hypewatch

Fair enough. I learned - in an American college - that “capitalism” was a term coined by Adam Smith in “Wealth if Nations”, which apparently was an incorrect conflation made by my Econ professor.

The term “free-market capitalism” is used often by politicians and economists, but apparently that term is conflating two distinct concepts by your definition.

That illustrates my point that the term’s meaning has morphed since it’s coining. Even the Wikipedia page’s disagrees with both of us!

The initial use of the term "capitalism" in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850

Marx did not extensively use the form capitalism, but instead capitalist and capitalist mode of production, which appear more than 2,600 times in the trilogy Capital

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

What a rabbit hole! We’re officially lost in the minutia of term definitions. Time to log off of HN for the weekend haha

Thanks! It’s a small world on HN haha. What was the issue? If you don’t mind me asking

I’d argue that free markets are a requirement of the definition of capitalism, but like the term “communism” the definition has become squishy.

I agree that your definition inevitably leads to income inequality.

Either way, I think we agree on the nature of these problems.

This critique, which annoyingly has little to do with the headline, is a regurgitation of many of the surface level critiques that have been made of VCs for years. Nothing novel about it.

It also wonders off to random topics, like Elon’s new baby’s name. I have a lot of respect for Elon, but a) I don’t care what his baby’s name is and b) what in the world does that have to do with the article’s main topic??

I usually enjoy articles from this publication and was looking forward to reading it but was sorely disappointed by the end.

Reader beware.

~Capitalizm~ Capitalism is purely a theoretical idea. Free markets as capitalism defines them are impossible. Perfect information, competition, price taking, ect, which are baked into the economic theories of capitalism are simply not feasible.

Often our critiques of capitalism are not critiques of capitalism at all. In fact they’re criticisms of monopolies and oligopolies in our modern society, which are antithetic to capitalism.

The American economy is an aristocracy. VCs, the big ones at least, are members of that aristocracy. Many of which are filled with smart good hearted people. But there are some incentives baked into their position of power that we need to be cognizant of.

Edit: “free-market capitalism” would probably have been a better term. Clearly that was not the point I was making.

I had this issue last night. What was really odd was that algolia’s API was throttling - 429 error code - when I was connected to my wifi, but when I switched to my cell network it worked fine. Then this morning it worked fine on both.

Why fundraise against the Prisma open source project instead of creating a new brand for the premium / enterprise product? Like how Confluent is separate from Kafka.

As a developer, I prefer the Confluent/Kafka model because it’s crystal clear where the separation is between premium and open source.

These types of tools are effectively another way to parameterize your SQL that _feels_ more like writing in your scripting language (nodejs in this case)

This approach is notorious for generating inefficient sql queries, but it can improve jr fronted dev productivity b/c a tool like this is easier to learn than SQL.

Oh, it’s mentioned in the very last paragraph!

Me too! They also don’t make much sense. The innovation in data storage was from “self-hosted” to “managed”. That’s quite a broad generalization over what’s happened in data storage over the last several decades.

And perhaps detriment. Nodejs apps are notoriously more difficult to keep secure because of how many npm dependencies are needed for a project and how often vulnerabilities are discovered in those dependencies.

Does Prisma have a business model or premium version I’m not aware of? I don’t see anything on their site around premium options. Not sure why Amplify Partners would invest in Prisma unless they were planning on dedicating substantial resources to a premium / enterprise version.

From what I understand, prisma is an open source query builder for node/ts. Like sqlalchemy-core in python, which has been around for a long time.

While almost any other part of the development stack has been modernized, database tools have been stuck with the same paradigms for the last decades.

This is simply not true. Perhaps that’s been the case in the node.js world but it has certainly not been the case in other server-side languages.

Are they? What’s the alternative that gets all the undeserved attention?

While learning about another tech stack is lots of fun for an engineer, I believe that great products aren’t written by great tools. They’re built by great engineers. A great tool helps but is not sufficient to build a great product.

24-monthers never deeply learn how things work. They’ll typically add value to a new company by carrying a collection of things they’ve seen before and shallowly applying them to similar problems.

This reminds me of an old CTO I worked for that refused to hire anyone from a boot camp. And a CEO that turned multiple surfer candidates down because “they looked like a total stoner”. The term “24-monthers” is another example of this.

I think this simple surface level approach is lazy and ineffective. To hire great engineers, you have to put in the work to learn about and evaluate your candidates. Every person has their own background and story. Just because someone had some bad luck with their last couple startups doesn’t mean that they’re dumb or a bad engineer. It also doesn’t mean that they didn’t learn anything in their experience.

