MichaelGlass

from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

The typical counterpoint to this NIMBYism isn't, communism, but rather most of Texas (where there's loosening zoning law) or West Virginia (where there's abundant poverty and social problems but also abundant housing).

I thought it was funny. And sad.

The incentives you're talking about -- they're missing because of NIMBYist overregulation. The whole point of NIMBYism is to use regulation to hamstring the positive incentives in the market. "There's demand for twenty units here but the place is zoned for a single unit." or "There's demand for twenty units but the city demands that if we build a multitenant unit, we have to do a twenty-year environmental survey first".

Do you live in a place with a homeless crisis. Guess what: You're a citizen and you have some agency. Democracy can be a backstop to "pure" (or mis-regulated) market forces. I, for one, enjoy clean drinking water (and also: a good deal from a healthy competitive market).

Have you ever been to a great restaurant that happened to be on the wrong corner? Or been at a company where one change in execution made or broke the company? My guess: the founder lost interest but the employees still believed in the [impressive] tech. Because of the lack of traction: the cost of the tech wasn't prohibitive for the employees?

I’d much rather a useful AI-aided post that gives me insight than the almost daily pedantic unrelated gripe “interesting post but I hate the font”. This AI slop is bad but is it worse? In any case “bad” should be a reasonable bar to get over.

fwiw I don't have a problem with LLM posts. But I do agree that this is pretty generic. If you want to use an LLM to post comments: find a better prompt / workflow

I'm not sure it's so simple as "making it pretty costs more". I'd bet there are hidden utilitarian cost benefits as well. E.g., murals prevent graffiti. (No judgment concerning graffiti, but municipalities tend to pay to remove it.)

Or: maybe there is no large cost trade-off. Do beautiful manhole covers seen all over the world significantly affect the total cost of ownership?

(I thought the introduction was, if not outright funny, deserving of at least one chuckle).

love it! Just wanted to share my support.

I really like the slightly silly writing style! Reminds me of a toned-down Douglas Adams. Honestly, I'm not particularly interested in Janet but the style sucked me in.

I don't think the article touches on internal vs external hiring at all. They tried it but eventually didn't do it. But there's no value judgement -- it just seemed like they couldn't find a great candidate and then the author was eventually promoted.

Fwiw the same thing happened at my last startup. We did a search for a VP eventually promoted from within. I hereby claim, that statistically speaking, it definitely happens sometimes.

I guess the author disagrees with your last statement, > If you start at the bottom then you remain there because your skills are not valuable in the top leadership roles.

She says that she had the space to think more about strategy because the "people at the bottom" were doing an good job of keeping the company's infrastructure stable as they scaled. Maybe it's less about top and bottom and more about what types of problems people are good at solving. My tip: if you like planning and management and strategy, you should try to get roles, in the top, bottom, and middle using those skillsets. Lots of even introductory roles involve "manager", and lots of non-management roles are a great career path for many.

To be clear, “we” the cyclists want cars to be prohibitively expensive in cities. Presumably we the cyclists aren’t so homogenous.

Yeah I wish you could just start with a `.tools-version` and nix would generate a development flake. Someday!

That being said, the task of debugging a deprecated tool version in asdf just one time makes the investment in the nix awkwardness worth it.

the pitch for nix isn't that it's a nicer tool than, e.g. `asdf`, but rather, that it will probably work in five years. frightful flashbacks of of trying to get nokogiri to build.

Agreed. To use the example from the article

`make_pizza(["pepperoni"])`

What does `make_pizza()` do? It could be a lot or it could be a little. It could have side-effects or not. Now I have to read another function to understand it, rather than easily skimming the ~four lines of code that I would have to repeat.

I think the article fails to show particularly problematic examples of DRY. E.g. merging two ~similar functions and adding a conditional for the non-shared codepaths. shudders

If you have a legal system, then breaking my lock is unlawful intrusion, and if you take something from behind my locked door, it's theft.

Without a legal system, e.g. crypto, if you solve my puzzle, then you deserve the reward. It's just math!

In a world where many are playing the, "there's a greater fool willing to buy it for more", the "it's about the future" crowd are fish in a barrel.

"Government casuses cronyism -- especially anti-cronyism laws". What should the role of government be? I guess the authors would say: Governments should be replaced with financial modeling. I'm not convinced.

There's something fundamentally undemocratic (and perhaps, sadly, realistic) about this take. Will advocating for broad de-regulation and business rule actually reduce cronism? Will it / can it reduce negative externalities?

I just think ... we've tried that. It's been the experiment of the last 40 years. What's next?

