HN user
http://www.steveperkins.com
That would be quite a feat, given that Mr. Carnegie was born in the 1800's and died over 70 years ago.
I'm convinced that 99% of the people who criticize or even just talk about that book have never actually read it, and have zero idea what they're talking about. It's just in that Ayn Rand bucket of books that people talk about, because they see other people getting likes and upvotes for it.
Why do they think they are "helping"
It's not about helping. It's about the feeling of clout. There are still plenty of people who look at Github profile activity to judge job candiates, etc. What gets measured gets repeated.
I believe that most of the ills of social media would disappear, if we eliminated the "like" and "upvotes" buttons and the view counts. Most open source garbage pull requests may likewise go away if contributions were somehow anonymous.
While I personally agree that claiming any European identity label from 400+ years ago is silly, I disagree that there's any winning move other than ignoring the slacktivist noise. The people telling you that your natural identity labels are "polluted" will never be satisfied with any amount of "fighting" (i.e. arguing on social media). Because their own identity is that too wrapped up in that.
Also, in this particular instance, arguing both that "Viking" is an imaginary identity that no one really has today, AND that it's being stolen from someone else and erased, is absurd. Other Nordic commenters here have discussed contexts in which the term "Viking" is used today, and it sounds like the same semi-cheeky spirit that everyone else says it.
You will always find plenty of buyers on HN and Reddit for general anti-US sentiment. But probably fewer takers for the unjust oppression of northern European white dudes.
1. People yearn for identity labels. It's a core part of human existance.
2. "White" and "American" are problematic identity labels. People therefore often reach back toward European ancestry (real or supposed), for identity labels that are less controversial.
3. The average person isn't aware (or concerned) that "Viking" isn't strictly an ethnicity. Because it's nevertheless a commonly used identity label.
Not everything has to be an opportunity to spot Nazis hiding behind every tree, or showcase your pedant chops. People wear shamrock jewelry or put an Italian flag bumper sticker on their car because it's fun and feels good, simple as that. Only a small number of legit white supremacists, and a legion of absolutely insufferable Internet progressives, think about this all that deeply.
I was involved in a UU church for a few years. It's a weird organization, and very unstable, with another revolution sweeping in new leadership (and completely new culture) every 5 to 10 years.
When I first started going, it was VERY open to atheists and secular humanists. New leadership sweeps in, and there's a mandate to focus more on "worship" and other religious jargon... and let the atheists know that while they can be fellow travelers on some of the social justice stuff, they're not really in the fold.
Last I heard, that leadership wave had themselves been swept out under controversial circumstances. But by then I was long gone.
I could never really get a straight answer on WHAT we were supposed to be "worshipping", given that UU's don't profess faith in any any particular deity or pantheistic concept, etc. I finally reached the conclusion that we were supposed to just worship the leadership's political beliefs, and not think too much or ask questions. In fairness, maybe that DOES make it a real church?
Is that REALLY a lot of power, though? Reddit is quasi-anonymous, how "isolated" are you when you can create a different account in seconds?
"Don't talk about your kids at work, it's off-putting"... then proceeds to talk about their dog every day. :)
Yeah, a lot of this discussion does seem pretty myopic sometimes.
Nonsense. It's fine to be boring, and to have boring friends. This expectation that you need to be travel influencer or a deep philosopher in order to have anything to talk about is an artifact of social media.
I'm old enough to remember what socialization was like pre-Internet. And by curated social media standards, it was really boring. It was also great.
That has never really been part of the definition. If you look at that Wikipedia article a couple comments up, I only see two examples (i.e. stoops and parks) that are free, and I think parks are a stretch because conversation is not a primary reason for most people going there.
This sounds like me always complaining about "Past Me"'s tech debt. Or when tech debt is being introduced, my team jokes about it being "Future Me"'s problem. It's good for a chuckle, but obviously there is continuity of identity.
But continuity is not immutability. Your actions are a present thing, and define you in the present. Past actions may have consequences, but you are always free to act differently now. Likewise, your present actions don't carve a future identity in stone, either. "The rent is due everyday", so to speak.
This never has anything to do with open source vs. closed source, or anything like that. It always has to do with prioritizing the cohort that's most likely to pay money.
It's been shown over and over again in A/B testing that Apple device users will pay higher prices for the same goods and services than non-Apple users will. They're more likely to pay, period, versus free-ride.
As an Android user, it frustrates me sometimes. But I understand. I'm far more frugal with my online spending than most of my Apple user friends, myself.
Of course it does. Do you think the elites actually WANT massive tariffs putting a brake on GDP growth? Why are tech companies suddenly reversing course on content moderation and/or DEI, after years of pushing in the opposite directions?
Private enterprise will always have some level of corrupting influence over government. And perhaps it sees current leadership as the lesser of two evils in the grand scheme. But make no mistake, government DOES ultimately have the power, when it chooses to assert itself and use it. It's just a matter of political will, which waxes and wanes.
Going back a century, did the British aristocracy WANT to be virtually taxed out of existence, and confined to the historical dustbin of "Downton Abbey"?
I only clicked this to see if Coolify could be a compelling option against my current setup, of using Docker Compose for everything on my VM (including a private Docker registry for my images, and a Traefik frontend proxy to route it all).
Zero actual mention of Coolify, and the manual steps to PREPARE for it seem far more complicated than, "Just base your VM on the Docker Compose base image, and then tweak a couple things".
