> EY’s arguments aren’t really possible to engage with because they don’t have much of a causal basis.
Yeah, it’s really the fundamental problem of non-empirical rationalism; it constructs a model of the world from abstract assumptions rather than factual grounding, applies logic to it, and comes to conclusions which are (in the ideal case) utterly unassailable within the system of assumptions, but ultimately where the universe they apply to has only coincidental relationship to the material universe in which we live.
It’s literally the realization of the worst exaggerated stereotypes of academic economics and other social sciences, but its cool with some of the people who propagate those stereotypes, because the people practicing it are various flavors of techies and tech entrepreneurs acting outside of their area of specialty, rather than actually being economists or social scientists.
I certainly wouldn’t join a union (and a “guild” would not be legally distinguishable from one).
I don’t want a levelling effect in our industry. I don’t want gatekeeping either. We aren’t interchangeable cogs, and people who do better than average should not be held down. Promising people with nontraditional backgrounds should not be prevented from entering the field. Despite what people claim, unions would definitely hold people down and lock out new people.
Things are going really well for us actually, compared to people in other professions. That’s partly the case because our industry has been able to remain dynamic and innovative. Much of the success we’ve seen was built by people with nontraditional professional backgrounds and would not have happened if we got bogged down by gatekeeping and credentialism.
When the pie stops growing and we need to fight management over how to divide it, maybe a union will be attractive. But right now the pie is growing rapidly and workers are getting a huge amount of it in the form of both cash and stock. I’m all for continuing with this free, dynamic, and incredibly successful model.
By the way, unions don’t make layoffs a thing of the past. Look at what happens in the auto industry. The beat thing we can do for laid-off tech workers is ensure that we keep our industry dynamic, so there will continue to be new employers to work for.
If everyone behaved like that, our society wouldn't have the wealth needed to make anyone's lives comfortable and secure, except for the lives of the rich.
A job that provides an income to a worker, and generates wealth for society, is not bullshit -- even if all it involves is making crappy consumer products, or working on an assembly line, or doing paperwork all day. In fact, such jobs are the reason the majority of people no longer live in 19th-century conditions -- and the lack of such jobs in regions that used to have a lot of them is a primary driver of populist politics.
This is what we get when we expect corporations to police speech, and when governments pressure them to do it.
We really would be better off with no censorship. Even allowing obvious conspiracy theories and fake news is better than trying to police the truth and getting it wrong. When moderators get it wrong even one time they lose trust forever and give the conspiracy theorists even more ammo — in some cases by making the conspiracy theories about censorship become true!
Besides, even if you wanted corporations to police speech and decide what is true, would Twitter and Facebook really be the ones you would want to do it?
It’s been very sad to see Westerners, especially Americans, and especially American liberals be so fearful and weak that they discarded the single most important principle of freedom, liberty, and human rights: freedom of speech.
That sacrifice got us nothing. Misinformation still spreads and it is more attractive than ever to the conspiracy-minded precisely because they can see the attempts to suppress it! Forbidden knowledge is always more attractive. It wasn’t worth it!
The only way out of this is to stop asking corporations and governments to censor things. Just stop.
The FBI comes up in plenty of the other Twitter censorship stories. Covid is not a one-off, and this article exists in that broader context, or it would not be interesting. It was part of a sustained, illiberal, counterproductive, and overall pretty stupid pattern of behavior from both the government and Twitter.
The government shouldn't be doing that. Also, it's important to break down what is meant by "the government" here -- it was the FBI attempting to suppress a news story which later turned out to be true about the son of a candidate for president. That sort of thing should not happen.
Secondly, this kind of moderation is counterproductive. It gives all the conspiracy theorists a true conspiracy to point to -- they really are being suppressed by "the man" or "the Feds" or whatever. Also, no matter how much stuff gets moderated, the left will never be happy.
End result: everyone is mad at Twitter, nobody trusts anything, conspiracy theorists get to make true claims about suppression, and more people are attracted to misinformation because it was suppressed -- e.g. "the government doesn't want you to know this!" or "see what the government is trying to hide from you!"
Being culturally Japanese didn't prevent Japanese companies from achieving dominant positions in electronics, automobile manufacturing, video games, shipbuilding, steel production...
Why is software so special?
I would argue that the kind of risk aversion that holds back software companies is just as evident in most of Europe as it is in Japan. It is also the norm in a bunch of American companies in the tech industry, especially the older ones. And China, which is also often brought up as a society where individuality is not valued in business (due to "Confucianism" and similar tropes), is not held back by similar risk aversion and has a massive software industry that can compete internationally.
