the extension developers. Yes, people would be spending money either way, but at least that money would be going toward a larger cause. Just like we pay taxes so the government can fund surgeons, who can then treat people.

It made me think... what happened to Google's famous hiring standards? What happened to Google's engineering-heavy structure? Google is now filled with middle managers whose only previous experience has been "being scrum masters". Right then I knew that these ineffective managers I saw joining Google were not only the symptoms of Google's decline but would also become one of the causes of speeding up the decline.

How could they let this happen? What happened to all their gatekeeping... "we are okay with false negatives in hiring but we'll NOT have false positives"? Current Google hiring is all about hiring loads of true negatives.

I think I saw a similar fall in hiring standards for engineering roles too but I will leave it to someone with more data to confirm me or refute me.

Congratulations on derailing what was otherwise such a nice thread. Well done.

Not everyone in this world is always on edge like you. It is OK to be cheesy sometimes. Humor exists for a reason. Not every unconventional interaction is creepy. Get over yourself, please.

I don't know if the original article casts him in a better light. I think it does not. But it is still worth reading so you can see the context for yourself and judge whether the criticism in this article is fair.

This sounds unnecessarily reductive. By "own" I would mean that I can re-read the book again and again and again as many times as I want as long as I take good care of the book and prevent it from disintegrating.

But the DRM e-books can't be used like that. That was their point.

What you are calling "negativity" are genuine concerns to me. I was excited at the headline first. But as soon as I found it is VC-funded, it became a complete non-starter for me.

Look, I'm going to make my labor of love available to the world on your platform. I'm not going to earn a dime from it. It's just free work I'm gonna put out there. If I'm going to do that, I'll choose a platform where I can be reasonably sure that there won't be a rug pull 5 years down the line.

The problem with VC-funded projects is that there is definitely going to be some kind of rug-pull. Because the investors need their money.

The Git hosting services I use today are those where I can pay as a paying customer or I can pay as a paying member. As a paying customer, I know what I am getting into. As a paying member, I have the right to vote on decisions that affect the platform.

What prompted this? I can't see "tanglers" in the OP. Did you see them calling their users "tanglers" somewhere? Honest question.

This makes no sense to me. For anything that has sensitive payment or personally identifieable data, direct access to DB is potentially illegal.

> The failure/rollback model is much easier with these as long as we have good backup hygiene.

Have you actually operated systems like this in production? Even reverting to a DB state that is only seconds old can still lose hundreds or thousands of transactions. Which means loads of unhappy customers. More realistically, recovery points are often minutes or hours behind once you factor in detection, validation and operational overhead.

DB revert is for exceptional disaster recovery scenarios, not something you want in normal day-to-day operations. If you are saying that you want to give LLM full access to prod DB and then revert every time it makes a mistake, you aren't running a serious business.

I don't know. I finished my graduate studies in math a few years ago, and pretty much every textbook by well-known mathematicians was packed with errors. I just stopped caring so much about inaccuracies. Every math book is going to have them. Human beings are imperfect, and great mathematicians are no exception. I'd just download the errata from the uni website and keep it open while reading.

> The article is plain wrong.

> This does not excuse the article from reversing the meaning of the theorem.

What's with this hyperbole? Even the best math books have loads of errors (typographical, factual, missing conditions, insufficient reasoning, incorrect reasoning, ...). Just look at any errata list published by any university for their set books! Nobody does this kind of hyperbole for errors in math books. Only on HN do you see this kind of takedown, which is frankly very annoying. In universities, professors and students just publish errata and focus on understanding the material, not tearing it down with such dismissive tone. It's totally unnecessary.

I don't know if you've got an axe to grind here or if you're generally this dismissive but calling it "simply not the theorem" or "plain wrong" is a very annoying kind of exaggeration that misses all nuance and human fallibility.

Yes, the precise statement of Birkhoff's representation theorem involves down-sets of the poset of join-irreducibles. Yes, the article omits that. I agree that it is imprecise.

But it's not "reversing the meaning". It still correctly points to reconstructing the lattice via an inclusion order built from join-irreducibles. What's missing is a condition. It is sloppy wording but not a fundamental error like you so want us to believe.

Feels like the productive move here is just to suggest the missing wording to the author. I'm sure they'll appreciate it. I don't really get the impulse to frame it as a takedown and be so dismissive when it's a small fix.

I'm not sure how one follows from the other. I am paid by a US for-profit company. But I still think EU has done some things better. People's beliefs are not determined by the company they work for. It would be a very sad world if people couldn't think outside the bubble of their employers.