Yes, and if it weren't for the constant campaigns of voter suppression targeted specifically at their communities, you might be making the point here that you imagine yourself to be.
Even ignoring voter suppression issues, being in a minority group in a democracy does not preclude authoritarian oppression. This is simple math, known as "tyranny of the majority", and is why the US Constitution is longer than just a paragraph about democratic elections.
This comment is why it's important to be more precise than the word "authoritarian." We all live under an "authoritarian regime" to one degree or another.
The problem in this case is that its institutionally racist towards, and extrajudicially assassinates, black people with impunity.
We must be more precise because otherwise it allows _this_ to happen.
Maybe I'm stupid but could someone enlighten me as to what "intellectual tourism" might mean? Is that like, a normal person pretending to be intellectual, or is it like browsing Wikipedia with no specific purpose except for the brain snacks? I can't even tell if that's an insult to Joe Rogan or not.
Agree with the other poster, not an insult at all. Think pop-science books or discussing Mayan art over beers.
I'd personally be thrilled if more people were intellectual tourists. In my professional technical life, I'd far rather talk to people with a superficial understanding than people who's mental model is part TV-hackers, part magic.
I don't think it's meant to be an insult. The way I interpret it, "intellectual tourism" means looking at / listening to "intellectual" topics, but only in a cursory manner with little deep conversation.
Have you ever seen that episode of The Office where the boss comes back from vacation to Jamaica? I see it as that but for wanting to sound smart and intellectual.
I cannot possibly encourage you more to check out magit. It is unbelievably good. I always share this demo with people to show off just a tiny portion of what it's capable of doing
My skills with git have gotten better after using magit, too, because it brings the power of git to the surface. It's a really fantastic git porcelain and the fact that it is deeply integrated into Emacs just makes it absolutely second to none.
Magit is easily one of my favorite pieces of software and I will leap at the chance to sing its praises.
According to this[1], SXSW brings Austin about $350 million annually. According to Wikipedia, Austin's annual GDP is about $1.5B so 350/1500 = roughly 23% of the city's annual GDP.
Anecdotally I know of many people who work year round to prepare for an event at SXSW and rely on it for their entire annual income.
Cancelling SXSW is a big deal to this city. It hurts. It's not to be downplayed.
You're confusing GDP with GDP per capita, and also 350,000,000 / 1,460,000,000 = 0.23972602739 and to convert that to a percentage you multiply by 100 so you get 23.973% as the result.
The number from wikipedia was 146 Billion (26 Austin-Round Rock, TX 146,784 metropolitan statistical area in millions of dollars) if you looked at the link I gave. Which is 146,784,000,000, though you could argue the city is a smaller area. Remember, thousand 3 zeros, Million 6 zeros, Billion 9 zeroes.
The GDP per capita was simply a sanity check showing how 1.4B must be wildly wrong.
Is that $350 million into the city taxes, or just $350 million for some private citizens, apparently some of whom you know and for whom it is undoubtedly a big deal.
Hol' up, are you saying that there's a reason besides economics that the government might introduce protectionist trade measures to keep some critical manufacturing domestic for use during an emergency when you cannot trust your supply chains which come from hostile -- or even friendly -- nations?
It's funny because this was a U.S. conservative talking point going back as long as I can remember (for me that's the mid/late 90s). There's even an episode of The Office (U.S.) where this point of view is lampooned (Oscar to Michael: "Wouldn't you say that the services sector is much more relevant than manufacturing?"). Never thought I'd see it expressed openly on HN, and with upvotes!
Hi, my wife is on an immunosuppressant and so we have been trying to avoid going to the store at all, except curbside, because it could be extremely bad if she were to get COVID-19. Save for a single emergency, no one in our household has left home in about a month.
This service makes it harder for us to get curbside slots, until our local store is able to respond to peaking demand, because people with normal immune systems will use these slots out of fear, when they have a much better chance of either not contracting COVID-19 in the first place, or of lesser symptoms if they get it, and in the meantime should be the ones going into the store, so that those with immuno-compromised households do not have to.
Your service makes no acknowledgement of this ethical dilemma.
I do not disagree that our local grocery store should do its best to expand its curbside service. They do seem to be trying, but this product makes it harder for households like ours in the meantime.
