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kovacs

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This is the best analogy I've read to explain what's going on and takes me back to the days of Doom and how it was so transformative at the time. Perhaps in time the current generation will be viewed as the Doom engine as we await the holy grail of full 3D in Quake.

That's fair but look at the assumptions currently built into NVDA's stock price. Hard to say for certain but to some it's priced as if it has a monopoly on all things AI for a decade. If you can spend $6K (and less in the future) on a full system that runs a model for you where does that leave the assumptions baked into that stock price? I'm too lazy to have come up with a model myself but off the cuff it seems like there might be some dislocation in a lot of assumptions. I dunno. I'm kind of a luddite because of the .com bubble and this has the same feel.

I feel validated by this headline/post. I've said the same thing over and over in my career and am always astounded when I get pushback on using them as a means to describe systems and interactions, including from some managers (that weren't coders very long), that would claim "nobody uses them, just read the code".

I don't know how you communicate how systems work without them. You either create a terrible non visual version in the docs or a person ends up drawing them on a whiteboard from memory to pass that knowledge down.

That's actually not true. There's at least one other product at MS that uses ruby... Yammer. Although I'm not sure how much more incentive that would add for MS.

Like a couple of other mutual friends who've posted here, I've known Bob about 20 years. We met at a conference and became friends. While we never worked together we'd talk about whatever we were working on, or language/framework features, code style, etc. He was a machine that would delve deeply into anything out of an abundance of curiosity and he would sometimes be tough to keep up with on a topic he knew deeply that required a bit more context I didn't have.

That curiosity and enthusiasm spilled over into anything he did, including supporting his friends in their endeavors. He'd be the first to cheer you on and brag about you or what you were doing to other friends, almost to the point of embarrassment where he believed in you or your project more than you did, LOL.

It was like being around the sun and constant solar flares of positivity, almost like my golden retriever LOL... He was unlike anyone else I'd experienced in my 22 years in tech in SF. We had bonded over both being midwest boys and there was an unspoken bond between us that endured no matter how long it'd been since we last spoke. We knew and acknowledged that each of us was an oasis for one another from the funhouse mirror that is bay area technology. We could each exhale and be ourselves with no posturing. And if anyone had any reason to posture at all it was Bob. Everything he did was a winner and all that success never once went to his head.

So while Bob was a great engineer/technologist, he was a greater man who truly lived life by the golden rule and would've been successful in anything he chose to do. It still hasn't fully hit me that he's gone, and I can't imagine what Krista and the girls are going through right now along with the rest of Bob's family.

My heart goes out to all of them and anyone else that knew him well. Thank you Bob. Thank you for believing in me always and for being a great friend. The world needs you and more people like you. RIP... until we meet again buddy...

It was stupid to not hedge that interest rate risk. I mean, the Fed telegraphed their moves well in advance. I don't work in finance but it doesn't take a genius to see how that dynamic would play out if that's your job. Not something I would've thought about till now but if banking is your business, you tend to think of ways it can break and this seems as elementary as anything if your job is to ensure solvency in all conditions. I just hope other banks weren't this stupid.

Take a look at Cloud66. Been using it for every project over the last 10 years or so... It's like Heroku except you can control a lot more and not get locked into "enterprise" pricing when you need to scale or simply don't want to expose your database to the open internet (imagine that).

Organic demand growth is what we want, not this Frankenstein economy that's been created since at least 2008 if not earlier. Demand doesn't boost GDP, producing real goods and services boosts GDP. You can't spend your way to prosperity despite what any of the insane MMT economists might say.

I agree that wage growth is good but not in the manner it's happening right now, through insanely easy money policies creating massive inflation that's easily outpacing any of those wage gains. Again, you can't print and spend your way to prosperity. Maybe some of these tools would work if they'd ever let off the gas and removed them but that's not what's happening.

Async Ruby 5 years ago

I think what's being talked about here is the back end implementation for ActionCable. By default it uses ruby threads to push over open web sockets. There's at least one production quality drop in implementation (https://anycable.io/) that address the default scalability issues you'll have with ActionCable. The async support would seem to allow one to go much further with default rails before needing to move to something more performant.