I suspect the initial negative take on the license change was correct, and this is the dying gasp of the company.
It's just taking longer than expected to replace Docker Desktop. But I am seeing a lot of progress on Podman and Rancher and a few others, and some of the larger tech companies are also building in-house replacements. A lot of the people who had to scramble to find a replacement are not happy about it.
In a year or two I think some of the companies that paid for licenses to avoid migrating are going to rethink their license costs, because the free alternatives will be just as good as Docker Desktop. Then we will see whether this revenue increase was sustainable or simply the transient result of holding customers hostage when they had no alternatives but to pay.
The article is grouping things together that don't belong in the same categories.
OO, functional, imperative, declarative: these are ways of controlling dispatch.
Monoliths and microservices are both ways to organize codebases and teams of programmers and control whether dispatch is intermediated by the network or not. Either way, both of these options are implemented by some kind of language in the previous category (OO, functional, imperative, or declarative).
Service-oriented architecture applies to both monoliths and microservices, and very few programmers still working in the industry have really seen what an alternative to service-oriented architecture actually looks like.
Populists would love to convince you that "the elites" and "the people" are distinct groups that are pitted against each other in an eternal struggle. They do this in many cases to convince "the people" to adopt radical fringe views.
In the past (and present!) this false narrative has been used to push mostly bad things: nativism, xenophobia, and really dumb economic policy. By falling for this false distinction you are priming yourself to be susceptible to demagoguery and similar bad ideas.
If you look at reality you'll find that most distinctions between "the elites" and "the people" collapse and there is substantial overlap between both groups, both in membership and in their political self-interest.
Millennials are entering the home buying market in large numbers now, and it turns out they want detached single family homes in quiet suburban neighborhoods, just like everyone else.
It is important to be very clear about this because the HN crowd seems to have a massive over-representation of people who like dense living arrangements: the vast majority of Americans want to live in a detached home that they own, and they want to transport themselves in cars that they own. They don't want to live in apartments, they don't want to rent, and they don't like mass transit. There are indeed some Americans who want to live in places like Manhattan, but they are a small minority. A large majority of the Americans who currently live in apartments only do so because they cannot afford a detached home.
If the transmission failed on that $4k car it could cost you $3k to repair it.
I also used to buy cheap cars and do my own maintenance. I got lucky. I was also a college student who didn't have to be somewhere at a certain time to pick up my kids, and if I was late too many times and got fired from my minimum wage job I wouldn't lose my housing. But many people are not in that situation.
For a lot of people, car problems can cause significant disruption to their lives -- especially for single parents or people in some other kind of single-car household.
Also while I was in college, I saw a manager at my minimum-wage job get fired for missing too many shifts. She had an older car and had to defer maintenance because she couldn't afford it -- but of course that only made the car less reliable in the long term. It broke down so many times in a 3-month period that she frequently missed her shifts and got fired.
Situations like that are why a lot of people buy new, really low end cars like Mitsubishi Mirages or Kia Rios. Car enthusiasts look at that and say, you could get a used 3-series for that kind of money! But some people will get fired if they miss too many shifts, they have kids who need transportation, they don't have the cash to pay for a sudden maintenance issue, and a reliable new car with a warranty is best for them even if it's a low-end penalty box.
You can spend a lot of time getting databases and other stateful workloads to work -- mess around with StatefulSet and PVC on top of all the normal Kubernetes concepts, and what do you get in the end? Are you really better off than you would have been if you ran the database in EC2?
Plus, "herds not pets" kind of breaks down once you start using StatefulSets and PVCs. Those things exist to make Kubernetes more like a static environment for workloads that can't handle being run like ephemeral cattle. So why not just keep using your static environment?
If Kubernetes is the only workload management control plane you have, then I guess this makes sense. But if you are already able to deploy your databases with existing tools, and those existing tools don't really suck, it's probably not worth migrating. It would take a lot of time and introduce significant new risks and operational complexity without a compensating payoff.
Doing that would also price out all EVs, because they are all heavy because of batteries.
2023 Tesla Model 3 weight: 3,648 to 4,250 lbs depending on trim level.
2023 Ford F150 weight: 4,021 to 5,740 lbs depending on trim level.
Most of the Model 3s sold are the dual-motor variety, because of performance and range, and most of those weigh more than the 2wd F150s.
