@gkoberger | Hacker News

I know you're being sarcastic, but Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway at Hollywood Studios opened recently. It's really well done. There's also a new uber-stylized show called The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse on Disney+.

(That being said, there's never really been much Mickey media. This is the first ride featuring him, and he's never had his own full-length movie. Mickey is way closer to a trademark, in my opinion, and has always been that way.)

Fun fact: the guy who plays the Tres Commas VC in Silicon Valley is the current voice of Mickey Mouse.

I don't get how you can say Disney is coasting. You can dislike them, but they're actively creating new things all the time and expanding on existing IP in genuine ways.

This clip is amazing. It was animated by one guy, Ub Iwerks, in 2 weeks. He would do almost a thousand drawings a day. Walt gets a ton of credit, but early Mickey (and Oswald) is because Ub was a phenomenal animator.

I guess I just don't understand this. I'm all for patents expiring and I'm against "monopolies". But why does anyone think that Disney, who created Mickey and is actively developing him, should have to let anyone else use him?

This isn't something, like a medical device or drug, that would save lives or make anything better if it was more widely available. Disney didn't go crazy with copyright, like copyrighting the concept of an animated mouse. All that will happen is we'll get a bunch of knockoff Mickey Mouse products.

Yeah, so many.

YouTube, Instagram, Github, Android, Slack, Heroku (until recently), etc. And those are just the ones that were left to their own devices.

There's also a ton that have lost their brand, but melted into the parent company. It's not obvious from the outside, but the tech (and team behind it) goes on to become a vital feature. Like, look at any acquisition by Stripe.

Lastly, companies sell because things are going really well or they're going really badly. This company was closer to the latter, and that has a much smaller success rate – but teams often get continued employment, some get promotions, people make money, etc.

Just echoing what a lot of people here have said – I love Flask. It was the first time I ever could relax and just enjoy programming. It was beautiful, simple, easy, thoughtful. I had been programming for years, and it just felt like a breath of fresh air at the time.

I'll start by saying that overall I agree. For engineers, specifically, things are still pretty good and companies are actively hiring.

That being said, be careful with this assumption. Recruiters aren't going to stop recruiting; that's their job. At many companies, they have a certain amount of outreach they're required to do. If they stop emailing, then all of a sudden they stop doing their job, and that means they're personally going into layoffs with bad numbers.

The jobs still exist, but behind the scenes it's likely things are changing. Companies are hiring 2 engineers instead of 10, or increasing their hiring bar significantly. The difference between "we're desperate to hire" and "we're open if someone great comes along..." is huge, but you won't see a difference in how recruiters treat you.

tl;dr = if a company cuts their hiring plan from 10 engs to 1, they still send the same number of recruiting emails.

Yup, I was a die-hard Alfred user with tons of custom automations. Haven't looked back for even a second. I was shocked; I've never had a piece of software replace something I depended on so easily.

I run a business. You're allowed to pick morals over money.

Sure, nobody can make sure every single thing they touch, up and down the supply chain, is pure good. But don't act like you have no agency. If everyone makes small improvements when confronted with them, combined it adds up.

Puppy Kickers LLC is a client that wants to utilize Coinbase services. Coinbase "core mission" is making money. As such, servicing Puppy Kickers LLC is completely within their "core mission".

Coinbase made $1.17bn last year. A $1.36M contract from each of ICE, ATF and the FBI doesn't even come close to covering their Superbowl ad budget.

On average, people have varying levels of appreciation/distaste for government agencies... but I think regardless of your stance, it's an easy argument to say ICE falls high on the list of disliked government agencies.

Sources:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/10/coinbase-coin-earnings-q1-20...

https://www.marketplace.org/2022/02/14/how-much-did-cryptocu...

You mentioned some tactics. Now could you detail which specific "political" opinions you don't believe belong in the workplace?

Totally agree; I'm against any company having a no-politics rule. Everything is political, for better or for worse, and enforcing it is really just enforcing your own political beliefs.

Two things.

First, Coinbase has a no-politics rule. I wonder where this falls. Since it's something business-related, I imagine it's fine to discuss internally, but this is an example where (if I was at Coinbase) I'd feel the no-politics-rule does the company a disservice. I'd be pretty mad if my company was selling to ICE and I wasn't allowed to say anything about it.

Second, it always amazes me how little these ICE contracts are, and how quick big companies (like Github) are willing to burn their credibility over such a relatively small amount of money.

Very unlikely. They probably don't have the voting shares, and in this market they definitely don't have the buyer. And lastly, don't forget, every single VC involved in this valuation supported the numbers you're reading.

This definitely isn't the main usecase; it's mostly used as a spreadsheet application.

But, I use it for a few random tools.

I have an app I made that shows schedules. Rather than using a DB and building out an admin interface myself and giving people access to it, it just pulls from the Airtable DB.

I also often use it to export data to, so having signups or things like that go into Airtable rather than a DB.

I could use a DB for all of these, but Airtable's UI is super nice and makes it really pleasant to edit (vs a crappy form I set up)

Linear might be the best-made software I've seen in a decade.

Raycast is phenomenal; a perfect drop-in replacement for like 8 different tools I used to use.

Airtable is really amazing, and their API is sososo close to making it a solid database replacement for super small personal projects.

Superhuman could do a lot more to make email managable, but going back to the Gmail interface makes it clear how much of a 10x improvement it is.

Look at the parent article. The person quoted didn’t know what BAYC was; he went a few times a week because he liked the vibe.

Mickey had been around since 1928. I don’t think we’ll care about BAYC, specifically, but I do think it’s premature to say no NFT-based project will ever have any significant cultural impact.

Almost every human on the planet knows who Mickey Mouse is, and one corporation benefits. Aren’t you at least curious about a world where ownership of cultural icons is shared?

(I love Disney and hate NFTs so this is a weird position for me to be in, for the record)

Will it save lives? No.

But experimenting with copyright law is fascinating. It’s like saying, 20 years ago, that concepts like Creative Commons solves no real world use case.

I don’t think 5 years from now BAYC will matter. I do think, however, experimentation with intellectual property, copyright and ownership will.

Okay, so they don't actually already do it, but they could do it.

How would you keep track of who currently has ownership? How do you make sure I don't sell ownership to 5 people, or keep using it myself? Do I need to hire a lawyer each time?

Yes, this can be done without the blockchain. But also, does it matter to you if the code is in SQL or the blockchain? The blockchain is just a technology. (I do think the environmental impact is worth considering, for the record.)