CameronBarre

In 4 years I haven't felt the need to look elsewhere.

non-entity is right, we do not exist in a free market, due to government intervention through regulations.

It's not simply 'some' businesses that are forced to shut down, it's non-essential businesses where the majority of the work cannot be done from home.

It is true that 'some' businesses are still operating, but this has more to do with the industry sector they've chosen to operate in, or lack of physical constraints (if non-essential), than policy based on favoritism or even arbitrariness.

There are always 'privileged elites' benefiting from contemporary market conditions within a capitalist economy. You would have to count a lot of small business owners who work hard in essential industries as privileged elites to justify your statement, which, obviously most small business owners are not elites on this planet.

would you all be prepared to give up 100% of your wages and live in a communist society until the lockdown has been lifted?

No.

Are you aware of the magnitude of the additional money, resources, and genuine force it would cost to convert our entire society to anything resembling 'Marxism'? There is theory out there that a highly developed and mature capitalist system can gradually ease into socialism, but that if the conversion is attempted before the system is ready, there will absolutely be bloody revolution. In your scenario, how will the government force every individual and business to give all of their profits up? By force, presumably.

As an aside, there are many conceivable 'flavors' of socialism, each with their own themes and attributes. Most of them do not need to be filed under 'Marx'.

Hope this helps.

Edit: a word

You're getting some things mixed up.

We must be careful when comparing tangible goods (like food) to intangible goods (like a browser app).

Food has an element of genuine scarcity. This scarcity is what causes food to have economic character. If there is more demand than supply, this state of things triggers investment into the production of more food to satisfy the demand some time in the future, ultimately affecting prices. Prices will rise in the short-run, but decrease in the long-run (if the demand can be met, and then some). If food was not scarce, it would not be an economic good, and it would not be subject to supply and demand.

Software, on the other hand, is intangible. It can be duplicated and distributed, essentially for free, and more or less forever. Even if you have a paid plan this does not create scarcity. We shouldn't think of software the same as we think of food in terms of economics.

What is the theoretical limit to how many paying customers would be so many, that it impacts the ability of new customers to install, pay for, and use your app? Practically, this question is insignificant, that's one of the reasons software is interesting.

The simplest answer to why 40 - 50 people discover your software per day, is that whatever marketing channels you have utilized (or not) up to this point in your apps's lifetime expose you to 40 - 50 users per day who have a direct need that they think your product may solve.

The second element to this is that there are a lot of people in the world. As others have pointed out, they don't all have the same information. You are capturing a fraction of the total number of people out there looking for a solution to this specific problem, who are influenced by, or aware of, at least one of the marketing channels that influence your app.

If the problem your app solves became a non-issue overnight (for everyone), then you would see that number start to decline over time or go away instantly.

What's more likely to change the situation (temporarily or permanently) is that something changes (positive or negative) with those marketing channels, either influenced by you, or by whatever entities or forces control those channels.

Hope this helps.

I worked as a PeopleSoft developer in college. It's a competitor to SAP. Working with esoteric software taught me how to properly read documents with hundreds of pages. It also showed me how to get by in a less than ideal circumstances.

I am a bit of a maverick in that sort of environment, though. I wrote a JSON encoder [1] to ship PeopleCode objects to the browser via these webscript endpoints you could make in order to use modern web technologies. PeopleSoft actually moved in that exact same direction years later with better JSON support, 'FluidUI', and better html5/javascript support.

ERP systems are hell to work with. It was fun, but ultimately I was glad to get back to the real world. I got back to my main interest C#, but then went fully into the Clojure world :).

[1] https://bitbucket.org/cjbarre/jsoft.json/src/master/

Decentralized ledger technology and the notion of value are different from manipulative pyramid corporations.

MLMs / Pyramid Schemes and bitcoin are fundamentally different constructs.

I didn't say it wouldn't affect google. If everyone who uses the internet suddenly realized the joy of ad free browsing, then that would be something of a paradigm shift in my opinion.

Cult is the right word for it. I went to a meeting once, met the leader, and it was fascinating. I caught every bit of the psychological warfare in play.

Shortly after, I realized an important fact about MLMs, or at least Amway:

They encourage members to work harder at their real jobs (their plan A) in order to finance what they call the member's plan B (independent business, early retirement, wealth, etc). This results in a siphoning of capital from the legitimate economy to the pyramid organization, producing mind numbing amounts of physical waste in the process.

What's missing from most pyramid scheme diagrams, including the one in this article, are the arrows pointing from the legitimate economy (value adding corporations that the members work for as well) through the member, and then up the pyramid to the top.

Viewed through this lens, it's obvious that MLMs function as parasites, like a tick on a cow.

My understanding is that these services are paid for by ads but I've had an ad blocker most of that time.

Google makes money by collecting behavioral data generated by its users, which it then uses in the form of raw materials to create products for its actual paying customers: advertisers.

Whether you're using an ad-blocker or not, you're still contributing to the advertising machine by using its products, you can't stop Google from crunching your personal behavioral data on their platform.

