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The multi-billion dollar question is whether someone with serious technical acumen is prepared to step up and fight for a law that meaningfully restrains surveillance capitalism while allowing startups to compete. Or build a compliance-as-a-service business and give it away to startups for free.
Automattic was founded 15 years ago, and despite being a profitable and growing company for most of that time, has only raised $617.3 million, mostly to fund specific expansion projects. At no time have they sought 10x returns or some kind of spectacular exit for the benefits of its shareholders. It’s not even close to the disaster that is most of VC world.
People love to trash talk WordPress, but by being consistently correct and committed to its principles, it got this single line in this article:
"WordPress has managed to keep chugging and even bought Tumblr off Verizon."
It's because Matt Mullenweg and co have held the line on open source and the open internet for more than a decade now, and we should all be grateful.
Everything cool I've gotten to do in my life I owe to learning to code via building WordPress websites. I hope in the next decade WordPress and companies like Automattic become the example to aspire to instead of people throwing more fuel on the never-ending VC trash fire.
You can’t, this is why we used to design services based on open protocols with data portability. No service lives forever.
"Well of course the models were right", you say to yourself. Who is still arguing about this? The evidence has piled up to the extent that being "skeptical of the science" is unacceptable in educated, elite spaces (such as Hacker News and the tech industry generally).
But now, as you can already see proliferating in the comments to this piece, the new acceptable contrarian take on climate change is that of course its happening, but since life thrived on the planet during other climactic conditions there's nothing to worry about.
The message is the same as it's always been: trying to do anything in response is foolish, and we should all continue to just focus on making as much money as possible.
But the real issue with climate change is and has always been that it will socially and politically de-stabilize the planet, because quite a few people live in places that will become less livable in the near future, and those people will want to go somewhere else.
Those people will have a quite strong claim on land and resources in wealthy countries that emitted most of the pollution and have lots of mostly empty and more habitable land. This will cause global conflict on a scale beyond any that exists in living memory.
Yes, "life" will survive. Our societies in their current configurations will not, and decisions we make now will determine how messy or violent (or not) that transition will be.
Pedantic retorts about geological time should embarrass you in the face of the leaders of the tech industry evidently using their immense wealth to prepare for social collapse[1].
And although these people are clearly willing to spend money to prep for climate change, I still can't get a single one of the recruiters who cold-call or email me about HOT NEW SILICON VALLEY OPPORTUNITIES to find me a single credible company working on anything climate or energy adjacent. I can just hear their jaws slackening every time I bring it up.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val...
I was hoping this article was going to be more like “who makes enough money to eat working on Open Source Software?”
If you really believe the media, any media, is reporting things accurately in 2019 you are not thinking critically or actively searching for the truth.
Please tell me which media source you consume that's telling you the other media sources are lying to you.
I quit reading media, and eliminated all social media from my life, and I've never been happier.
Staggering numbers of people are dying from opioid overdoses, many of them from opiates that doctors were incentivized to push onto their patients by drug companies, or that were illegally distributed from pharmacies who looked the other way when there were enough pills going out the door to kill the entire population of the town they were in. It's bad enough that someone might even finally be held criminally liable for it.
It isn't the media's fault that any of that happened, and it's largely because of media attention that anyone is being held accountable for it. Blaming the media for accurately reporting on the state of the world is always the last refuge of the person who's run out of real arguments.
The argument from people who would rather not engage with the state of the world for a long time has been that anyone who complains about the state of the world is just watching the news too much, because "the data" always show that the world is getting inexorably better, all the time. That was always a specious argument, and now that life expectancy in America has been declining for three years in a row, that argument should finally be laid to rest entirely. But here you're reviving it, by blaming the decrease in life expectancy itself on the media. It's very innovative! But it's just as wrong.
If I put my number or email on my page, and I adjust the privacy settings to "only friends", I understand I am making that information available to my friends. They are free to copy that information by hand, or by copy-pasting, into their own address book. I have explicitly made it available to them. Facebook includes information about your friends, such as their birthdays, in your data export. Their decision to not include off-Facebook contact information is a business decision designed to make leaving Facebook harder. It has nothing to do with privacy.
Their argument doesn't hold up under the slightest amount of scrutiny. You can go to your friends' pages and manually extract their email or other contact information. If it's visible to you, its because your friend made a decision to make that information visible. They designed the data export tool that way knowing that the main thing someone trying to leave Facebook wants is contact information for their friends that they may only know how to reach on Facebook.
This fight is much older than that. If you want to get sad, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed
Haha, remember more than a decade ago when we all thought that interoperability was more profitable, and that everything would just naturally tend toward open standards? Wow. We were all just stupid?
Those things aren't going to zero anytime soon.
Not with that attitude
Divestment also means asking banks and institutions to commit to not investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure, not just selling stock in existing oil and gas companies. Making it more difficult for new fossil fuel infrastructure projects to access capital absolutely has an impact.
The "12 years" figure comes from here:
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/summary-for-policy-makers/
C.1. In model pathways with no or limited overshoot of 1.5°C, global net anthropogenic CO2 emissions decline by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 (40–60% interquartile range), reaching net zero around 2050 (2045–2055 interquartile range).
This report came out in late 2018. As of the publishing of this report, in order to keep global average temperature increase under 1.5°C, CO2 emissions must fall to 45% of 2010 levels in 12 years.
There has been a predictable amount of misstating what this report actually says by environmentalists with poor reading comprehension, and a similar amount of bad-faith readings and intentional obfuscation by climate science deniers, but in any case, this is the source of the "12 years" figure that's been going around.
Nobody is "predicting doomsday in 12 years", but you can set your clock by the outpouring of bad faith "I Told You So"s that will occur in October of 2030 when the world has not ended.