FWIW our experience has been: - finding devs with experience is hard - finding great devs who want to use interesting tooling is easy

In the end, we hire interesting, curious devs, and ask them to use tooling (elm) that has a pretty shallow learning curve.

I think bootstrapping a project in Elm without any experience on the team could be tough, but once you have some expertise, the seeds you plant in yield abundant fruit. At NoRedInk it's been a great success -- especially with regards to "finding other developers".

We noticed the new batch of contractors were Black and Brown like us, and the Full Timers were mostly white.

This doesn't strike me as drenched in a racist worldview, rather than just an observation of racism.

This was the author's stupid call this is the same kind of narrative that blames women for the clothes they wear.

Be better. Expect better.

Regarding your first point: I want to do those things if I'm convinced they help the "good work". I might not want to clean the dishes but I'll do it until I can delegate it.

No this article is wrong. Bitcoin is a battery /s.

Really nice. Looks like nextjournal is making a big bet on clojure: https://twitter.com/mkvlr/status/1355272185733111809?s=19

Vaccines are only paid for by the government in the USA for low-income, uninsured kids. If you're insured, you likely have a copay and if you're not medicaid-eligible and high-income, you likely have to pay out of pocket.

Florida Man informs Sweden and Germany that their societies are failing. In other news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBqY-4oDWAQ&feature=youtu.be...

But in all seriousness, Germany and Sweden (and the USA for that matter) all have sub-replacement fertility rates. I understand that you believe that people will reproduce like rabbits, especially if incentivized, but the data doesn't reflect that.

In every system there are those that game the system. The question is: does the benefit for the majority outweigh the cost of those abusing the benefit?

Those who "invest in companies" need somewhere to put their excess money. That demand for credit is likely responsible for downstream financial crises. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40854-019-0136-2

I like Milton Friedman too, he had a cool show on PBS, but history isn't going to be good for that guy.

"below market" because Instacart (and uber, etc) forgo normal labor law, have by-default but not by-contract full-time workers without any full-time benefits. Companies can achieve great benefit by externalizing cost on society, but should they? (And should they be able to?)

e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/12/16/is-uber-cheat... https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...

Programming jobs aren't inherently stressful. There are jobs that have innate stress, e.g. anything with strict time & attention requirements. E.g. driving, cooking, surgery. Programming jobs tend to have stress because of stressful personalities rather than innate need. Even in high-stakes situations, e.g. "fire fighting" where _urgency_ matters, stress / stressful personalities often throw a wrench in the machine.

I also think that how much stress you want is a matter of taste. Some folks prefer the pressure cooker. I'm not knocking stress, I just think that's a culture thing not a requirement.

When it comes to job interviews, there are so many ways to write somebody off, but all I'm looking for is: - major deal breakers. e.g. too mean, irresponsible, too many bad habits - major wins, e.g. they bring something to the team we don't have.

The default posture of most candidates is uncomfortable and stressed. Being able to evaluate them often means trying to make them more comfortable. If whiteboard interviews are more prone to inducing stress, that's worth knowing.

I don't think there's a specific call to action / advocacy, more philosophizing about the challenge.

tldr; Human beings are flawed. All our heroes have some amount of blood on their hands. If we start toppling statues we won't have any more statues. Maybe it's good that we stop putting people on pedestals, but without those pedestals what makes our creates Americans' shared identity / how do we work as a team?

--

I guess I simply disagree. Some leaders have blood on their hands as a side-effect, and some have it intentionally. I'm a southerner. Southern revisionist history tries to attach pride to the crimes of our forefathers. Knock those boys down.

For some heroes, I agree we need to be open to nuance instead of canceling the world. "This person helped with X, but we can't forget she also hurt Y".

Maybe we should put our heroes ideologies ahead of their identities. Maybe the heroes should be the workers who built the systems, who we can more easily forgive for their flaws. Maybe our shared history and stories can be more about activities than the people that did them. Maybe our heroes are the identities rather than the individual, e.g. "The Pirate Roberts".

But definitely, when a hero isn't supported by a significant part of its local populace, time to find better heroes.

With some punctuation: Britain-Based Card Aggregation Service, Curve, Opens First U.S. Center in Brooklyn

companies are pretty good at taking advantage of a good thing.

I ... don't think that's true?

There are lots of "superior" technologies that just haven't won. e.g. the handful of people who use it _swear_ by Datomic. And there are load of so-called "inferior" technologies that are still widely relevant. Mysql? Php? Wordpress? They pay a lot of software developers' bills.

I work at NoRedInk, and we pay Evan Czaplicki to work on elm. When we started to migrate to Elm, our eng team was under 10 people. Larger companies, e.g. even NoRedInk today, tend to be less agile.