I have no interest in Brave and I still use Google products (for now), I just wanted to point out that what's really happening is a bit more sophisticated than you may think.

Like a-saleh says, about 'building your case', you want to position yourself such that it's undeniable you are producing more value with your time. Point out that there has plainly been a shift in the value of your time for the organization.

clojure

Maybe you should try to find an opportunity that isn't dependent on what you're bumping up against repeatedly.

So true, humor is essential to (my) life though.

I think it's pretty clear by now there are both incredibly rude people and incredibly generous people on HN - despite that I understand how you feel, because this is a community, after all, and there is an inherent desire to be accepted when participating.

You have to take accountability for your own path. Choose to evolve your role, and if there is resistance, find someone to work with who you're more compatible with.

Considering writing an introduction to BLS (bureau of labor statistics) data, including the tech to ingest the data automatically for usage.

The above is part of a wider project of mine to bring together as many sources of macro-economic data as possible into one database.

Having a personal copy of such interesting data sources to query, and find patterns within, with the agility of SQL feels powerful to me, so I have been exploring that.

If I write, then it will be covering sections A and B of the monthly employment report (household and establishment surveys, respectively) and the JOLT report (Job Openings and Labor Turnover).

Hi everyone, author here, I put this small utility together while exploring the idea of using existing tools to import macroeconomic data from the BLS vs a pure homemade solution with a full-on Clojure project.

With that project I ended up settling on using wget, my tsv2csv tool, and pgfutter for streaming data into postgres and GNU parallel to create and import all tables at once.

I couldn't resist creating this tool at the time because, honestly, I write LISP faster than I adjust to conventional tooling like sed and awk.

It's still a goal to learn those better, but when it came to full on scrubbing of rows and columns, I already had code like tsv2csv in my homegrown BLS importer and I knew how simple it was.

It's made to participate in streaming so it processes line by line from stdin to stdout.

Thanks!

Hubbits, not to be confused with hobbits.

Crash Only Software

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/hotos03/tech/full_paper...

The armstrong thesis is one of the most insightful reads on software construction (I think).

You mean gitters? Or even go-gitters?

Personally, I agree.

I love working with other people, but NOT under those circumstances!

Face to face? None.

I've never met anyone I've worked with or work for at my current gig in person and I am well over three years in on it.

There is no point in arguing that face to face time isn't beneficial though.

If it feels necessary/feasible/practical to meet your client in person, then do it.

If it can be avoided and you work well together despite the distance, then just roll with it.

Business Secrets of the Pharoahs by Mark Corrigan.

I went through this transition in college. I was bad at math, historically, and after 2-3 years of obsessing over programming, math finally revealed itself as something mechanical and conquerable.

I'm NOT a math genius (or any kind of genius), but it went from being unapproachable to being totally learnable.

Unless you're building an application that doesn't interact with external systems, chances are your job is never finished, even if you choose to consider it finished.

If you don't want to be a lifetime maintainer, then you have to transfer ownership to someone else or consider the project to have reached its end of support.

Consider an analogy to building houses, it may appear that the builder has finished their job since the house is fully constructed, but like any system, it requires maintenance for the entire duration of its lifetime.

Systems degrade over time without maintenance.

What I'm discovering is simply: that's capitalism.

You're being paid a lot and unless you work for a lossy company, you must be contributing to a profit margin that amounts to more than what they're paying you.

Writing a bunch of things on a computer is a gross simplification of whatever skill-set you've accumulated and the ultimate value you produce for your employer.

Internships are a means to an end, so if your internship seemed trivial somehow, it may have been to some degree, but the company has an interest in figuring out if they could benefit from hiring you long-term.

At the end of the day, digital technology is at the forefront of innovation and innovation is (at least one hot spot) where profits come from. You're participating in the division of labor at the frontier, so you're well paid.

Capitalism spreads wealth asymmetrically, though, so it should come as no surprise that you witness that inequality when you find yourself using your wealth to pay for bourgeois luxuries (hotel rooms, conferences, restaurants) adjacent to service industries.

I just read "The Worldly Philosophers" by Robert Heilbroner and I can recommend that. I now have a tab with Marx's "Capital" open and I'm about half way through Joseph Schumpeter's "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy."

For finance, reading the Market Wizards series by Jack Schwager is a great idea because you get really personal and in-depth insights into how successful traders think.

I also recently read "Commodity Conversations" by Jonathan Kingsman which is similar to Market Wizards, but tailored to commodities and I can recommend that as well.

"The Secrets of Economic Indicators" by Bernard Baumohl is also an interesting overview to macro indicators.

I have no idea what constitutes an undergrad level of economics education, I don't recall my economics class being nearly as stimulating as everything I've just listed.

Good luck!

I think gao8a is probably right about data analysis providing a more comprehensive answer to the question in lieu of a greater quantity of subjective responses.

Two sides of the same coin.

I don't find the activity inherently malicious at all, it's a certain type of brain picking that people don't respond to positively. Thanks for the example!