The amount of migration that has completely upended political systems in the United States and Europe since 2010 or so will be a historical footnote compared to the migration we will experience due to climate change. The United States elected a professional wrestling character to the Presidency because he promised to be cruel to immigrants. Forgive my pessimism but I do not think "we will be able to migrate affected people in time" barring a major transformation of our society.
I'm a software engineer largely because my father and grandfather were union laborers. My and my cousins' generation was the first in our family to be able to go to college. And it was precisely because the union was so easy to get in to that my father and grandfather were able to get good paying jobs with benefits without a college education. A low barrier to entry to a profession is no reason not to build a union.
If you fixed the zoning issues preventing you from building an RV park you're 80% of the way to solving the housing issue entirely. So, go for it I guess!
Getting into YC is itself a credential
In the developing world where I live Facebook gives me the opportunity to maintain contact with my family who live on the other side of the world, as I walk the streets of São Paulo, for free.
There were, before Facebook, hundreds of apps that did the same thing, and there still are.
I learned to write code because of a very different internet, and I feel like if I'd grown up with the internet we have today I never would have bothered. Interoperability and disintermediation were such powerful, intoxicating concepts that I turned my entire life around and started writing software for a living. These days, except for the money, it feels like a mistake.
In every article like this, I'm always looking for the author's orientation to place. It's important to me whether they consider the Bay Area, or any other place, an actual home, with some transcendent quality besides a collection of objectively measurable attributes. This author clearly does not.
The author is annoyed that people like him (according to him, the smart people, the good people, the people on whom the entire society and economy depends!) are treated with such disrespect. But how does this author treat the people around him?
He writes about the Bay Area like he's observing it from an alien spacecraft, as if he's entirely separate, outside of time and space. He evaluates the various objective factors of the Bay Area solely in terms of their benefit to him, and finds it wanting. And the author, with an unlimited ability to simply uproot himself, darkly insinuates that he, and all the other good, smart people like him, are going to do it, and soon.
But why should anyone care? By the author's own admission, he and his fellow good, smart people aren't meaningfully a part of the culture or the social fabric of the place. The author clearly has contempt for the people around him ("If you can afford Pacific Heights rents and rideshare everywhere you can pretend you don't live here!"). He clearly has no intention of contributing to the place. He clearly sees it as a pool of resources for extraction and nothing else.
It's clear that the author sees it this way because if this wasn't the case, he would be involved in some effort, any effort at all, to fix some of the problems that he's describing. Yes, California and the Bay Area have their problems. And our problems and our fortunes are the result of generations-long processes. Whatever comes next will be the outcome of people digging in, working to fix the problems, putting their shoulders to the wheel, and not just bailing out because moving somewhere else would maximize certain values in their personal spreadsheets.
A few people that I consider friends were doing that work before the current round of good times. They're people who've been in San Francisco back when it was considered frightening and dangerous, and the set of problems the city had were completely different than the current ones. They stuck it out. They made the city a much better place. As a result, we now have a new set of problems to fix. The cycle repeats itself.
Right now, we don't need any more people who are just looking to extract resources for themselves. We need people who are willing to engage, to become part of the social fabric of this place, and to figure out what the future looks like. So I want to enthusiastically encourage this author, everyone else who's written a functionally identical article in the last few years, and everyone on Hacker News who constantly complains about how much they hate San Francisco, to get out.
If you're among that group, and you don't leave, you're actually cheating yourself. There's likely some place in the world with which you could find the same profound, transcendent connection that I and many others have with San Francisco.
It's a tragic waste of a life to live in a place you hate, and that you have neither the commitment nor the desire to make any better. It doesn't benefit you, and it doesn't benefit the people around you whose home you hate so much. Everyone would be so much better off if you would simply show yourself the door, and find a place you can call home, for better or worse.
No, they didn't, after years of legal battles the plans to build on that site were finally approved. https://hoodline.com/2018/09/plans-for-8-story-mission-devel...
It depends on the state. Lots and lots of states have tipped wage laws that allow an employer to count tips toward base pay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage
This is great, but why are these tools only for the Pacific Northwest?
David Heinemeier Hansson gave this speech at one of the early YC startup schools and he's still right about everything. This feels like such an impossible relic now that YC is firmly part of the grow-like-cancer VC universe. How things change.
It’s not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US
Most people don't have any real access to capital, and most people's labor is totally alienated from its actual value. For most people, advice to "Work Hard" amounts to "Sacrifice More So Your Boss Can Get Richer".
Also, as far as "working hard", Americans are an extreme outlier: https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-product.... Maybe if Sam is hearing pushback against "Work Hard" as good advice, it's because Americans already work harder than other people in advanced economies for a lower quality of life (meaning less access to healthcare, less paid vacation, less self-reported happiness, etc).
Sam's a smart guy and knows all of this already, so it's baffling why he would include such a stupid throwaway line in this essay.
It was also politically popular in the U.S. to outlaw unlimited donations to political campaigns from corporations, and then that law was struck down by the Supreme Court.
Here's a more recent status update from the other side of this dispute: https://www.surfrider.org/coastal-blog/entry/whats-next-for-...
The Supreme Court refused to take up Khosla's most recent appeal, leaving in place the requirement that he leave the gate open to the access road to Martin's Beach.
It will be interesting to see what Khosla does now, given that he has exhausted his appeals in the court system.
There's an extremely instructive lesson for programmers in the success and persistence of Alcoholics Anonymous. It's still around because:
* It's free * It's decentralized * It works
Is it the absolute best and most efficient method for treating addiction? Maybe not, but unless you have another method that works, which also does 1 and 2, it probably won't become as pervasive and long-lasting as AA.
How does this apply to programmers? Look at every dumb project that ever tried to "disrupt" email. That's a field littered with dead bodies. Email survives. Why? See above.