I'll stick with what I have. Nice advantage is that I can migrate from host to host and 99% of it is just copying the Docker Compose YAML file.
I believe that's the entire point.
Chris Rock comedy special, and the Tom Brady roast. Nothing on this scale, though.
Let's put it a different way. Are you as likely to see the same number of Pixel watches, while walking around the hallways in the Apple spaceship?
I'm sorry, but this is absolutely nonsensical. I literally just posted a screenshot showing that this is configurable on a Samsung.
In fact, when I first setup this phone, I had to specifically choose to make the home bar visible at all. Because the current default setting on Samsungs is to use "gestures" only. The same as the default setting on a Pixel now. All Android manufacturers seem united in pushing this, to ape iOS.
There are plenty of reasons to choose a Google Pixel. And I wouldn't quibble with any of them. But it's absolutely bizarre to point to a default setting as a reason, when they are configurable and when both brands use the same default setting anyway.
So many of these discussion threads are like this. It's perfectly fine to prefer a Pixel over a Galaxy. But people so often seem to take umbrage against Samsung for some reason, and when you poke at a little it rarely makes much sense.
This?
https://i.imgur.com/9uUJLaz.jpeg
I've never seen any kind of UI where the "Home" button wouldn't be in the center. And you have the option of placing the "Back" button on the left and the "Open Apps" button on the right, or vice-versa.
I can see wanting a smaller phone. That is an underserved market segment. But implying that phone marketing is patriarchy-driven is laughably absurd. Marketing for phones is probably more diverse and carefully balanced than for any other product category.
It blows me away that people actually care how much other people spend on something at all.
It's an idle discussion thread about consumer electronics. Not an attack on the core of your personal identity.
It's crazy that I'm the first person in this sub-thread to mention Samsung, when they are by far the market leader in Android phones. They have decent options at pretty much every price point.
For some reason, HN and Reddit just hates this company, and I don't understand why. People talk about "bloat", because Samsung ships with their own apps for things like phone, clock, calculator, etc. But it's trivial to uninstall those, and/or set the Google stock Android counterparts as your system defaults.
People get all weird about One UI, but my son has a Pixel and I have a Galaxy and I honestly don't see much meaningful difference between the two (other than his phone getting hot as hell because Google's own Tensor silicon sucks). I just recently switched back to Android from Apple, perhaps these UI skins were further apart in the past?
I think a lot of contrarians just hate Samsung because it's the market leader, simple as that.
Is that really a large subculture, or is that mostly car rental places cycling vehicles through their fleet?
The rental companies typically buy vehicles from the manufacturer at such a volume discount, that they're able to flip them onto the used market a few years later and come out even with taxes benefits factored in.
The point is not to balance a budget. The point is to rein in persistently triple-digit inflation. Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too, but the reality is that you fight inflation by cooling economic activity for a period.
Same, and I note that the OVERWHELMING majority of other customers that I see at the grocery store or Target are still inserting plastic credit cards into the readers (I do think swiping is going extinct though, as the readers push you to insert instead).
However, this is HN and not at all typical of the U.S. or world overall. Even though we frequently lose sight of that.
No idea what it tastes like.
Then what's the point of including it in dishes like paella, where any fragrance will be drowned out by all of the other spices and flavors in the dish?
This article seems to stem from a desire to dunk on "evil Silicon Valley robber barons" more than anything else.
As others have pointed out here, the premise is based on a linked Washington Post survey that doesn't even really suggest that sci-fi is unpopular (at least no less popular than other "genre" fiction). Also, cyberpunk and other "near-future capitalism-dystopia" stories are only a subset of science fiction.
Honestly, I think we're still working through the psychic trauma of Donald Trump's 2016 victory over Clinton. The literary class was SO caught off guard and stunned by that unexpected outcome, that it lost its mind and has yet to recover.
I don't remember "Silicon Valley" being used as a scare phrase, or regarded all that negatively, prior to 2016. But immediately afterward, stunned people desperate for explanation latched onto whatever theories they could find. We ended up with Clinton losing "because Russia posted on Facebook too much", and overnight Silicon Valley became a bugbear. Then Elon messed with the rage echo chamber on Twitter, and immediately went from "pot-smoking goofball troll" to robber baron and devil incarnate.
In other words, the sort of people who write articles about books are feeling really down on social media companies and tech entrepreneurs these days. And transfer those feelings onto sci-fi, because they're not really into sci-fi themselves anyway, and therefore see all that as one and the same.
Have you actually read the books? That TV series was one of the most true to its adapted source material.
Amazon didn't pivot from a detective story to an action story. Abraham and Franck (aka James S.A. Corey), the authors, did. After the arc from the first trilogy of books wrapped up.
I would wager that the vast majority of backend software jobs are for people writing REST API microservices, exchanging JSON, with a mindset that is more practical and "blue-collar" than academic.
Golang is an absolutely ideal language for writing REST API microservices, that exchange JSON, with a practical and blue-collar mindset.
Plus it compiles to small-ish native executables. Which renders Docker superfluous in many uses cases, and also makes it well-suited for writing DevOps tooling (e.g. Docker, everything from HashCorp, etc).
It's not trying to out-cool Haskell and Rust on online message boards. But I would never in a million years evangelize either of those two languages for routine REST API work in most real-world shops, whereas I could suggest Golang without losing professional credibility.
I don't give a damn!
Jesus.