We should build our roads to handle that and stop shaming weight. The future is going to involve heavier cars for both emission and safety reasons. Fixating on weight is a bad idea.
A few years ago the NYT editorial board argued that inflation was going to be transitory because "it's not the 1970s." It was a smug, dismissive, and ultimately incorrect argument. Appealing to the past doesn't mean much because we don't live there.
This argument about automation is no different. We don't know what is going to happen because of AI. We don't even know where AI is going to go as a product/feature/whatever. It could totally make obsolete an entire class of lower-earning white collar workers whose main contribution is writing things. On the other hand, it could fizzle out and we could be comparing Bing Chat to Clippy a few years from now and laughing at all the investors who wasted their money on the next big thing after crypto.
Pointing to times in the past when people feared automation, and showing how those fears did not pan out, is not a good argument. Everything in history is contingent, everything could have gone a different way if a few people made different decisions at a few key times, and fear of automation may have motivated some of those people to make the decisions that prevented automation from destroying all the jobs.
To put it another way: If you play Russian Roulette with a six-shot revolver and you survive five rounds, should you be more or less likely to believe that you will survive the sixth round? People who look to the past and say "bad thing that was predicted did not happen then so it won't happen now" are guilty of thinking that if they survived five rounds then they will definitely survive the next one.
Exactly. It's also unfair to say VCs and depositors should have noticed the problems when regulators didn't see them either.
Banking has been a quasi-government-operated industry since 1933, and even more so since 2008, and we need to make sure that the government does not dodge blame for the failure of SVB. Government regulators are supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening, and they didn't prevent it. You can't as deeply involved as the government is in banking and not be complicit in the outcomes of banking.
People will try to blame "lobbying" for this but let's be honest, even if regulators were looking at every bank in the US with a microscope no matter how many deposits they held, those regulators probably would have missed this. Hey, government bonds are a great investment! Duration risk is sneaky.
Who caused that duration risk to actually manifest as a real problem? The Fed! The same people who are supposed to run the banking system in a stable way have contributed to the instability of the banking system by trying to squash inflation. If the Fed hadn't raised rates so much everyone would be praising SVB for doing so well.
People have an impression that banking is a private industry and the government comes in to bail it out, when really the government was involved the entire time. If we don't understand that, we won't be able to actually fix the problems.
What would you do if you were a board member of multiple companies and you found out their bank was financially unsound and couldn't do normal bank stuff?
Would you say nothing and hope nobody else notices? Good luck with that. That just means your companies get screwed.
What if you get away with being silent, nobody else noticed, and the bank gets bigger and fails even more spectacularly later in the year? Wouldn't that be worse? Wouldn't you then be criticized for not speaking up when you knew about the problem?
Would you try to band together with other investors to save the bank? Worth a try, but that means you have to tell other people there is a problem and trust that not a single one of them would start a bank run.
A lot of people have an axe to grind against Peter Thiel but in this case he did the only rational thing. If he had done anything else he would have been blamed too, because some people just don't like him. I haven't seen anyone demonstrate a reasonable alternative for how a rational person would act, knowing what he knew at the time.
You are better off because the government is helping, and so are all of the people in the country who need to work for a living and need companies to work for. You can't let the banking system collapse and expect it will only hurt the people you don't like.
> If these statements are true, can someone explain how it's possible that despositors are fully protected, far beyond what FDIC insures, without the taxpayer bearing any of the burden?
"The FDIC is not supported by public funds; member banks' insurance dues are its primary source of funding. When dues and the proceeds of bank liquidations are insufficient, it can borrow from the federal government, or issue debt through the Federal Financing Bank on terms that the bank decides."
On top of that, SVB has the money to pay back almost all of the depositors. They just don't have it liquid right now because it's in bonds that won't mature for a while and would need to be sold for a loss. So the obvious and sensible thing to do is have the government lend money to cover the time until the bonds mature, in addition to using the FDIC's money which did not come from public funds.
> And please inform him the recourse he has should he disagree with sharing your loss.
You can vote for people who are dumb enough to let the entire banking system collapse because they want to hurt rich people. But of course that would probably put "peasants" out of work while the rich get slightly less rich.
Of course it is irrelevant to depositors, that is why the bank failed.
However, it also proves that holding bonds to maturity is different from selling them at market rates. It demonstrates the distinction between solvency and liquidity. Every financial publication has made this point when discussing SVB in order to educate their readership about the problems of duration risk and explain how a bank with enough assets to cover liabilities can still fail.