A big question to ask the candidate is why did they leave their last gig. It could be for the reasons the author mentions but there could be plenty of other reasons that are indicative of a high quality candidate. Again, as the hiring manager, you need to actually put in the work instead of making quick judgements on the surface.

And the final bit of “career advice” in this article’s conclusion is just silly. Almost no one leaves a company after 2 years because the “novelty” wares off. If the author took the time to ask they’d learn that people leave companies for a wide variety of reasons. Some good some bad. Grit for grit’s can turn into foolishness.

Have you looked at Lucidchart - https://www.lucidchart.com/? They also have cloud infra icons.

It’s no coincidence! Apache Kafka is named after Franz Kafka. From Wikipedia:

Jay Kreps chose to name the software after the author Franz Kafka because it is "a system optimized for writing", and he liked Kafka's work.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Kafka

This sounds like an enforcement nightmare. It’s a nice idea, but how would it actually work?

So we would get some sort of commission from Instagram for every ad we view. And the government will need to track this for every Californian, then divvy up a couple dollars per person each year.

I know there are some Yang fans on HN and I don’t want to get too political here but his ideas are too oversimplified, from the $1k UBI thing to this they feel like the left’s version of “build a wall”. They’re simple ideas that are great for social media attention but ultimately oversimplify an inherently complex problem.

Again, I’m not trying to make a political argument either way here, just pointing out how social media seems to incentivize our leaders to oversimplify policy ideas.

But there are many enterprise saas products out there with solid security, decent UX and support for older browsers.

I think that they won these contracts with more “who you know” advantages than technical.

My thoughts exactly! And apparently they won many contracts over several years. From the article:

Netsential, a web services company used by multiple fusion centers, law enforcement, and other government agencies across the United States

I’m disappointed that U.S. police departments would use such low a quality service with no focus on security. Looking at Netsential’s website, their services look very basic and inexpensive. There’s not even a mention of security on its site. It was only a matter of time before they were hacked.

https://netsential.com/default.aspx?menuitemid=280

Hey, I’m sorry. I disagree with you and looks like you disagree with a couple other folks on this thread, but I don’t think this conversation is going to help anyone.

I’m going to avoid these political / non-technical threads on HN going forward.

Yeah I’m a programmer, so I think you could be right. I’d like to work with our designer using figma and get her thoughts / opinions to get a better understanding.

Also, because I’m a programmer, I’ve lived through many tech hype cycles (with mostly open source and developer tools). So over time I’ve become sensitive to this kind of rhetoric. That’s why my initial reaction was skepticism.

This is not true and a toxic stereotype. Most homeless people are homeless for financial reasons. Income inequality is the biggest driver of homelessness.

Therefore the most effective solutions are economic and perhaps anti-trust.

This is one reason why the “making the world a better place” rhetoric from big tech companies comes off so tone-deaf.

Fundamentally, tech companies have been a major driver in increasing income inequality. For all the productivity gains we get from automation, low-income jobs are lost - at least in the short term.

A popular solution is UBI, but I fear that it’s overly-simplistic and could have unintended negative consequences.

Figma sounds like a great tool, but it feels overhyped to me - especially in this article.

This reads like a long-winded pitch to a Figma investor more than an honest review.

I’ve been wanting to try it out but this article was a little bit of a turn off because it is so enthusiastic. Every tool has strengths and weaknesses so an article like this makes me wonder, what are the trade offs?

I’ve never heard of the phrase “problem taste” until this post, so if Sam just coined that phrase, well done!

This is such an important issue in the startup world. The most common mistake that founders I’ve worked with make is that they focus on the wrong problem or even worse focus on too many problems.

Having good “problem taste” is critical for anyone who wants to start a successful company or publish breakthrough research.

If anyone would like to learn more about this topic, Jepsen has some great articles on isolation levels and consistency models.

https://jepsen.io/consistency

You mentioned database constraints and testing already, which are great automated methods.

Besides these automated methods another way to monitor data integrity is for a human to manually analyze the data for inconsistencies. And to ask other domain experts at your company to analyze the data for issues. Sometimes this is called the “smell test”. This method can be an effective way to find deeper integrity issues with your data that would be hard to find with automated tests.

Maintaining data integrity is very difficult, domain dependent, and takes lots of work. Good luck!

Apple typically gets 30% of in-app subscriptions for the first year and 15% of renewals.

I think that 30% then 15% commission are both way too high. Apple should be able to charge a modest commission fee to be on their App Store but that price is way too high. Maybe 5% then 3% would be more reasonable.

But the worst part about this is that Apple is so inconsistent with its enforcement. There is an anti-competitive element to Apple’s enforcement behavior that is very concerning. I’m surprised that Tim Cook has allowed this behavior. Long term this will hurt app developers and Tim should understand that.