> people with normal immune systems will use these slots out of fear
I sympathize with your situation, and agree that people who are more at risk should get priority, but suggesting that someone with a normal immune system should not use curbside pickup and just suck it up and go in the store is just... not correct. Everyone should be availing themselves of options that reduce their interactions with other people.
I imagine you and people like you are already frustrated as to how difficult it is to get pickup slots. A website like this can perhaps make it easier on you, as well.
There are a limited number of slots available for these sort of services. It would be great if everyone could utilize them, but since that’s not possible it seems the slots should go to people who can use them most. I’m guessing HN readers skew significantly younger and healthier than the average victim of coronavirus, so it would be a shame if a service like this prevented people who really need remote pickup options from using them.
Everything after your first "but" contradicts what comes before it. Should people who are at more risk get priority? Because if they should, then yes, people with regular immune systems SHOULD in fact just suck it up and go inside until there are enough curbside slots available for everyone. Then there won't be a use for a site like this and those healthy people can book their curbside slots on the grocery stores' websites like normal.
This site and others like it just guarantee that vulnerable people MUST use these sites to even have a chance to get curbside. I guarantee there are those who are not savvy enough, and young tech-savvy people who know how to use these services will use curbside while older, more vulnerable, and less tech-savvy people must go in. I feel bad using a site like this because even though my wife is in a vulnerable group, I know others are worse off and don't have the know-how to use this tool. I want them to have a chance.
You can't say that "people who are more at risk should get priority" AND say that _everyone_ should be doing the same thing as them. If everyone is a priority, nobody is. Yes, some healthy people with good immune systems DO need to take some risks in lieu of those who are more likely to die if they take the same risks.
And spare me the platitude at the beginning of your comment. If you did sympathize, you wouldn't've posted something so tone-deaf.
It sounds like this crisis has been especially frustrating to you and my heart goes out to you.
One of the reasons we decided to release the app was so friends of ours who are immunocompromised could use it.
The ideal scenario would be for grocery stores to switch to curbside/delivery only. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw that happening 6 months from now. None of us know if we are asymptomatic carriers, so we all need to stay out of the public as much as possible.
Our thinking if that if people start using this app, they're staying out of the stores, keeping themselves and the workers safer. Hopefully they can do several weeks worth of shopping at a time, freeing up slots for others.
In the UK, Sainsbury's is limiting curbside and delivery to high risk people. But they're only able to do so because they're getting a list of high-risk people from the government and validating against that list. That isn't really possible for us. https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/shop/gb/groceries/working-to-fe...
Do we support grocery stores in your area? Hopefully this app can help your family, too.
> One of the reasons we decided to release the app was so friends of ours who are immunocompromised could use it.
Understandable, but it becomes a gold rush if people with normal immune systems use sites like yours to reserve slots. My only real suggestion is that your site call out the moral dilemma to users.
Basically our only choice now is to use a service like this (which I guess I will now do; yes you do cover our area) or book slots weeks in advance (this is what we have been doing with limited success).
Honestly we are very lucky; services like this make me more concerned for people in situations like my wife's, but who are not married to a programmer who is aware that you need a f*king web scraper to get groceries now.
Apologies if my frustration is visibly surfacing there; I know y'all are just trying to do your best to help with this situation and so I want to provide you with some honest feedback. I would also like to make clear that I'm not suggesting your service is a net negative. Thank you for your efforts.
Thanks, I appreciate your honesty. We're all struggling through this and need to vent it.
We hope that since this doesn't require any real tech knowledge, even people who aren't super tech savvy can use it. I've shared it with my neighborhood, which has lots of elderly people, and they seem to be using it okay (only a handful of tech support requests). We think this is a service the grocery stores should be offering themselves -- hopefully it'll push them in that direction.
It would probably be ideal for the US to do something like the UK and force grocery stores to prioritize high risk households... but there's a lot our government's response leaves to be desired.
But even those of us who aren't high risk could still be carriers. I could go in a store and accidentally get everyone in it sick. We ALL need to be avoiding public places. :-/
I don’t think you can claim we’re all in this together while providing an unofficial tool that prioritizes people you know and HN readers.
A good solution is to spread the word as far and wide as possible so that everyone can use your tool, and that at least seems to be what you are doing so good for you.
Have you had a shot at getting national press coverage for this, or even (long shot) having the vendors link to your service?
The tool doesn't prioritize HN readers. We released this almost two weeks ago and have primarily posted it on local neighborhood listservs and our own social media so far.