Now, the nice thing is, the government has time to wait for the bonds to mature. So the government can take the bonds, pay off the depositors, and get the money back when the bonds mature. The government won't lose money if they do it right -- just like they didn't lose money with TARP in 2008.
Sad that when I open a thread the first comment I see is cheap cynicism that comes close to trolling, and the replies are even worse.
Look at all the stuff this generation of workers have built in big tech — the amazing devices in all areas of the market, the progress in electric cars, the massive scale in compute infrastructure that enables most smaller companies to easily spin up entire regions rather than run their own hardware…
We now carry devices in our pockets that put more information at our fingertips than entire civilizations could access throughout all of human history. Mobile payments have enabled entrepreneurial capitalism in impoverished parts of the world. Anywhere we are, we can get a map of our location and directions to anywhere we want to go.
The scale and technology that makes remote work even possible for much of the population didn’t even exist a decade ago. Some pieces existed but they never would have scaled the way we needed them to. If you didn’t lose your job during the pandemic, you ought to be grateful to the major cloud providers for the fact that your video conferencing software was able to function while you and almost everyone else were piling onto it. You should also be grateful there were multiple delivery companies able to bring you groceries and restaurant food when you weren’t allowed to leave the house. I know restaurants are grateful for the delivery services — so many more would have gone out of business if in-person transactions were the only way to sell their product!
Anyone who owned a total market index fund in the past decade has benefitted massively from the success of big tech, including most pension funds, university endowments, and many individuals. The creation of wealth has been enormous in scale and enormously socially beneficial.
The big tech companies have delivered results to our economy like the space program did — most of the technology that smaller companies and startups depend on was developed by big tech and either turned into a line of business open to others (like AWS) or was open sourced (like Kubernetes, most of the major app frameworks, multiple programming languages, distributed consensus, distributed tracing, modern CI/CD…) The industry as a whole would be a lot worse off if that hadn’t happened. So what if some of it was used to sell ads?
I’m one of the long term PMC / committers on mesos.
In retrospect I feel this was inevitable to a few key reasons:
* k8s was a second system with all the learnings and experience of building such a system at Google for over a decade. Mesos was birthed by grad students and subsequently evolved into its position at Twitter but the engineers driving the project (myself included) did not have experience building cluster management systems. We learned many things along the way that we would do differently a second time around.
* Mesos was too “batteries not included”: this fragmented the community, made it unapproachable to new users, and led to a lot of redundant effort. Most users just want to run services, jobs and cron jobs, but this was not part of Mesos and you had to choose from the array of ecosystem schedulers (e.g. Aurora, Marathon, Chronos, Singularity, etc) or building something yourself.
* Mesosphere was a VC backed startup and drove the project after Twitter. Being a VC backed startup you need to have a business model that can generate revenue. This led to a lot of tensions and mistrust with users and other vendors. Compare this with Google / k8s, where Google does not need to generate revenue from k8s directly, it can instead invest massive amounts of money and strong engineers on the notion that it will improve Google’s cloud computing business.
Even if k8s hadn’t come along, Mesos was ripe to be disrupted by something that was easier to use out of the box, and that had a benevolent home that could unite vendors and other contributors. Mesos could have perhaps evolved in this direction over time but we'll never know now.
If by casual user, you mean the 95% case of a back-end developer whose main job is pulling data from various sources, performing operations, and placing that data elsewhere and/or displaying it to an end user: nothing, really.
Rust excels at performance, but the bottleneck in modern web apps is going to be IO, whether that's loading data from a database or from a third-party API you're integrating with. Rust excels at correctness, but your errors are going to come from bad data and system outages which require manual intervention anyway. Rust excels at security, but if you're using a GC language running on a Docker container on an ephemeral cloud instance, the kind of security Rust provides isn't a likely attack vector for you.
All that being said, Rust is a great language! It just has its niche, and that niche is not the typical web-dev back-end work that most developers do these days. As others have said, you'd use Rust in the same situations you'd use C++: building a database, building a web server (like nginx), etc. If you're just building a web app that talks to a database and serves HTTP responses, stick with Python/Ruby/Go/PHP.
The problem is, if these exchanges collapse, the value of that crypto you have will drop significantly. So yes, you still have your crypto assets, but there is a real chance they could end up being worthless.
Even if you don't use exchanges, you are still exposed to their failure because they are major players in the market that determines the value of the cryptocurrencies. When major players in a market go bust, it's unlikely that any of the other market participants will end up unscathed.