That's what you took away from my response? So what? It's not a problem that this kind of behavior is enabled and hurting the integrity of what the majority of people rely on for a shot at being able to retire someday? This is one fund that blew up during good times. How many others are out there acting this way and what's the risk that everyone is taking without even knowing by being invested in the market at all? Are you up for another GFC or bust that takes 10+ years to get back to even? Because these things are the seeds for that. Booms and busts aren't a good thing.

I guess I just see things differently. This isn't about being properly diversified, this is about the integrity of our markets and trust. I mean if the idea is that it's a free for all then why have securities laws at all? The US markets have been viewed as a haven of trust and stability. Garbage like this only serves to undermine that trust.

The idea that he only hurt himself is simply not true. Behavior like this distorts markets and price discovery. Speaking of discovery (DISCK/DISKA), that's one of the stocks he bought and ran up from low $20s to $60s. Everyone who bought along the way thinking that the company had turned the corner because of their new streaming platform and that it was now in favor on Wall St. has been crushed. Yes, the market is volatile, but it's even more volatile when we allow some participants to come into the market loaded with cheap money and create havoc. If we're going to allow this unbridled behavior it undermines confidence in the "market". I know I've lost complete confidence in it since the GFC and now with the antics of the Fed over the past year. Knowing that there's no true price signal on anything makes you not want to buy anything, or else accept that the activity is nothing more than a turn at the craps table.

And yes, in theory you should be fine long term, but the problem is it depends on your time window. The market can go nowhere for decades because of all the future profits that get pulled forward. We're staring that exact scenario in the face right now is my guess.

All this is to say but one thing... end the Fed. Their recklessness is enabling this kind of crap.

Stock buybacks end up being nothing other than a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders because anytime something happens the government steps in bails them out because they're too big. Now everyone knows that so there's no incentive for companies to act responsibly. The fact that it's now accepted and normalized is incredibly disheartening to say the least. No government subsidies. Let the capitalists figure it out. Otherwise let's just nationalize everything instead of privatizing profits and socializing losses.

My exact reaction as well. Or how about all that money used for stock buy backs over the last decade? Intel especially. It's been mismanaged and now it's putting its hand out for government money while having spent billions on stock buy backs. No more but of course it'll happen because the politics of it. Socialism for the rich and corporations, capitalism for the rest of us.

Exceptionally well written with more than one Big Lebowski reference but one minor correction...

"Since then, as Jeff Lebowski explains to Maude between hits on a postcoital roach, “my career has slowed down a little bit.”"

s/Jeff Lebowski/The Dude

I believe The Dude made that distinction very clear in the movie :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be7Og9Gc_KY

Joking aside I truly admire this man's outlook and ability to take a pretty big setback and make a positive out of it.

Nice job getting something built and launched. That in and of itself is a huge accomplishment, so congrats to you!

I know everyone has opinions and feature requests but to me the thing that I would find the most useful is a feed of the blogs' content under the tags themselves (e.g. all the posts in #ruby maybe sorted by popularity if you wrap those links and track clicks or something). Either via RSS or use your email signup form to capture me and send me digests of updates. I know you'd have to go workout deals with all those bloggers (or have a TOS giving you permission) for their content and what not, but you emailing me every time you add a new blog isn't high value and I don't want a job checking all those blogs or finding an RSS reader and subscribing to them and keeping the list up to date and curated.

That's my $.02 so take it for what it's worth. I don't know your plans for this but that was the first thing that struck me as being the most obvious product feature to add value.

Best of luck to you!

And yet you didn't manage to find a single one to point out and inform me of where I'm misguided, only a condescending response. Address any one of my claims about asset prices and the fed's actions distorting price discovery, please. I'd rather be wrong and realize that I'll be just fine not panic buying assets while free money is distributed and stocks rip to infinity, ignoring any and all fundamentals.

