Software is the connective tissue of the world, generating mediocre quality results (which will be the best outcome if you don’t really understand what you are looking at) is not just lazy it can be dangerous, do the worlds best engineers make mistakes? Of course they do, but that’s why building high quality software is collaborative process you have to work with others to build better systems. If you aren’t, you are wasting your time.
As of now (and this could change, but that doesn’t change the moral and ethical obligations), software engineers are richly rewarded specifically because they should be able to write and understand high quality code, the code written is the foundation of how our entire modern world is built.
"This stuff" is by far the most-discussed stuff on HN in the last couple months. Nothing else comes close.
Below, I've pasted a partial list. That's restricted to just muskdogeness and only the biggest threads. There are 25,000 comments in those threads alone.
How this translates into "the threads are silenced" and "people give up on commenting" is left as an exercise to the reader.
Yup, they're permaflagged and HN knowingly lets them go by even though they could do differently. Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43208973. Seems exceedingly likely that this one too would've gotten auto-perma-flagged, but then a button was pushed to undo this as a one-off that is not applied to all these other cases. Of course @dang is free to prove us wrong and explain the discrepancy.
That's an underestimate though, since the list is far from comprehensive. Let's conservatively bump the number up to 40k comments. That's over 1000 comments a day and well over 10% of the total comments that have been posted to HN during this period.
From my perspective that's not the same as "letting it go by".
Hmm, that's interesting dang. I'm almost never seeing any 'muskdogeness' posts (nice name !) on the first page. I'm looking at new posts, with showdead = True.
Would you have a stat on all those posts, if they were flagged at some point, and then un-flagged later ?
I looked at the frontpage time of those 50 threads and it adds up to almost exactly 300 hours on the front page. That's a lot of hours.
But it was over a total time span of 900 hours, so still pretty easy to miss all 50 threads. This is the way the HN frontpage works: no one sees everything that makes the front page (not even us), and it's entirely possible to miss the largest threads and most-discussed topics.
For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43208973 is by now the second-largest thread in HN's history and spent 16 hours on the front page, but there are still going to be thousands of regular HN readers who never saw it, and some of those will probably feel angry about that and say that it has been "silenced" and "censored" and so on. That's the way this works.
Ultimately, it works that way because of fundamentals, meaning there's not much we can do about it. The solution is not to have 100 threads with 80k comments on the frontpage for 600 hours, instead of 50 threads with 40k comments for 300 hours, even though that's probably what most people who feel frustrated probably think they want. Rather the solution is to articulate the principles by which HN operates, and keep sticking to those principles over time.
I've been posting a ton about that in recent weeks, although (by the same dynamic I just described!) many readers won't yet have seen any of those posts. Here are two entry points:
He's acting like this because he campaigned on "government bad". Not any specific bit of it: all of it.
It is often theorized that he's doing this on behalf of some foreign power. That seems unlikely, and more to the point, uninformative. He was democratically elected: a plurality of voters wanted this outcome. He still has wide support among them.
It is true that foreign powers have been spreading propaganda in his favor, and the result is a weakening of the country. But that's not the result of one person betraying the nation. It's the result of American beliefs about what their nation is and should be.
The term for them is useful idiots not assets. The democrats did enormous damage to the Ukrainian cause pushing the russia hoax in 2017/18. Steele assumed there was competent intelligence analysts to analyse what he collected but instead it was politicians.
>. Article II, Section 2
empowers the President to nominate and, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to
appoint the principal officers of the United States, as well as some subordinate officers .
Duopoly’s produce excessive regulation as a means of protection.
Duopolies grow out slow growth, once the pie stops growing stealing customers is hard and is a zero sum game, reaching a comfortable stasis which then becomes the status quo is how organisms in these environments behave
Home elevators are a thing. We had one in our previous house, as did many other homes in the neighborhood. They are not terribly expensive, about $12k/floor during construction.
Not the US, but my dad just got one installed in his two story home, cost him around US$25k for installation of the lift/elevator itself, although he incurred a few grand more on modifications to create a space to install it in (would have been more but he did some of them himself). Not a new house, around 40-50 years old. In part, he got the idea because one of his neighbours had already done it. Plus his partner has dementia and climbing stairs has been becoming an ever increasing challenge for her.
We saw a new house with an elevator when we were looking, but it seemed to be an accessibility quota thing, I don’t want to think what it costs to maintain and what kind of inspections it needs.
Generally home eaevators are made of things that don't need inspections. Screws will last for decades without issues and when they fail rescue workers can get you out. Those systems are too slow and expensive for use commercial buildings but good enough for a short house. Thus commercial buildings will use a cable which is cheaper and faster but they stretch and break over time so you must do safety inspection. (a house sized screw is under a grand so not really a big factor in price, but that much cable will get several floors.
some commercial builings use hydraulic elevators which when they break just slowly lower you to the bottom floor . Again much less inspections needed because they are desirned safe. but the slow speed and cost mean only a few floors are possible
Cable systems are not cheap. The biggest issue with cables is the cores dry out. Hydraulic doesn't have to be slow by any means and they dont just seep down unless you blow a seal on the cylinder. Even then it would take an hour under a full load to move a story. Thats a lot of hydraulic fluid to displace. Hydraulic elevators are also prone to issues with cold temperature as the oil can become quite viscous when not in regular use.