We haven't tried to get national press coverage because we don't have national store coverage, but once we add some of the bigger regional chains people are requesting (like HyVee, Meijer and Giant/Stop and Shop) we probably will.
The only grocery store we've been in touch with wasn't too thrilled about it and did not want to work together :)
If you use the Matrix identity server, which is required to have federation, the 3rd party identity server operated by the Matrix organization retains a list of your usernames. They don't tell you up front about this, either, and I think silently leaking a username list is pretty bad. You have to really pay attention during setup to realize that the federation technology relies on a bastion operated by matrix.org.
The identity server is optional and you can use your own, but you will lose the federation that Matrix is so proud of, and the instructions to set up the reference home server don't make it clear that this is necessary in order to avoid a leak of your users' identities.
> Matrix identity server, which is required to have federation,
The identity server is not required to have federation to work. All it does is let you optionally discover users on Matrix by their email address or phone number.
> 3rd party identity server operated by the Matrix organization retains a list of your usernames.
Not sure what this means, but the identity service does not retain a "list of your usernames". All it does is keep track of email->matrix ID mappings for users who have published them. When you look up an email address (or phone number), a hashed representation is sent to the service, and even then, they're not retained.
> They don't tell you up front about this
We do; to use the identity service you have to click through a very explicit GDPR terms of use which explains precisely how it works. You only get prompted with this when you actually use the identity service though (i.e. when inviting someone by email address) which might be why you've never seen it, however.
> You have to really pay attention during setup to realize that the federation technology relies on a bastion operated by matrix.org.
Again, Matrix federation does not depend on identity servers (and I kinda wish we'd never even implemented the feature, given how confused and upset people get about them).
> All it does is keep track of email->matrix ID mappings for users who have published them
This is what I mean by "it leaks the userlist." Matrix (the organization) stores the email addresses of my users, along with some mapping that could allow Matrix the organization to correlate email addresses with my server. To me, as a server operator, this is a deal-breaker, even if it was just email addresses with no mapping. I see this as a privacy violation against my users who trust me to hold their information privately and securely. My understanding is that you cannot join another Matrix homeserver server with an identity established on a homeserver disconnected from the vector.im identity server, which effectively forces the homeserver operator to use the vector.im centralized identity server if you want, as an end user, to actually take advantage of federation. I do not know how a user is supposed to take their login from one homeserver to log into another one if the first homeserver is not connected to vector.im.
Please correct me if the above is wrong.
Additionally, when I set up Synapse I was not presented with any kind of GDPR info, and it wouldn't make sense that I would be, because the GPDR is for end users, not site operators. Maybe this is presented to new users who connect to the public reference Synapse instance using Riot.im or something, but I'm not talking about this issue from the perspective of an end user, I'm talking about it from the perspective of a homeserver operator. I got about halfway through the homeserver setup before I realized that vector.im was necessary for identity lookup and I realized it only by carefully following the docs. This was long before the 9/27/2019 blog post was published, so I guess maybe this has been addressed somewhat. I have been following Matrix now for the better part of a decade.
If federation is possible without identity mapping done on a central server, then I too wish that identity mapping was never implemented.
> My understanding is that you cannot join another Matrix homeserver server with an identity established on a homeserver disconnected from the vector.im identity server
This is not true. The identity server is an optional feature, which users can use if they want to try to discover a user's matrix ID based on their email address. Matrix itself operates using matrix IDs to federate and establish conversations.
A good analogy is using LDAP as an address book in an email client. LDAP addressbook lookups are very clearly optional, not relevant to all people, and don't stop email itself working.
> Additionally, when I set up Synapse I was not presented with any kind of GDPR info, and it wouldn't make sense that I would be, because the GPDR is for end users, not site operators.
Because the identity server is an optional feature for users (just like a user, not a sysadmin, would configure LDAP lookups in Thunderbird), the GDPR terms of use are shown to users if they try to use an identity server to make sure they understand what they're doing.
Well then I'm glad that the blog post linked above was written, because obviously this situation was confusing when I set up Synapse a couple years back. I might not be a genius but I'm not stupid, either, and I'm obsessed with chat systems (I trialed every available self-hostable chat server at the time), so I guarantee if this confused me, it confused plenty of perfectly intelligent individuals.
I hope the team has clarified this in the documentation.