Given that crypto value is based solely on what other people are willing to pay for it, it really could go to zero. It probably won't go all the way to zero, but I'd still expect a significant drop.
People even use Uber in Europe despite having world-class public transit. That should tell you something about the utility it provides people: they could have used top-tier public transit but they chose to use Uber instead.
I switched back to Amex despite them offering worse rewards than my other card because of this.
Other card: I returned an item, with proof of delivery via UPS tracking. Never got a refund. Opened a dispute. Weeks later, the dispute was resolved in the merchant's favor despite the merchant providing nothing as evidence except the original receipt. I had to call the help line, deal with several uncomprehending service reps until one of them re-opened the dispute, asking me to resubmit the same documents I submitted the first time! Finally the dispute was resolved in my favor a month later.
Amex: I ordered some items from a local store to be delivered and the order was cancelled without my money being refunded. I received an email with a few questions, which I answered. A few weeks later the dispute was resolved in my favor.
I still need to carry another card because some merchants don't accept Amex, but I use the Amex for everything I possibly can. I'm giving up some cash back rewards to do so, and I'm also paying an annual fee, but that's a small price to pay for getting better service when something goes wrong.
50 years ago housing was affordable in areas that are now expensive, like Silicon Valley and Vancouver. That outcome did not require land value taxes or targeted taxes on landlords or bans on foreign investment or other novel solutions like a lot of posters here are suggesting. It was just easier and cheaper and more profitable to build housing back then, and the market took care of the rest.
What changed? It got harder to build because the government empowered NIMBYISM and nonsense “environmental impact” rules (hint: nobody actually cares about the endangered burrowing owls, they just don’t want affordable housing near their homes).
The affordability crisis was caused by government.
Any solution that piles even more government on top of the current government-caused problem is a no go — especially pie-in-the-sky solutions like land value taxes.
The only solution is to make it easier to build. But that's politically painful so it’s not going to happen. We even see places like California making it more expensive to build by requiring solar panels on new homes, in order to virtue signal about climate change without actually solving anything. So, invest in expensive areas, they are only going to get more expensive!
Social media is what happens if you give everyone a microphone.
The mob mentality, fake news, conspiracy theories, and so forth were all big problems in the past. Until sometime in the 20th century, lots of newspapers published that kind of stuff too. It’s an unavoidable part of human nature.
People who want regulation of social media need to realize that they really desire a return to elite control of public discourse and want the microphone taken away from many of the people it has been given to. Maybe that is the correct position — but people making that argument should realize and admit that is the case.
> You only want people as politicians because they feel it's their civic duty to serve their countrymen, not because it's a lucrative career.
We also want successful, competent people to enter politics and we should not be giving them reasons to avoid it, such as forcing them to sacrifice their financial freedom and success.
Also, there is a very clear correlation between low legislator pay and corruption in other countries. Let's not make bribes and kickbacks more attractive by taking away other options politicians have for building wealth.
Debt is a useful tool for people who can control themselves.
Dave Ramsey caters to people who need unusually strict financial discipline to avoid getting in trouble. For everyone else, responsibly using debt is often better than paying cash.
For example, paying cash for a car is often worse than taking a low-interest loan. Liquidity is important -- locking up a bunch of money in a car means you can't use it for other things, like investments or emergency savings.
Another example: taking out a loan for a large purchase, rather than liquidating investments to pay cash, can cost less overall because the interest paid on the loan might be lower than the capital gains taxes on the investments.
> A credit card isn't gonna make that big of an impact on the kinds of purchases you truly need credit for (land/housing).
Yes it will.
I know a few people who avoided credit cards well into their 20s. They ran into trouble with credit checks for renting apartments and buying cars. Imagine being nearly 30 years old with a good income and no debts, but needing to ask your parents to cosign on a car loan simply because you have no credit history of any kind. That does happen.
Yeah, it’s really the fundamental problem of non-empirical rationalism; it constructs a model of the world from abstract assumptions rather than factual grounding, applies logic to it, and comes to conclusions which are (in the ideal case) utterly unassailable within the system of assumptions, but ultimately where the universe they apply to has only coincidental relationship to the material universe in which we live.
It’s literally the realization of the worst exaggerated stereotypes of academic economics and other social sciences, but its cool with some of the people who propagate those stereotypes, because the people practicing it are various flavors of techies and tech entrepreneurs acting outside of their area of specialty, rather than actually being economists or social scientists.