Tell me how I'm wrong about housing prices in the last ten years doubling and tripling in some areas. Tell me again how my USD are just fine and buying the same amount of goods and services they did 10 years ago, because I contend their buying power has been effectively halved by the moral hazard presented by the fed and Congress not allowing failures to happen. They're doing the exact same thing right now. How will this end? Deflation? I used to think so but not anymore. JPow even said himself that he has unlimited power to print money. They'll sooner destroy the currency than allow a deflationary depression to take hold.

Again, please, educate me as to what my "many issues" are with any of what I've said.

Trolls? Sounds like YOU need to understand what QE is. From Wikipedia...

"Quantitative easing (QE) is a monetary policy whereby a central bank buys government bonds or other financial assets in order to inject money into the economy to expand economic activity."

Sounds pretty inflationary to me. Especially when they buy up illiquid mark to fantasy assets that nobody wants and unloads them on the taxpayer to foot the bill while their buddies get a wad of cash to redeploy, into the stock market as it turns out. How is that not inflationary exactly? Oh, the destruction of those bad assets? Yeah I suppose but the socialization of that across America hides that and what's left is pumped up asset prices that cause the average American to have to work even harder to save up to buy and get worse returns because the fed's buddies got in first and drove prices higher.

Have you happened to look at the price of assets since 2008 vs. the actual recovery of the economy? Have you seen that S&P earnings were flat to down for the past 4 years going into this crisis? Yet what's happened to stocks? That's right they've tripled since 2009. Go look at any piece of real estate now almost anywhere vs. 10-20 years go and tell me there's been no inflation.

I realize it's different everywhere but the idea that we've had "low inflation" over the last 10 years is completely laughable because the calculation removes the highest cost items. The fed has effectively destroyed any price discovery on any assets. It's taken increasingly larger amounts of QE to goose the fake economy. And now for its encore it has overreacted to save their buddies and decided to lower rates to zero and tell the world that it will never let assets fall. How in the world is that not inflationary when you're flooding the market with free money and enabling those at the top to buy up assets and run up prices?

Every single person that works to earn USD and saves USD should be livid and rioting in the streets for the theft that's been, and continues to occur.

Also, your example of Japan isn't apples to apples. The US has the world's reserve currency and can print as much of it as it wants, Japan does not. Japan is a nation of savers so getting them to spend is harder than a US citizen.

We may have short term deflation and that's what the fed is scared of but make no mistake about it what they've done is inflationary as they will well overshoot whatever deflationary impact any failures have. Hell, they've made it clear that's what they're gonna do.

Perhaps you can translate for me too, because I read the reply and agreed that the risk appetite for new small business owners might not be as robust given the current set of rules, which is what the commenter was saying. At least that's my interpretation. You seem to see something else in this comment.

As a result I have some clarification questions... How do they want to "keep kicking the can down the road" exactly? Your comment about the government not being able to bail out everyone only serves to reinforce the point about the risk of starting a small business.

What do you mean by "He's right"? He's right that people will line up to start new businesses and put their diminished life savings on the line after what's transpired?

Then you flippantly say "Add UBI and nationalized healthcare", as if it's just something you add to a shopping cart and "it's not complicated". So it sounds like you assume these features as part of the assumption that people will flock to starting businesses. That's not part of the discussion at all, but it's an interesting point to discuss whether that would spur the activity. It very well might as it's the "social safety net" one would need to have more confidence.

About the only thing you said that resonated with me is "the elites just don't want it". Given the growing wealth disparity and the relative flat to down real income of the average American in the last 40 years I'd say that's a fair statement.

Your final statement comes out of nowhere as you lump the commenter into this group of elites when all they were saying is "hey man, I'm not so sure people will be lining up to risk their life savings to start a small business".

Care to try again with a gentler, more constructive tone and explain how the commenter, and by extension myself, are naive with the summarized viewpoint I stated at the outset?

I think solving this problem is a great idea and is something I've thought of building a product around myself. I just haven't acted on it and haven't gotten clear on what such a problem/solution would look like. Congrats on launching!

I'm no legal expert but I would suspect there could be a point of friction with legal teams inside companies. Things like liability for hiring practices, IP leakage, and security. Not to dissuade you but just some thoughts about possible challenges that might work against the goal of transparency.