I was thinking a hose break not a seal which would fall much faster. Which is why you would design them slow - if a hose breaks they are still a safe fall. (of course if you make them fast then you need more inspection, a trade off)
That said I'm not an elevator expert. The details I've given so far is about all I know. So if/when someone claims to be an expert and contradicts me - well they could be right.
Maintenance was essentially zero. No regular official inspections needed, but we had an elevator company come out every 3-4 years for a general inspection. Ours was a 3 story hydraulic unit.
How can a duopoly produce regulation? That'd be straight out corruption unless someone came up with a new word for it that suddenly made that legal, moral, and efficient.
Your are conflating asset price inflation and cost inflation, they are not the same. Apple could lose $2T in market cap next week, the cost of the fab would not be discounted in the same way.
Ok, but let's say the scenario is that Apple, Google, Microsoft need to build a chip plant for 0.5nm chips. They need $1 trillion.
If each company is worth $20 trillion in 20 years, they can easily raise $1 trillion together by selling some shares or using their shares as leverage or just straight up using their cash flow. I'm simplifying things by ignoring inflation, but you get the point.
The bottom line is, if capitalism thinks a $1 trillion fab will produce more than $1 trillion in value, it will happen.
This appears to be missing the forest for the trees.
Which is to say, if Rock's law continues to hold, it doesn't matter if some global consortium can pull together $1T for a new fab; can they pull together $2T four years later? And $4T four years after that? And $8T? $16T? To say that a doubling at this rate is sustainable is to suggest that you more than double the value at each step. At some point this can clearly not be the case, unless you want to posit a world where going from one process node to the next literally doubles the entire productive output of the human race.
Absent some unforeseeable technological breakthrough, at some point it has to slow down, either slowly, or drastically, or otherwise stop altogether. And for anyone who's currently middle age or younger, it's currently projected to happen in your lifetime.
Arbitration is just another power grab by companies, originally the government would keep this sort of excess and greed in check, as we have successively dismantled that capability the people of this country had to turn to the courts to seek redress and enforce the cost of consequences of mismanagement back on to the balance sheets of the companies via legal liabilities.
This was supposed to be the mechanism that enforced market penalization envisaged by capitalism, especially in sectors where choice was limited or no other options existed.
Companies got tired of having to deal with lawsuits that resulted from the misbehavior of their organizations so they started pushing binding arbitration clauses, and because no one gives a fuck about the people in this country they have been able to push this as an effective and cheap mechanism to shut customers up and remove their rights.
However you feel about corporations, they are entities that exists only because our social contract allows them to, they haven’t always existed and if we keep granting them or allowing them greater rights and freedoms than the actual people in this country, they may not always exist.
Arbitration makes sense when you think about how costly the court system is. The problem is that the defendant gets to choose the arbiter, so its not a fair system. If the arbiter was neutral I think arbitration would generally be better than the traditional court system in many cases as its easier to use without legal representation.
The "defense" would argue that the arbitrator was mutually selected when the contract was signed, because the "plantiff" agreed to the contract terms.
The fact that the contract was non-negotiable should have made it a "contract of adhesion" where the plaintiff is recognized to have little choice in the details and the courts should provide scrutiny to ensure that they were equitable. But the supreme court has decided that "contracts of adhesion" don't really exist because you always had the choice to not have a cell phone or internet service or a job.
Not really. Any corporation will be represented in an arbitration by lawyers. The arbiter will likely be a lawyer. You will be bamboozled by their arguments and the best you can hope for is to make a reasonably clear statement of your claim and hope that the arbiter doesn't agree with some technical argument the other side has.
And (I don't know if it always works this way) you will take turns speaking with the arbiter, you will not directly hear or be able to question/challenge what the the other party is saying.
> Arbitration makes sense when you think about how costly the court system is.
The court system isn't required to be trash. That's like how we made immigration so impossible that we just let people in illegally. It's a pretense. If official justice is so burdensome that we have to create extensive private legal systems, we should figure out a sane way to do things.
People who have the power to make decisions prefer it this way.
The court system is expensive because it’s the wrong mechanism to address this aspect of corporate and monopoly power, frankly all companies have gotten too large they aren’t efficient at any thing other than redistribution of the fruits of labor increasingly unfairly all the way up the organizational chart.
The fact that no-one fails no matter the egregiousness of their actions or behaviors is absurd.
Well sadly, the mechanism made to disrupt such monopolies will probably be crippled in 6-12 months, maybe even sooner. We're definitely in a plutocracy .
Yep big companies basically have too much capital to fail. They own distribution channels they seek rent on. No one else can get ahead of them. A small company making a mistake will die. A large company will not even notice it.
As of now (and this could change, but that doesn’t change the moral and ethical obligations), software engineers are richly rewarded specifically because they should be able to write and understand high quality code, the code written is the foundation of how our entire modern world is built.